Practical Beermaking for Beginners by Jim Weathers (©️ 1980 Home Fermenter Publications, San Leandro, Cali.)
I picked up a copy of Jim Weathers’ Practical Beermaking for Beginners at my library booksale for 8⅓¢. The book is copyright 1980 making it just slightly older than I am. It also makes it the oldest book in my collection on the topic of homebrewing, per se; I have books about historic brewing and reproductions of historic books about brewing, but these are not about homebrewing as we understand it from our post-prohibition, post-industrialized, post-ABInBev perspective.
Reading Mr. Weathers’ treatise made for an interesting exploration of what has changed (and what has not) in the hobby during the intervening forty-four years. At least, I found it interesting; so I thought you might too, but maybe you won’t. I am, after all, the kind of self-admitted nerd who reads forty-four-year-old books about homebrewing.
I would like it to be absolutely clear that nothing in this post is meant to belittle Mr. Weathers or his work. Science marches ever on, and we cannot fault anyone for using and promulgating the best information available at the time he is writing. This is not a scholarly, authoritative analysis; it’s just my idle musings.
That said, I will now idly muse on Jim’s approach to Ingredients and Recipes; Process (hot side and cold); and Packaging, in turn.
Ingredients and Recipes
Water
The way homebrewers talk these days, I almost get the impression that, prior to about 2015, everyone was sort of blithely oblivious to the impact of water chemistry on brewing.
This is clearly not the case since Jim does acknowledge and discuss the importance of water chemistry in beer: “. . . it is next to impossible to make a perfect beer . . . of one type, then another, then another, all using the same source of water. There are just too many complex reactions from the mineral salts in the water during the brewing process . . . .”
He does diverge from modern practices in two significant ways, however:
First, he assumes your tap water contains only chlorine, and since chlorine is relatively volatile, you can assume it will dissipate in during the brewing process and not endanger your final beer. Chloramine, I suppose, was not yet in common use.
Second, he limits his water adjustments to determining whether your municipal supply is hard or soft and adjusting (i.e., hardening soft water or softening hard water) as needed based on a few broad recipe classes: lager vs. stout vs. bitter and so forth.
Malt Extracts
Jim’s basic extract recipe calls for pre-hopped liquid malt extract (dark, light, or amber “malt syrup” in his parlance) combined with an equal weight of corn sugar. Both liquid and dry extracts were available. The biggest difference from today being that he expects LME to come in metal cans that can be immersed in the boil kettle to warm the syrup and ensure that nothing is left behind in the cans.
Malt extracts were available from the Premier Malt Company (part of Pabst), Edme, John Bull, Munton Fisson, and Blue Ribbon Malts.
I include the following quote without comment:
Canned malt syrups have a long self-life as well, but occasionally a can will swell. . . . don’t panic; and there is no need to dispose of this swollen can. Just use it as soon as possible.
Malt
Most of Jim’s all-grain recipes revolve around pale barley malt and some healthy dose of crystal malt — between ½ and 2 pounds depending on the recipe. Pale malt is the assumed base malt; all others are “flavoring malts”. The distinguishing difference being that flavoring malts do not contribute any fermentable sugars.
Crystal malt is the most used “shade” of flavoring malt. Crystal malts are optional but contribute body and sweetness to your beer.
Darker malts, such as black patent, are used for color and roast character. If you cannot get flavoring malts from your home wine or brewing shop, directions are provided for toasting your own.
Hops
Hops come in two sorts: bittering (or flavoring) and aroma. Bittering hops have high alpha acid content (9 to 10%), and aroma hops have lower alpha acid content (3 to 7%). At the time Jim was writing, it was “very difficult for the home beermaker to purchase just any hop he wants from the home wine and brewing shops,” but he had hope that this would improve as the hobby expanded.
For bittering, Buillion, Brewers Gold, Southern Brewer, and Late Cluster were available. And for aroma: Cascade, Fuggle, Willamette (“a new variety”), Savinja Golding, Dunav, Hallertauer mittelfruh, Tettnanger, and Saazer.
