If you’re interested, leave a comment on this post and use your preferred email. I’ll get in touch with a link to the test site.

Despite temperatures near 90 degrees, autumn is at least officially here. As such, the thoughts of many a brew fan turn to seasonal additions to their normal schedule of beer crafting and drinking. Typically, this means pumpkin ales. Funny thing is, most of these ales don’t actually contain any pumpkin at all, and the ones that do are usually inferior to those that don’t.

The reason is simple. Most people associate pumpkin’s flavor with the pie that they scarf down after Thanksgiving dinner, while the actual fruit tastes more like a rather bland squash. It’s the flavor of the spices used to make that pie that people want in their ales. Perhaps pumpkin ales should more accurately be described as “pumpkin pie ales.”

Some brewers take to adding roasted pumpkin flesh to their mash tun, and then finish things off by adding a certain amount of nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, allspice, and mace at the same time they add hops. The difference is almost imperceptible if things go according to plan, and disastrous if they don’t (I’ve heard remarks about ales with pumpkin used in the mash that likened the flavor to that of a Matchbox car). The squash addition doesn’t up the ante for flavor or alcohol production, and is much more likely to create off-flavors than just the spice addition (not to mention a fog that can’t be exorcised from the finished product).

Brewers also display a common tendency to beat the drinker over the head with the spices they add to their beers. The flavor of cloves in many spiced ales is overwhelming, and ultimately reduces your ability to taste the other elements of the beer. Too much clove included can often mean that the natural anesthetic in clove oils numb your tongue to the flavor of the beer. If the beer tastes like toy cars this isn’t such a bad thing, but could be a problem if you want to enjoy the flavor of more than just that first beer.

Without trying to account for taste, there’s still something to be said for balance, and intent, when making beers. With almost infinite styles and sub-styles of beer to choose from, knowing a little bit about the style of the beer before the addition of spices gives us a better understanding of how the spices add or detract from the overall flavor. It’s like cooking, if you know a little bit about the basic ingredients a chef uses to create a dish, and you know what style the chef is working in, you can argue whether he’s done a good job. Knowing that the brewer is trying to do something uncharacteristic of a particular style gives you the ability to decide whether he or she has succeeded, outside of whether it tastes good. Happy accidents are often the mother of new styles of beer.

Most brewers in this country draft their typical American Pale Ale style into double duty as pumpkin ales. They reduce the amount of hops used and replace that with some McCormick’s pumpkin pie spice, and that’s fine. I use a basic Anchor Steam clone — typically less hoppy than Pale Ales — and add whole nutmeg, a few cloves, some cinnamon sticks, and some allspice berries to the end of the boil.

While not traditionally used, the holiday spices found in the typical pumpkin pie blend could work as well in a Belgian Saison style ale, as they do in the typically American versions you’re probably more accustomed to.

Examples you might be interested in are Coors’ Blue Moon “Harvest Moon Ale,” and Dogfish Head’s Punkin’ Ale, but pretty much every microbrewery in this country does one this time of year.

One of the holy grails of the intermediate brewer is the achievement of brewing a beer that has good head retention. That is, the beer maintains an appropriate amount of foamy suds throughout the duration of the drink. Despite this, bartenders often spend inordinate amounts of time during their workday spilling off valuable foam into a drain, just to provide the drinker with what is supposedly more bang for the buck. What’s the point of having it at all if it takes up space in the glass that would otherwise be actual beer?

The short answer is that without it — despite getting more liquid — you aren’t getting everything you paid for. Head serves a purpose more important than looking good in advertising. Head acts as a diffuser for the aromas relatively locked and buried beneath the surface tension of the beer. Because we drink beers generally either ice-cold or at cellar temperatures (45-50 degrees), they don’t diffuse molecules into the air as readily as say, red wines or brandies that begin to smell intensely as they are warmed by the heat from our own hands conducted through the glass. That lack of diffusion leads inevitably to a reduction in flavor.

Beer’s aroma arises with the effervescence of the CO2 coming out of solution. You see it rising up from the bottom of the glass or bottle. Head prolongs and intensifies this diffusion, allowing more of the beer molecules to enter our noses. And yes, it looks good in advertising, and ultimately in a glass up close and personal.

Within the brewing process, factors ranging from how much alcohol the yeast produces and how much it settles out of solution, to the amount of unfermented sugars left in the beer all affect whether a beer will generate and retain head. How hoppy the beer is can also be a factor, as hops contain oils that can both help and hinder the process.

A well-poured beer in a clean glass should retain head for a while, leaving a lace pattern down the insides of the glass as the beer is consumed. Typically, with a pint glass, a good pour utilizes the standard “45-degrees-until-half-of-the-glass-is-full-and-then-straight-down-until-full” method. This ought to give the drinker about an inch or inch and a half of head that should slowly decrease until the beer is gone, allowing the drinker the chance to fully smell, taste, and hopefully enjoy the beer.

The cleanliness of the glass also has a huge effect. Any oils that remain on the interior of the glass will cause the bubbles forming the head to burst prematurely, leaving behind a beer with no head and less flavor than you paid for. Particulates in the glass or the beer itself also have an effect. So if you’re drinking a headless beer that has been poured correctly, your glass was probably not very clean.

Just like wines, there are certain types of glasses for certain types of beers. The pint glass is pretty ubiquitous, with the pilsener glass becoming less and less common, but there are also schooners and snifter-like, tulip shaped glasses for use with certain Belgian ales. Of course, there’s also the classic mug, but that’s seen a decline in the United States. Most of these have a mouth that is wide enough to allow for that all-important diffusion. A bottle doesn’t allow for much of that at all, and thus you probably don’t have much — if any — head with a bottle. The same goes for cans. Though admittedly, the portability that bottles and cans give us is a nice thing.

