The joy of brewing

To people who love beer, brewing your own is the ultimate fantasy. Since 90 percent of the 250,000 home-brewers in America are male, that would be male fantasy.

"Mmmm, Gummy-beer," Homer Simpson once marveled.

Mark Sprigg, Mike Mills and Jeff Byrne feel the same way about beer, especially about making it. Combining malted barley, heat, hops and yeast in an environment as meticulously sterile as a laboratory is a science. The science of fermentation is called zymurgy. Brewing also is an art, with each creative tweak of the recipe producing a batch of beer that to the educated palate is different from any other. That is the joy in it for brewers.

"If it's perfected enough, it could reach a state of splendor," Mills says.

Sprigg, Mills and Byrne are all home-brewers who have gotten to make their fantasy come true on a larger scale. They brew the beer at the Buckner Brewing Co. in downtown Cape Girardeau.

Sprigg, co-owner of the company, is an emergency room nurse at St. Francis Medical Center. Mills is a Southeast Missouri State University student studying to become an art teacher. Byrne is happy just making beer as a job right now. "It's a creative outlet," he says. "... There are so many variables."

Zymurgy allows them to make beers that are as distinctive as wines. Local honey is responsible for the sweet aftertaste in the brew-pub's Honey Wheat, which is served with a slice of lemon. "The lemon takes out a little bit of the bitterness of the grain," explains bartender Nelson Sparks. "It's a little bit more palatable."

One of their craft beers, the dark porter, has a chocolate finish, another piques the taste buds with raspberry. The finish is nutty in two other beers on tap. The India Pale Ale is especially hoppy. The British used to send this kind of ale to their troops in India because hops is a preservative.

The type of malt used is responsible for the different flavors, Sprigg says. Malts are created by toasting germinated barley at different temperatures. There are caramel malts and chocolate malts. Black barley yields a coffee flavor. Malt also is responsible for most of the color in beer.

The Nut Brown Ale, created from Mills' recipe, went on tap last week. A painter, Mills says making beer also is a creative act. "I can alter it the way I want to."

Making beer at home just seemed logical to him. "I figured I drank enough, I might as well start making it," Mills said.

The brewers are readying a new batch of Buckner Lite, a beer that wasn't on the brew-pub's original roster. It is a concession to the fact that some people care about the number of calories in their beer. Theirs, though, is a hoppier beer than those Miller or Budweiser make.

"The majority of people are light beer drinkers," Sprigg says, "probably because they've never had fresh beer." He says mass-produced beer is stale by the time it gets on the shelves.

Fresh beer has a different taste, he says. "It's alive. It's a living thing."

Beer to go

The brewpub offers its beers to go in half-gallon glass containers called growlers.

The process of making a beer takes about three weeks. The mash produced by heating goes into a vessel called the "mash lauter tun," where the sweetness is extracted from the malt. Lauter is the German word for clarify. Germans are so serious about beer that the country enacted "purity laws" to govern brewing.

The sweet liquid wort is moved to a brew kettle for boiling. Hops, the ingredient that adds bitterness to beer, is added and the clarified wort is transferred to the brew house's gleaming fermentation kettles, where it spends two or three weeks. The beer finally is piped one floor down to the ice house to be conditioned at 34 degrees before the fresh beer is ready. They make 14 barrels to the batch. There are 32 gallons to the barrel.

Sprigg is co-owner of the company and the veteran brewer of the crew, starting in 1979. His two careers, nursing and brewing, coincide at the cleanliness required to prevent something from going wrong.

He handles the brewing part of the business, while partner Phil Brinson is in charge of the restaurant. But the beer and food are meant to complement each other. Buckner's porter is the kind of beer Sparks recommends to drink with a steak or Yankee pot roast.

Just as wine connoisseurs are exquisitely attuned to the tastes and aromas in wine, some people know their beers. Sprigg remembers a man and his son who came into the brew-pub, drank a beer and told him he was using a type of hops called cascade.

There are many different types of hops, but they were right. "That's pretty good," Sprigg said.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182