((PKG)) BEER MAKING
((Banner: Traditional Beer))
((Reporter: Sadie Witkowski))
((Camera: Steve Baragona))
((Adapted by: Zdenko Novacki))
((Map: Ashburn, Virginia))
((Banner: Beer is traditionally fermented by yeast found naturally in the environment))
((NATS))
((MELISSA HOFFMANN, QUALITY CONTROL, LOST RHINO BREWING CO.))
Back in the day, they didn't know why beer fermented. They thought it was god. It was like, “Oh, god is doing this. It’s making this miraculous thing.” They'd pop hops, water and malt and all the sudden, they have a fermented product. And it wasn’t until pasteurization and the airlock was invented that keeps out the dust and the microbes and the yeast that’s in the air, and when they were doing that, nothing was happening. So, they realized “Oh, it must be something in the air.”
((NATS))
((ALEX LYNCH, BARREL MASTER, LOST RHINO BREWING CO.))
The original beer was just from the air, whatever fell into it, whatever came. We were using sanitary practices but whatever happened to come into that, beer fermented it.
((Banner: After decades of using cultivated yeast, some US brewers are again using more natural yeast))
It's unique to us. It's unique to our region. It came out pretty well and it had some characteristics that we didn’t have elsewhere in our brewery.
((MELISSA HOFFMANN, QUALITY CONTROL, LOST RHINO BREWING CO.))
It was harvested from the parking lot and put into the barrel and we didn't take it out for two years. So, it kind of sat there. We didn't know what was going to happen. Just something grew from the parking lot. We popped the yeast in and it spontaneously fermented. So, then we took the, we called it a puncheon. We took that and we added two different other barrels and blended it.
((ALEX LYNCH, BARREL MASTER, LOST RHINO BREWING CO.))
These beers take up to three years to mature. So that's just so much time and so much raw ingredients just sitting on a shelf or in a barrel. So, I think people were very meticulous in trying to emulate exactly what these traditional producers in Europe were doing. And I think for the most part, they’ve been largely successful. And what’s fascinating is these beers are sort of the reverse of what everything you’re supposed to do in a brewing tradition.
((MELISSA HOFFMANN, QUALITY CONTROL, LOST RHINO BREWING CO.))
No matter what you add into your beer, your wort might be the most best tasting thing. If you put a certain type of yeast in there or your yeast isn’t healthy, you’re going to get terrible off flavors. If you get anything in there that’s, you know, wild, it can create secondary fermentation which we’ve seen in house, and that happens. We’ve had cans go through secondary fermentation and they explode. So, you can’t get hurt by anything. So, it definitely is the unsung hero of the beer industry that people don’t really realize.