Bittering hops are added at the start of the boil. Aromatic hops are added at ten minutes.
Yeast
Jim discusses two yeasts (three if you count a brief aside on baker’s yeast): ale and lager. Both of which should be pitched at about 75°F, but while ale yeast is then cooled and held at a fermentation temperature of about 70°F, lager yeast should be cooled and held at 45 to 50°F.
Jim selects his yeast based not on the beer but on the temperature at which he expects to ferment — ale in the summer; lager in the winter. “If you have controlled temperature in your brewery,” he says, “then it makes no difference.”
Salts and Other Additions
All of Jim’s recipes include yeast nutrient, citric acid, and non-iodized salt. I couldn’t find any explanation of whether the citric acid was for flavor, pH adjustment, or as an antioxidant.
Recipes
Interestingly, by 1980, five gallons was already the default recipe size. Jim includes one larger, ten-gallon “Old Tight Wad Beer” recipe, but everything else is five gallons. I reproduce here for your consideration a few representative extract and all-grain recipes from the book.
Fast Beer (Lager type)
- 6 lbs malt syrup, hopped or unhopped, either dark or light
- 1 lb corn sugar
- 1 tsp citric acid
- 1 tsp non-iodized salt
- 2 oz flavoring hops (if using hop-flavored malt, use 1 oz hops)
- 1 packet either lager or ale yeast
Final gravity will be around .08. This beer will be ready to drink about 20 days after bottling. Use the general procedure for malt syrup extract beer.
Bitter Words (Ale-type beer)
- 3 lbs malt syrup, light hop flavored
- 4 lbs dried malt extract, light
- 3 oz flavoring hops
- 2 oz aromatic hops
- 1 lb crystal malt
- 1 tsp citric acid
- 1 tsp non-iodized salt
- 2½ tsp nutrient powder, or 5 nutrient tablets
- 1 packet lager or ale yeast
Final gravity about .14
Pilsener Light-light
- 5 pounds pale malt
- 1 pound cooked rice
- ½ pound corn sugar
- ½ pound crystal malt
- 2 ounces flavoring hops
- 2 ounces aromatic hops
- 1 tsp citric acid
- 1 tsp non-iodized salt
- 2½ tsp nutrient powder or 5 nutrient tablets
- 1 packet yeast
Cook the rice slowly for about thirty minutes. Add the rice and cooking water to the sparge and discard with spent grain.
Black Stout
- 7 pounds pale malt
- 2 pounds crystal malt
- 1 pound black patent malt (Do not crack)
- 6 ounces lactose
- 4 ounces flavoring hops
- 1 tsp citric acid
- 1 tsp non-iodized salt
- 2½ tsp nutrient powder or 5 nutrient tablets
- 1 packet yeast
Hot-Side
Extract Brewing
Jim’s General Procedure for Extract batches is a partial-boil with a fermenter top-off.
If using LME, remove the labels from the cans, warm the cans in three quarts of water as you bring it to a boil, then tip the cans over into the boiling water so the LME will mix in. Oh, and remember to remove the cans.
If using DME, add it to three quarts of water at the beginning.
Then add the adjunct sugar if the recipe calls for it and simmer for thirty minutes. Transfer to the fermenter and top-off with enough water to hit five gallons. Allow it to cool a bit and add the citric acid, nutrient, and salt.
All-Grain Brewing
Unsurprisingly, Jim holds the opinion that while extract brewing is not without merit and is the easier process for new brewers to learn, all-grain brewing is the way to go for truly high quality beers.
[R]egardless of how fantastic your “Beers from Extracts” are, you will really be surprised at the quality you will get from all-grain beers.
His all-grain process is interestingly different from today’s “standard” all-grain process. Jim recommends the oven-mashing method which he developed with Gil Russell. (He mentions Gil Russell like the reader should know who he is, but I don’t, and Google didn’t turn up anything relevant either.) Jim was skeptical of mashing in a cooler because of the potential to leech chemicals from the plastic into your mash. He much preferred oven mashing in a stainless or enameled stock pot.
