Saltwater Brewery - What's Brewing

The calendar says fall. The forecast does not agree. This morning the National Weather Service forecast for Delray Beach called for highs of 84, 83 and 83 degrees through Wednesday. For us that is beach weather. It is also the weather that quietly ruins beer somewhere between the store and your fridge.

This week's Tides & Taps is for the beer side of our community: anyone who buys it, carries it, stores it or brews it down here. It covers the short science on what heat and light do to beer, and the habits that keep a can tasting the way the brewer meant it to.

Heat: the 3-30-300 rule

Beer is a food, and like most food it ages faster when it is warm. The Brewers Association, the trade group for small and independent brewers, puts this in a temperature cheat sheet for retailers as the 3-30-300 rule. Beer loses the same amount of flavor in 3 days in a car trunk at 90°F, in 30 days at room temperature (72°F), or in 300 days in a refrigerator at 38°F.

The sheet credits the rule to a flavor-loss study by one of the large breweries, so treat it as a rule of thumb, not a lab constant. The direction is not in doubt. The Cicerone Certification Program's line on the same sheet is blunt: "Refrigerated storage is best for all beers at all times." The brewers quoted there explain what warm storage does. It speeds up oxidation, the slow reaction that brings in flavors like wet cardboard, sherry, honey or metal. They also note that unpasteurized, full-flavored beers lose the most when stored warm, and they say that describes most craft beer.

In our own lineup, the beer with the most to lose is Screamin' Reels, our West Coast IPA (7% ABV, 75 IBU). It is built around hops, and fresh hop character is what you are paying for. LocAle, Sea Cow and Passion Pit deserve the same care.

The parked car is the hottest place in the county

The "90°F car trunk" in that rule is generous for South Florida. In a study published in Pediatrics in 2005, McLaren, Null and Quinn measured a dark sedan parked on 16 clear days with outdoor temperatures from 72 to 96°F. The inside warmed by an average of 3.2°F every five minutes. Eighty percent of the rise came in the first 30 minutes. After an hour it was about 40°F hotter inside than out, and even on the coolest day the cabin reached 117°F. Cracking the windows made almost no difference.

Jan Null, one of the authors, keeps the research at NoHeatStroke.org. It notes that a dark dashboard or seat in the sun often reaches 180°F to over 200°F. On an 84-degree October afternoon, a case of beer left in the car for a long lunch is sitting in heat well past the rule's worst case. That research exists to protect children, not beer. So the rule that matters most is simple: never leave a child or a pet in a parked car, not even for a minute.

Light: why a can never skunks

"Skunky" is a real chemical fault, not a figure of speech. In 2001, chemists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, working with the University of Gent in Belgium, worked out how it happens. Their findings ran in Chemistry: A European Journal and were summarized by ScienceDaily. Visible or ultraviolet light breaks down isohumulones, the light-sensitive bitter compounds that come from hops. The pieces react into what the team called a "skunky thiol," a cousin of the compound in a skunk's spray. People can taste it at just a few parts per trillion, and brewers had been writing about the problem since at least 1875.

That is why beer has long been bottled in brown or green glass. A can goes one better: it lets no light in at all, so that reaction never starts. A can of LocAle on a bright beach afternoon is safe from the sun's light. Heat is the one you still have to manage.

Five habits for the beer run this month

1. Make beer the last stop. Bring a cooler with ice, or an insulated bag, for the ride home.
2. Never park it. No beer left in a closed car or trunk while you run other errands, and never a child or a pet, ever.
3. Get it in the fridge as soon as you're home. Not the garage, and not the hall closet.
4. Buy it cold when you can. If the shop keeps a beer in the cooler, take it from the cooler.
5. Empty it and blue-bin it. The Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County takes food and beverage cans in the blue bin. You don't need to rinse them, as long as no liquid is left. Aluminum keeps coming back: the International Aluminium Institute estimates that 74.5% of all the primary aluminum produced since 1888 is still in use.

The freshest beer is at the source

The shortest trip any beer makes is from our tanks to your glass at the taproom, 1701 W. Atlantic Ave., the first building off the I-95 Atlantic Ave exit in Delray Beach. Hours are Monday 1 to 7, Tuesday through Thursday 12 to 10, Friday and Saturday 12 to 11, and Sunday 12 to 8. Our cans are also around South Florida. Wherever you buy them, the ride home is the part you control. Here is what's on at the taproom this week.

If you brew at home, the same rules apply to your own batches. Our earlier post on what Florida law says about brewing beer at home covers reading ABV and IBU, using our Core Four as the ruler. If the cooler is headed to the beach, read how to read beach flags and rip current risk first. The swell is back, and the beer waits until everyone is out of the water and done driving.

From all of us at Saltwater Brewery: keep it cold, and keep it in the can. Please drink responsibly.