Beerguy: Beer in the Time of Zombies

Fri Jan 6, 01:18 PM by

It’s happened to all of us at some time in our lives. We’re star-gazing on our porches, parking at Makeout Overlook, or trying to find our kitty-cats in our dark backyards, and it dawns on us: We are completely unprepared for the zombie pandemic! If the lurching undead came stumbling around the corner and we had to run for our lives, few of us would have any idea how to reconstruct society, let alone make it to that remote army bunker where some semblance of order prevails. Could we sow and reap the necessary crops? Could we maintain our ramshackle fleet of armored motorcycles? Could we build a facility with good, sterile technique that would allow us to perform the complicated childbirths that our fledgling community would require?

It’s a depressing thought, I know. Anyone who could do all these things would probably be hunting me and my ilk for sport, or at least feeding us to the zombie hordes. None-the-less, this thought presses on my mind, and if you ever notice me sitting at the bus stop with a glazed look in my eyes, I’m probably pondering this dilemma.

I’ve spent so much time cogitating on this grim tomorrow that I’ve come to some pretty definitive conclusions about my own personal role in the zombie-plagued future. Since you don’t know me, I expect you have no idea what skill I’ve come up with that will earn me an important place in humankind after the world order disintegrates. Let me clue you in. When I think of what the society of the future will need, I don’t think much of sterile technique or motorcycles (although the latter would be great). Humans got along without these things for millennia. No, what people need besides food, shelter and sex is: alcohol. Most of us know from experience that deprivation of one (or all) of these things is much compensated for by a strict drinking regimen. Now, before the pro-liver and M.A.D.D. crowds burn me at the stake, I ask them to recall that until Allah came along with that date-wine prohibition, few major deities could stray far from the jug if they wanted a following. Even J.C. had to frequently nod to the third rail of pre-Modern politics. From the amaranth beer of the ancient Egyptians and the kvass of the Siberian tundra to Mouton-Rothschild and Cristal, the Glory that is Man has always been fortified by beverages of a spirituous nature. It is my studied opinion that only by the mediating influence of fall-down drunkenness will man rebuild upon the foundations broken by the zombie scourge.

So…I, in my finite wisdom, conclude that alcohol must be produced in the post-zombie epoch, and as a philanthropist, I offer you this crude guide to boozing it. Pardon me if I make a few assumptions about you in the zombie world of tomorrow:

You can start a fire (if you can’t do this, kidnap a Boy Scout*).

You had the presence of mind to salvage a thermometer, a hydrometer (to be explained later), and a ten-gallon pot from the wreck of civilization.

You can grow, barter for, or spontaneously create sugar (this is easier than it sounds).

You have an organic chemist/biologist in your society who can culture Saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast from between his/her toes. If you don’t have a chemist/biologist, you can loot a supermarket for dried bread yeast. The result won’t taste great, but it will have enough kick to put a bastard behind your eyes the next morning.

You have water.

You can keep your soon-to-be-alcoholic-water out of zombie hands and direct sunlight for about two weeks.

That’s it. If you can do all these things, then you too can be a hero and savior of civilization in the not-too-distant zombie future, and I will show you how.

Section the First

So, you’ve got your pot and an indefatigable sense of hope in the world of tomorrow. You have escaped your major population center and have achieved some sense of security. After all that horror, chaos and fatigue, you really need a drink. Too bad. Have some patience. You’re still at least a week from anything remotely resembling alcohol. Try some lighter fluid. Or maybe this bottle of C-L-R? You okay now? Ya good? Super. Now you need to think about getting some sugar together.

Sugar can be found or made in a lot of different ways. You can take just about any fruit juice with a reasonably low acidity, pasteurize it (for you this means boiling), and you’ve got decent sugar water, or what vintners call must. From that point all you actually need to do is drop yeast in and you’ll have grape/apple/plum/peach wine in a couple of weeks. Easy. However, if you want delicious beer like all the kids are drinking these days, things get a little more difficult. You need to get your hands on some malt.

A malted grain is one that tried to grow into a barley seedling but was cruelly thwarted by a maltster who threw it in a kiln just before it sprouted. This kiln got good and hot, which killed the burgeoning plant and preserved the starchy food in the seed, all the while scorching the husk. The longer and hotter the kiln fired, the darker that malt became, which in turn darkens the beer that it produces. You then take this malt and put it in
water that you have managed to heat to 165 degrees Fahrenheit (no Communist Centigrade in this brewery). This process is called mashing, during which the starches in the malted seedling (aka: acrospire) are leached out into the water and converted into sugars that can be fed to yeast.

After about an hour most of the desirable stuff has been drawn from the malted grain. You now need to remove the grain lest it contribute unpleasant flavors or colors to your otherwise perfect sugar-water. Using one of many methods too numerous to list here, you take the grain out of your pot (which, during this procedure, you may call a mash tun). Now you have a sugar-rich solution called wort (ridiculously pronounced as: wert) that would have yeast salivating over it if yeast had mouths. All of this could theoretically be accomplished by one individual, but unless you are already a baker or pot-thrower, you probably don’t own a roasting oven or kiln. I advise marauding a malting facility and stealing their malt or, if possible, getting some prepared malt extract. Malt extract is a syrupy, sweet liquid or a dried powder made by some machine somewhere that just needs water to become wort, and allows an exhausted zombie-slayer to skip the entire malting and mashing process and get straight to brewing.