Homebrewing grain mills apparently weren’t a thing yet because Jim suggests buying pre-crushed grain if you can, or that failing using a meat grinder or counter-top blender (interestingly, he genericizes Osteriser into a catch-all for blender).
Mashing begins by adding the crushed grains to the mash tun, adding water to about three inches above the grain, then stirring to remove any doughballs. The mash kettle is then placed in an oven set to 150°F and left there for at least six hours or up to overnight (12 to 14 hours). After the mash is complete, remove the pot from the oven and let it cool until you can comfortably handle it.
Sparging is done by setting up a filter (either a bag or mesh) in the top half of a five-gallon bucket. Empty the mash pot into the top of the bucket so that the wort collects in the bottom half and the grains are caught by the filter. You’ll then sparge through the grains into the bottom of the bucket using either a spigot or a siphon tube to drain the wort into the boil kettle (which can be the same pot you mashed in) as you sparge. Sparge until you have six gallons in the boil kettle.
This is sort of halfway between a one-vessel BIAB setup and a two- or three-vessel sparge setup. Batch sparging, obviously, was not yet a thing.
After sparging, you do a full-volume boil. Jim’s boil is at least 30 minutes but no more than an hour. He times his boil not based on hop additions but by periodically pulling samples, chilling them, and checking the hot break. The coagulation of proteins and not hop extraction is the key.
Chilling, Cold-Side, and Fermentation
Once you have your full volume of wort, the extract and all-grain processes converge.
Jim does what we would now call no-chill brewing. He discusses using an ice bath and a DIY counterflow chiller but does not recommend them … and, he says, definitely don’t add ice (a potential source of bacterial contamination).
Some people use all sorts of systems to cool the wort down so that it may be pitched with yeast as soon as possible. Naturally the large breweries want it cooled down rapidly so that the process will be much shorter and the finished beer will be ready for the market sooner.
I prefer to just let the wort set over-night . . . .
Transfer the wort through a filter bag into the primary fermenter. Cover loosely with a plastic sheet and when the outside of the fermenter is cool to the touch (this may be several hours later or even the next day), sprinkle in your yeast and replace the cover. When the krausen falls, transfer from the primary bucket into a carboy with an airlock for secondary, being careful to transfer a little of but not too much of the flocculated yeast. (He does note that it is acceptable to skip the secondary and do the entire ferment in the bucket, but he prefers using a secondary.)
Packaging and Serving
Jim spends quite a few words emphasizing the importance of using a hydrometer to verify OG and a stable FG before moving to packaging. I get the impression that a lot of other guides were telling brewers to go by time without checking gravity.
Anyway, when you hit a stable FG, you’re ready to bottle or keg.
Bottling
His process for bottling does not differ significantly from the modern. Bottling bucket, priming sugar, bottling wand, bottles, capper — you know the drill. The one big difference is he thinks you need to intentionally transfer some lees from the fermenter to the bottling bucket to ensure enough yeast get into the bottles.
Kegging
Corny kegs and kegerators were already the standard in 1980. Apart from his SOP being to keg conditioning with priming sugar instead of force carbonating, Jim’s process is largely the same as today’s. He doesn’t, however, provide very much detail on balancing the system, tube diameters, or tube materials.
A word on oxidation and other observations and musings…
A notable difference in Jim’s writing from today’s received wisdom is that he consistently treats oxidation as something that happens over weeks to months. The idea that brief oxygen exposure — during hot-side transfers, for example, or at bottling — will be detrimental to your beer is not mentioned. Also, the idea of the protective CO2 cap is very much operative here.
He talks a little about Krausening instead of priming. And I’m honestly not sure if he’s joking or serious with this comment:
The method of priming by using the Kraeusen method was discovered many years ago. I think it was named after the guy who first developed it. Why he couldn’t have had an easier name to pronounce, I’ll never know.
Jim is a fan of home beer clubs. He mentions the Maltose Falcons “and their irrepressible mascot, ‘Hashiell, dammit’”. Maybe Mr. Beechum can find some record of Jim or the mysterious Gil Russell in the Falcons’ court chronicles.
