CRAFT BEER FOR
THE BIG BEND
Q&A with Steve Anderson,
Big Bend Brewing Co.
Whether you enjoy a cold beer or not, you’ll appreciate the creative effort that goes into the
brew process. That creativity is now on display
right in the Big Bend at Big Bend Brewing Co.
in Alpine, Texas. Big Bend Brewing Co. will
produce the two types of beer produced today
– lagers and ales – with four to five varieties.
Galleries & Artists sat down with brewmeister
Steve Anderson, a man who really knows how
to brew great beer (formally of the famous
Live Oak Brewing Co. and Waterloo Brewing
in Austin) to learn more about the art of brewing one of the oldest beverages known to man.
Learn more at www.BigBendBrewery.com
G&A: Describe for me the differences in beer?
Steve: There's lagers and ales.
G&A:
Those are the only two.
Steve: Right. And then there are subcategories of both. A pilsner is a lager beer that is
the ancestor of all the big macro beers today
like Bud, Miller, Coors, Heineken. It's golden
colored. But with the true pilsner it's very
hoppy. It's really bitter. It’s a lager. With the
pilsner it's going to be mostly pilsner malt. I
don't think we'll have any specialty malt in it.
G&A:
What does that mean?
Steve: It's just a base malt. Malt is barley
that's been germinated to a certain point and
then dried out. But it's still viable so when you
expose the endosperm with warm water then
the enzymes reactivate and continue the germination process. Except now instead of making a plant it breaks the starch inside the
endosperm into sugar. And then we'll remove
that sugar from the grain and the water, and
we boil it to sterilize it, add hops to bitter it up.
And then we send it to the fermenter with yeast
that will consume that sugar that we've made
from it and it produces ethanol and carbon
dioxide. And so then it makes beer.
But that requires lots of tank space. And because we're going to be making a lager, primarily which is the pilsner, that ties up the tank
for a month.
G&A:
So why is that? Aging?
Steve: Aging, yes. The difference between
a lager and an ale is the yeast, and the lager
yeast ferments at a cooler temperature and so
it takes a little bit longer to ferment but not a
whole lot. But because it ferments at a cooler
temperature it produces and retains a lot of
sulfites that are unpleasant. And it takes a
while for that to scrub out of the beer. It's
called "green beer".
G&A: Do you have yeast that you've used before that you bring to bear on this?
Steve: I think I'm going to use a different
strain than what I've used before for the pilsner.
10 • www.GalleriesArtists.com