cooking wort. Photo cred – Lisa King
This summer I spent some fifty days in a tree planting camp near High Level in northern Alberta. Since the logging roads turn to swamp in the summer, everything we needed had to be flown in by helicopter and beer was hard to come by. So, before leaving Edmonton for the two day trip north, I bought two corny kegs, a carboy, CO2 tank, siphon, malt extract, hops, and grain.
— Before you continue, a warning, this post is about brewing and I geek out —
My bush brewing experiment went against the grain of everything that passes for conventional knowledge about home brewing: keep everything sanitary (we lived in tents at the intersection of two swampy logging roads), keep temperatures steady (temperatures fluctuated from near freezing at night to swelteringly hot in the day), and keep kegs just above freezing to facilitate CO2 absorption (our fridges and freezers were overflowing with food to feed the camp and powered by two sporadically working diesel generators).
hardly a sanitary brewing environment. Photo cred – Cody Puckett
Here are the lessons I learned:
1) You don’t have to obsesses over sanitation. Or directions. I reason that beer predates synthetic sanitizing solution and that the use of chemicals like Saniclean has more to do with creating a consistent flavour than it does with creating a unique flavour. The principle that sanitation aficionados follow is that sanitizing agents kill all of the outside yeasts and bacteria that create dreaded ‘off flavours’. Thus, thoroughly sanitizing your equipment and using a commercially packaged yeast, when combined with a religious adherence to a recipe will yield consistent beers – be it a nut brown ale with subtle chocolate notes, or a crisp honey lager…
However, with a simple shift in your frame of mind, these discriminated against ‘off flavours’ can become a delicious surprise – unique to the airborne yeasts of your area. Some renowned beers, such as the lambic breweries of Belgium, are so special precisely because they’ve embraced their unique microflora. I was inspired not to fear wild yeast by this blog post at The Mad Fermentationist.
2) Brew a style suited to your environment. I used exclusively ale yeasts since they can handle a much higher temperature range than any other variety of commercial brewing yeast. Lagers need to ferment at cooler temperatures and were traditionally brewed in the winter months before the advent of refrigeration.
3) To keep temperatures steady, I stored the carboy in a pool of stagnant water that collected in a pit dug out for our garbage incinerator and covered it with a silvicool tarp (a reflective tarp used to keep tree seedlings cool in the sun). This wasn’t very sanitary.
4) Instead of carbonating with a CO2 canister, which requires the beer to be cooled to ~2°C, I treated the corny keg as if it were a large bottle. I primed it with a few cups of dextrose while racking and then waited a few days while the yeast did all the hard work for me. I only used the CO2 to set the keg seal, and again to serve the beer.
5) Don’t limit yourself to hops. Hops are a psychoactive sedative reputed to numb the sex drive. They, along with barley, were mandated as the only legal ingredients by the Bavarian Purity Law way back in 1487 to sedate a population uninhibited by wild varients of a hitherto unregulated beer. I added flavour by using hop’s cousin plant, pot. I soaked it in a high proof alcohol for a few weeks before straining the THC infused alcohol through cheesecloth into the primed corny kegs.
beer was scarce and horded over with a watchful eye. Cody Puckett
Gnarly Travels 