Eat the City(54)

IN the Williamsburg loft, Josh Fields stirs a tub of heating water with a giant paddle. “It’s a cream ale,” he tells me. “It’s called Cream Master.” It turns out the beer’s appellation is an art world reference, named for Matthew Barney’s cycle of films, Cremaster, whose conceptual departure point, Josh explains, is the male cremaster muscle, which raises and lowers the testes in response to temperature. “Ours is poking fun at him,” says Josh, a bit sheepishly. He and Jon Conner also make Bankrupt State, a California common, or steam beer. They free-associate beer names while they’re brewing, and came up with Frank Lloyd Rye for an IPA made in part from rye when Jon was working on a sculpture related to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house. “We were cracking up,” says Jon.

Every brewer follows similar steps to make beer: Take malt—barley that has been wetted so it germinates, and then kilned in an oven so that germination stops. Add water and steep it to extract as much sugar and flavor as possible, creating the mash. Add the flower of the hop plant, which provides flavor and bitterness, and also acts as a preservative. Cool the mixture, and drop in yeast, which converts sugar to alcohol. But exactly how to accomplish each step is a matter of centuries of contention.

There are dozens of varieties of barley malt and hops, and brewers can also malt other grains or skip hops altogether. Yeast is a living microorganism that must be tended, and specific varieties are used for different beers. Even water can be challenging: How soft is it? What else is in it? The choice of mashing temperature affects how the ingredients combine into flavors. For a drink synonymous with laid-back enjoyment, beer’s manufacture is a precision chemistry experiment in which every element is critical.

The founder of the groundbreaking New Albion Brewery in Sonoma, California, famously drove all over California, Oregon, and Washington in the 1970s, stopping at scrap yards, dairies, and farms to pick up discarded pumps, pipes, and tanks. Decades later, on the other side of the country, Josh and Jon had eBay, Craigslist, and the junk piles of Brooklyn. One tank came from all the way up near the Manischewitz wine production plant at Canandaigua, and they collected tidbits from the inventories of old soda distributors and ice cream makers. They picked up two 535-gallon tanks from a maple syrup producer in the Berkshires, also a home brewer, who poured them a couple pints and assured them that the tanks were safe for food. “There’s a little bit of brotherhood,” said Jon.

Josh found a ten-gallon, dried-out oak barrel on the street in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. “It’s a little risky,” Jon said, but they figured it had likely been used for wine and ended up cleaning and sanitizing it and soaking it in water, so the wood expanded to fill gaps between staves. Then they barrel-aged a few beers—a Belgian dark strong ale, and a Belgian witbier that they said was delicious.

For today’s cream ale, Josh pulls a vacuum-packed bag from the freezer full of hops pellets, ground and molded from the bitter flowers of the vinelike plant. He selects Northern Brewer hops, which smell green, and Saaz hops, which smell deep. Just off the kitchen, a small storage room is crowded with tubes and kegs and empty fermentation vessels, like a modern-day apothecary. The actual brewing takes place in the center of the loft’s main room, which also houses a welding station, an art studio, fabrication equipment, and a wood shop. Josh sets the hops on the table and heads down to the garage, past a tiny, insulated fermentation room under the stairs, outfitted with a computer-controlled heater and air conditioner that keeps the temperature within a degree of the target.

In the garage, below a poster of a Colt 45 girlie looking coy in her underwear, Josh throws his whole body into milling grains, hand-cranking a clay slab roller left over from an art project of Jon’s. The rollers crush the grains, cracking their kernels and exposing their contents. Each grain alters the chemistry of the brew slightly, allowing Jon and Josh to fine-tune flavors. “Flaked corn adds sugar,” Josh says, measuring out two pounds, “and the more sugar, the more alcohol.” He adds flaked rice, for the same effect. Two Row base malt, nutty and light, provides a kind of canvas for flavor. A brandname malt called Carapils, Josh says, untying a giant vinyl bag and measuring out two pounds to dump into the machine, provides body and head retention. “That’s nice,” Josh says, sweating, when suddenly the wheel turns freely—he’s done.

Josh and Jon recently worked out a new brewing system, and this is their first time brewing on it. They’re in mechanic mode, ready to fix what might go wrong. They mix the milled malt barley and rice with water—now it’s called the mash—in a stainless steel keg they call the mash tun. Mashing is a slow heating process that allows enzymes to turn starch in the grain into sugars; it is punctuated by occasional pauses, or mash rests, when the temperature hits certain levels. This new system provides a different way to control temperature—not in a cooler, but by pumping the mash through a fifty-foot stainless steel coil that runs through a hot water tank (called, confusingly, a hot liquor tank), in a principle similar to that of a double boiler. At the end of the process, Josh and Jon will pump cold water through a similar copper coil they place in the boil kettle, to chill the wort, or unfermented beer, to a temperature optimal for yeast.

The workshop, with its high ceilings, skylights, and many windows, has the glassy feel of a greenhouse. It’s cold outside, and the thermometer on the wall of the unheated loft reads 40 degrees. The only heat comes from the liquid barley, bubbling up toward 140 degrees in the mash tun in the center of the room, and we gather around the brewing beer as if it is a hearth.