Brewing in remote regions

From time to time, I take space in my column to write about something timely and exciting to share. Wilco’s dilemma is a challenge for me because there is a limit to reducing production costs when living on a small island where everything is a challenge due to the cost of shipping, energy, and warm average temperatures. Even if you aren’t living on an island, I think my advice may be of benefit to a number of readers in remote or hot locations, or who wish to cut the costs of their hobby.

I will start with the low-hanging fruit: Yeast. Liquid yeast is expensive, not just for those living outside of countries like the U.S. where specialty labs produce a diverse and exciting selection of strains, but for all homebrewers. Yes, homebrewing is a hobby, and the goals of hobbyists are not the same as commercial brewers, but there is a limit to how much folks are willing to sink into 5-gallon (19-L) batches of beer. I am proudly frugal and like to spend less on raw materials for a batch than buying commercially produced beer. In today’s world, that is somewhere around $100 per 5-gallon (19-L) batch, depending on where you live. Beer taxes are all over the place and are something to factor into this metric. Bottom line is that liquid yeast can eat up a big chunk of the raw material total when express-shipped to Bonaire. In fact, the “cheapest” FedEx envelope rate to Bonaire is $80!

Here are a few things to reduce the cost of yeast. I am skipping the details of how because we have covered this in many previous issues of BYO. For starters, find a friend who can be your courier to bring you yeast, general purpose micro media, a few test tubes, and dried malt extract (DME) when traveling to your remote/expensive location. This is gonna cost something, like a nice lunch or a few beers, but will save you big time!

Once you have yeast in hand, prepare some media slants for later use. When you do brew, which should be soon after your prized shipment has been delivered, use a microbiologist’s “loop” to transfer yeast from your ”empty” liquid package onto the surface of the slants, allow the surface to grow for a few days, cover with sterile mineral oil, close the test tube with a sterile cotton plug, and chuck the tubes in your refrigerator for future use. The DME will be used to make your own liquid pitches for future brews. If you want to have several strains on hand, ask your friend to bring whatever you want for the future.

Another cost-saving suggestion is to have your courier bring you a wide selection of dried yeasts and take advantage of the long shelf life and simplicity of using dried yeast. When brewing in expensive parts of the globe, you need to choose your brewing battles wisely and dried yeast these days is a terrific option.

Let’s move onto hops, another ingredient that is hard to find in places with a small homebrewing scene and with few established breweries. Although the weight of hops used in most beers represents a small weight, shipping can add to the cost. Again, having a friend make hop deliveries is an option. If relying on visitors to bring hops is not practical, consider using hop extracts for bittering purposes, augmenting pellet additions with hop aroma extracts, using lupulin enriched hop products like Cryo® hops, and focusing on styles that don’t require large aroma additions as a few ways to cut back on how much “stuff” you either need to import or have stuffed in your friend’s suitcase or carry-on.

Another hop option is to replace hops with locally available herbs, spices, and fruits. This strategy can work whether brewing “hoppy” styles with bold and fruity noses or dry, crisp, and spicy styles. Looking for a big, juicy, mango and pineapple hop aroma in your hazy IPA? Instead of seeking out those fruit aromas from hops, go straight to the source and add mangos and pineapple juice to your beer! Remember that pineapple contains the foam-destroying enzyme, bromelain, and to either somehow cook fresh pineapple before use or to use canned pineapple. How about a nice witbier after a hot day on the dive boat? Those wonderful spicy and fruity notes can be found at the local market. The sky really is the limit when it comes to hop replacements, because hops replaced herbs and spices commonly used by brewers when hops were just “wicked weeds” crawling about in the wild. 

Now that the low-hanging fruit has been plucked, it’s time to venture on to the real challenges: Malt and refrigeration. Seasonal temperature fluctuations and the access to ice sources during the winter months relegated beer brewing to latitudes greater than about 40º until the advent of commercial refrigeration allowed brewers to ferment, age, store, and ship beers in hotter climates. Once the temperature problem was solved, barley, primarily grown in latitudes greater than 50º, was shipped to warmer climates for malting to serve the growth of breweries around the globe.

