Lightning Brewery

A Bit of History on Beer

In order to further explain our position, we would like to share a little brewing history. The first physical evidence that man has made beer dates to about 3,500 BC. Since cereal crops were grown thousands of years earlier, close to the end of the last Ice Age, it is usually presumed that the first primitive beers were brewed nearly 10,000 years ago.

One of the attributes that has likely contributed to the success of beer as a common beverage is the fact that beer is stabilized. That is to say, beer is one of the first beverages identified that does not readily spoil. Instead, beer is stabilized by the fermentation process. By a partial and limited “spoilage” by yeast fermentation, beer becomes resistant to action by many other microorganisms. This is particularly true when air is excluded from the beer by storage in air-tight containers.

If we fast-forward to the European Middle Ages beer making has seen a remarkable revolution. By this time, incremental improvements in the brewing process have resulted in the implementation of the German Purity Act of 1516 (the Reinheitsgebot). This allowed beer to only contain water, malted grain, and hops. Malted grain is grain that has been sprouted and then kiln-dried. This allows the starch in the kernels to be partially broken down, then the kilning stops the process allowing the malted grain to have an extended shelf life. Hops were used to counteract the residual sweetness of newly fermented beer and as an early anti-bacterial agent that extended the shelf life of newly fermented beer. It’s important to remember that conditions used to brew beer in the Middle Ages were relatively unsanitary.

Interestingly, yeast was not originally mentioned in the Reinheitsgebot since it was provided as a residue or sludge from the wooden vats used for beer fermentation. After yeast was discovered to be the organism responsible for fermentation, the act was amended to include the addition of yeast.

Some of the Scientific Thinking we Apply to our Beers

More recently other countries, including the United States, allow for the use of clarifying additives, shelf life extenders, body-enhancing compounds and foam stabilizers. At the Lightning Brewery we only use water, malted grain, hops, and yeast.

In fact, instead of adding a mineral acid (phosphoric acid or sulfuric acid) to acidify our wort for making German-style beers, we use lactic acid. This sounds like a “fifth ingredient,” but under the German Purity Act we perform exactly the same procedures as German breweries. This is where “sweet” wort, without the hop addition is allowed to sour, or become acidic, by the action of lactobacillus.
We take unhopped wort and to better control the process add to it a certified strain of lactobacillus that naturally occurs on the surface of malted grain. By combining them and allowing fermentation to occur a fraction of the sugar in the wort is converted to lactic acid. We then take a predetermined amount of this mixture and use it to acidify our German-style beer worts. The residual bacteria is removed by boiling and the beers that result have a crisper and freshening finish.

Like many of the European breweries, we further harden our water with gypsum for making our non-German style Ales. This is to have the ionic strength of the water better reflect well water from the Burton-on-Trent region of the UK. Finally and with all of our beers, we naturally carbonate by trapping carbon dioxide evolved through the fermentation process and allow it to dissolve into the beer. This natural carbonation process makes for a finer and cleaner tasting carbonation and a soft persistent foamy head.

We have a lot of people that stop by the brewery on our open hours that ask how we do apply science to our beer making. The first step of the scientific reasoning process is to have a hypothesis. Our hypothesis is that great beers can be made by understanding the principles of brewing, fermentation and packaging only when coupled with an interest in crafting beers of balanced character. We don’t have much analytical equipment at the brewery for testing or quantifying our newly mad worts, beers, finished beers or packaged beers other than our senses of sight, smell and taste. With those senses we have been able to target and improve the appearance, aromas and flavors of our beers since we started brewing at Lightning.
If we had folks at the brewery that were less focused on quality, maybe we couldn’t consistently criticize our brewing and fermentation. But with any new thing, you do the best you can with the resources at hand. Along with being committed to growing a successful brewery further hones the senses. Maybe someday we will have some LC (liquid chromatography) equipment, maybe some GC/MS (gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry) equipment. However, we feel that equipment is supportive in nature and only provides confirming and quantified numbers for what we can detect with our own senses.

Some Philosophy on Science in general

May people have the mis-impression that science is only big. In fact, there has been a push towards “Big Science” in recent years. Historically, science has been very small, but enormously thoughtful. Big science is a only a recent phenomenon common since WWII and even more in the biomedical sciences since the ‘War on Cancer” was started in the early 1970s. It does keep scientists working. However, it is more production line-oriented and (I have to, yet hate to say) less scientific.

We are specializing in the more traditional types of scientific thinking. We hone an idea about what great beer should be, compare that to what we have made at the brewery, and then deliberately and specifically put in place or alter pre-existing protocols and procedures to make that beer better. If you were to observe this from the outside, you might think that we are a little too focused. That is how things improve. For use: One pint at a time as our beers are enjoyed!