Now that you have your sugar, you need to figure out how much of it to feed to your yeast to ensure you don’t end up with 2% swill. Yeast eats sugar. All the sugar it can. When it eats this sugar, it shits out carbon dioxide and precious alcohol. Logically, you might think that you should just take all the sugar you got and put some yeast in it, right? Gong! Yeast likes sugar enough that it will eat and eat until it excretes enough alcohol to kill itself. It’s sort of like farting in the car and enjoying it until your own putrid stench forces you out into the rain. Too much sugar in your wort and you end up with a bunch of unfermented sugar floating in your beer. Do you usually take sugar in your beer? No? Well then, you don’t want to overload your wort with unnecessary sugars. You need to save them for the next batch. That hydrometer you swiped/bought/fabricated comes in handy here.

The hydrometer can judge the specific gravity of any liquid in relation to that of water. It uses a scale based upon the weight of water, which it cleverly labels “1” (why not “0”? I don’t know). Liquid solutions less dense (ergo, lighter) than water register below the integer “1,” and denser liquids register above it. Sugar solutions like must or wort will have a higher specific gravity reading since, in case you didn’t know, sugar is heavier than water. The hydrometer placed in must or wort will float higher than the one in plain water, exhibiting a higher number that reflects the amount of sugar in solution.

You want your hydrometer to show you a specific gravity of at least 1.05 times that of water, or you might as well use your own pee, because you won’t do much better than O’Douls. If your wort is too weak, sorry loser! Use more malt/sugar next time! Undiluted fruit must has more than enough sugar to make wine, but barley wort must be carefully measured. With a good hydrometer reading, you’ve finished the legwork, and can really start to brew.

Part the Second

Brewing is fun. It doesn’t take long. You don’t need to do much. If you can make soup that doesn’t come out of a can, you can brew beer. Hey, soup-makers! Stop stirring that slop and come make something worthwhile. Who pays cooks well anyway? When everyone else is on the front lines fighting against death by brain-consumption, you will be protected and revered as magicians who can conjure fun from wet grain, water and yeast. Oh, and hops. That’s the other ingredient. Anyone who followed my ramble this long probably wondered when I was going to get to that pungent little flower. Well, here it is: hops, as easy as weeds to grow, give all the subtle character, flavor and aroma we love about beer. Now, you don’t need hops. Beer without hops sucks, but if you can drink it, to your pleasure…the rest of us will till a small square of dirt and train some hops up a trellis, dry them between the pages of our chapped, treasured remnants of literature, and throw them in our brew. Hops are delicious, mildly acidic (to cut the sweet malt taste of booze), and will preserve your beer while you flee the zombie insurgence.

When you’ve got your wort ready and full of sugar, you bring that to a boil in your pot. Once you’ve got a rolling boil, throw in a couple of ounces of hops. These hops should be your more acidic ones, to give the brew some bitterness. These hops boil for 45-60 minutes and then, towards the end of the hour, add some more hops; maybe one to two more ounces. These hops should boil for no more than ten minutes, and will add the aroma that makes you drool over a fresh, foamy pint. Now quick, turn off the fire! Cool that shit down! From here on out, sanitation is key. No peeing in the wort, no sneezing around the brew, no flinging boogers at your friends over the pot. Maintain your composure. Once the wort has fallen below 170 degrees, any bread mold, fecal matter or botulism toxin that gets in there will stay in there, and will become a part of your finished product. Blindness? Dysentery? Self-inflicted zombiosis? All are possible when you get unwanted bacteria in your wort.

The only bacteria you want in there for sure are yeast cells. Genus: Saccharomyces cerevisiae, in particular. How you get them is up to you. I get them from my friendly neighborhood yeast lab run by a university professor, but I expect after the zombie apocalypse that probably won’t be an option. Dried bread yeast is the same genus as that of brewing yeast and can be used, but won’t offer the refined variety of lab-produced strains. And failing all these options, you can do as the lambic brewers of Belgium (and all pre-scientific cultures did): you can coax yeast out of the very air and water of your natural surroundings. This is possible.

Saccaromyces, like The Force, is all around us. It surrounds us, it penetrates us. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to get. Man failed many, many times until he refined and cultured the yeast we now know of as brewing yeast. Picture austrolopithicene stumblers dying of toxic shock and Ostrogoths ceremoniously puking up rancid bread-water in the middle of winter. In order to ferment wort without a ready yeast culture, you must repeatedly expose it to the open air and maintain sanitary conditions until the yeast cultures itself. You then reuse the yeast in your next batch, and so on, passing it on down the generations. This sounds impossible, but no one ever said rebuilding culture would be easy.

So, you’ve got some yeast in your wort. You’ve either pitched in some ready yeast or re-activated some dried stuff in a warm-water slurry. You must pour all this in an airtight container (bottle and cork, plastic bucket, pigs’ bladder) that has some kind of pressure-release valve. The reason for this is the other byproduct of anaerobic fermentation. Yeast releases carbon dioxide on consumption of sugar, and this CO2 must have a way to escape your container without allowing air (with evil bacteria) in. A simple bubbler or pasteurizing tube will do the trick. Even a tight rubber nipple will probably work. Just make sure air can’t get in. Can’t stress that enough.

Now you wait. After twenty-four hours, you should see your brew begin to bubble on the surface, and CO2 should be bubbling out of your container. By day two or three, it should be fermenting like we want. A lot. Wait another week. Keep it away from the light. When the CO2 is slow to escape (a bubble once every 30-45 seconds), the brew has become beer. Congratulations. If you want, you can drink it now. It is officially beer. Most people like their beer with bubbles in it, though.

If you want carbonation, just add about a cup of sugar (corn syrup, malt, some fermentable sugar) to your beer, and put it in sanitized bottles. Cap or cork these bottles, wait another week, and the fermentation will produce enough CO2 to bubbly-up your beer. Crack one open and enjoy. Drink it down. Savor the fruit of your labors. Then, fill the bottle with kerosene, stuff it with a rag, and break out your lighter. Those zombies fear fire, and you are fearless and desperate. Long live mankind and the magic of alcohol!

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