For those readers not familiar with Wilco’s island-home, Bonaire is situated 12º north of the equator and 68º west of the prime meridian. That’s about 1,925 miles (3,100 km), as the flamingo flies, south of 40º north latitude. While I could expand the definition of beer to include seltzer, like the tax-collecting office simply known as the TTB has done, and conclude with clarity, I’m going to press onwards with beer-flavored beer.

Malt is bulky and, outside of water, is the main ingredient in beer, both in terms of weight and functionality (sorry hop heads!). Malt brings us enzymes, a ready source of starch that is easily converted into fermentable sugar through mashing, nature’s own wort filter media, color, foam-stabilizing proteins, body-building biopolymers, and those wonderful malt aromas and tastes. To brew relatively normal beer, there is no way around dealing with this bulky ingredient. But don’t lose hope!

Lower-ABV beer styles, styles traditionally containing ~20–50% unmalted adjuncts, dry malt extracts, and brewing enzymes are a few of the things that can be used to lighten the malt bill when freight costs simply become too great to bear. Start by taking a trip to the local market and seeking out ingredients that can be used as adjuncts. Maize (corn), rice, sugars, flaked cereals, and locally produced grains like millet may cost less than malt. Brewers often assume that adjuncts are cheap, but when compared to malted barley and malted wheat, they are often more expensive and not as easy to use.

Brewing enzymes, like alpha amylase powder and liquid amyloglucosidase/glucoamylase, are very handy because of their power per weight and because they permit higher adjunct usage rates. If locally available adjuncts are indeed less costly than malt, enzymes can be a big help for just about all ingredients outside of sugars. Keep in mind that higher adjunct ratios dilute wort nutrients from malt; if brewing with more than about 25% adjunct, nutrient additions will help your yeast with fermentation and will also keep certain off-flavors in check.

The last hurdle to brewing in Bonaire and other hot climates is temperature control. Island brewing has the additional challenge of expensive electricity. The two easy solutions are to ferment hot using kveik strains or to bite the bullet and ferment in a refrigerator. Those ideas work, but Wilco told me that he wants more variety than offered by kveik strains and would like to do something that does not always require a refrigerated space.

One thing about modern living in hot climates is that most places have air conditioning, and one of the more popular types of cooling uses so-called “mini split” units where the evaporator, or cold side of a cooling system, is installed in the wall of a building with the compressor and condenser, or hot side of a cooling system, is located somewhere outside. These small window-style units separate the hot and cold portions of a cooling system, like larger units that use air ducting, hence the name “mini split.” These systems are handy because homes often have multiple mini splits. A single room in a home can be closed off and kept at below-average temperatures during active fermentation. Once active fermentation is complete, the room temperature can be returned to normal, and the doors open to other rooms.

Another idea is to use evaporative cooling to remove heat from fermentation via a DIY swamp cooler. All that is needed is a wet towel (I have used paper towels for this) partially submerged in a tub of water, a fan, and a temperature controller. The water wicks up the towel, the fan evaporates water, and the water vapor carries heat away from the surface of the fermenter. This only works with single wall fermenters and works best when the relative humidity is less than about 60%, making this perfect for use in a conditioned space or in a dry climate. 

There are other ways to economize on cooling, like pumping water from a reservoir placed in a refrigerated space to a stainless fermenter immersion cooling coil, but most of these methods do require some sort of refrigeration system. For those hardcore project folks looking for something that does not require much electricity, check out vapor absorption refrigeration systems. The main energy input
can be supplied by a fuel source, like propane, solar heat, or waste heat energy coming from other sources. This type of refrigeration is used in some recreational vehicles to cool refrigerators.

If you are like Wilco and brew in a hot, remote place, hopefully you’ve picked up some helpful tidbits here. And if you don’t have these challenges and are just checking this out, you should feel lucky! 

Response by Ashton Lewis.