There’s a time and a place for swilling back a few nearly frozen Old Milwaukees. In a Boat with fishing rods seems pretty appropriate and enjoyable to me. But there’s also a time for savoring the flavor of a beer crafted with precision and love, and I contend that that finger and a half of head in your Double IPA will help you unlock that effort.

Most actual fermentation occurs in the first week to ten days after yeast is added to the wort. Depending on the style of beer, brewers tend to siphon, or rack, the resultant beer into a secondary fermenting vessel.

If a brewer wants to clear a beer following fermentation, he will usually transfer beer that has reached its expected final gravity from the primary fermenter to a secondary fermenter. Doing this, the brewer can siphon, or rack off of the spent yeast cake that has settled to the bottom of the primary fermenter. If he happens to make the same beer, he can use the spent yeast instead of re-pitching from a new starter, though usually brewers will only do this one time to avoid significant changes in the yeast strain.

Flavoring agents are usually added during secondary fermentation. For instance, if you want a raspberry flavored ale, you would pour raspberry purée into the empty secondary fermenter, and then rack the beer onto the fruit and let it soak up the raspberry essence for between ten dasy and two weeks.

By cooling the second fermenter, suspended particles of yeast, grain dust, flakes of coagulated proteins, and other bits will fall to the bottom of the new fermenter where they can be left behind when bottling or kegging. This process is called lagering, but doesn’t necessarily make the final product a lager. Lager in German literally means “to store.” True lager beers are often lagered at near freezing temperatures; often for lengthy periods of time in order to fully clear a beer of particles and stronger yeast-produced flavors.

Beer is not carbonated at this point in the process. While yeast produces carbon dioxide throughout fermentation, the gas is not allowed to pressurize. Brewers use airlocks to take advantage of the positive pressure created by the CO2 production of the yeast to keep unwanted oxygen, wild yeasts, bacteria, and other invaders out of the vulnerable, fermenting wort. Getting the fizz into beer can be done in a number of ways.

For bottling, a small amount of sugar is added to the beer, sometimes with the addition of a strain of yeast specifically developed for bottling. Once the bottle is sealed, the added sugar allows the yeast to produce enough CO2 to pressurize the bottle. When the bottles are cool, more of this CO2 will chemically dissolve into the beer, escaping when the bottle is uncapped. As the liquid warms up, you can see the gas coming out of solution as it rises up from the bottom of your glass. This process is called bottle conditioning. Cask or keg conditioned ales pretty much do the same thing. All of this usually takes about two weeks, which can be a long time to wait if you’ve already spent three weeks or more waiting to taste your beer. But like a lot of things, it can be worth it.

Force carbonating is a different story. This process involves forcibly pumping CO2 into the beer without the addition of sugars. After kegging the beer, brewers add as much gas as the keg will hold and then chill the beer. Once it’s cold, brewers shake the keg to force more gas in and return it to the cooler. Within a day or two — sometimes even hours if the beer is already cold enough — the beer is carbonated and ready to drink. Macrobrewers pasteurize and filter after primary fermentation so the beer contains no yeast but is full of dissolved CO2.

That’s how beer converts from crushed grains, leaves and water to wonderful elixir; proof, according to Benjamin Franklin, that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Immediately following the end of the boil, brewers turn their minds to fermentation, the part of the brewing process that requires the least actual work but the most patience. Despite the seeming simplicity of this phase, careful choices must be made.

Yeast performs most of the legwork of brewing. By “digesting” sugars suspended in the wort, yeast respirates carbon dioxide just like we do, but it also produces another waste product: Alcohol. Given, there are certain sugars that the yeast can’t digest, and these unconvertible sugars give beer sweetness and aid in head retention.

Wort is cooled to below 80 degrees. A specific gravity reading is taken using a hydrometer. This determines the relative density of the liquid, and allows brewers to determine both when the beer has stopped fermenting, and what the beer’s final alcohol content by volume (ABV) will be. After aerating or oxygenating the wort, we pitch yeast.

Most of the time brewers decide on a particular strain of yeast that they want to use in advance of even starting their brew. They consider whether they want to produce ale or lager. Using yeast that rests on top of the wort (top-fermenting), and converts sugar to alcohol most efficiently at temperatures in the upper 50s, an ale is produced. Exactly the opposite, bottom-fermenting, cold temperature yeast (below 50 degrees) produces a lager.

Ale yeasts produce abundant flavors just by converting sugars. They give off chemical aroma and flavor compounds that affect the final taste of the beer. The higher the temperature, the more and different chemical flavors the yeast will produce.

Lagers ferment cold and produce fewer esters but also produce a much clearer final product. Most store-bought canned beer is lager. Brewers must maintain strict temperature control when using lager yeasts to avoid producing off flavors.

Of course, there are many different strains of yeast in both categories. California Ale yeast has a high alcohol tolerance, so it is more likely to continue to ferment when living in high concentrations of its own waste product. There are about as many types of yeast as there are styles of beer. Ale yeasts specifically cultured for use in wheat beers produce fruity, clove and banana-like esters. They give hefeweizens their characteristic cloudiness and fruity, citric flavor. Hefeweizen literally means beer with yeast, as the yeast is not intentionally cleared from the beer.

Coming next, from flat to fizzy: conditioning beer.