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All About Beers. Beer is the generic term for all fermented beverages made from malted grain (usually barley), hops, and water. Barley. Hops.
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Beer is the generic term for all fermented beverages made from malted grain (usually barley), hops, and water.
Beer is the world’s oldest and most popular alcoholic beverage. It is produced by the fermentation of sugars derived from starch-based material – the most common being malted barley
Barley Diastase Malted Barley
The starch source is steep in water, along with certain enzymes, to produce sugary wort. Wort
This is then flavored with herbs, fruit or most hops. Yeast is then used to cause fermentation, which produces alcohol and other waste products from anaerobic respiration of the sugars. Fermenting Beer Wort Yeast
Beer uses varying ingredients, production methods and traditions. The type of yeast and production method may be used to classify beer into ale, lager and spontaneously fermented beers. Ale Lager
Some beer writers and organizations differentiate and categorize beer by various factors into beer styles. Hoegaarden Wheat Beer
Alcohol beverages fermented from non-starch sources such as grape juice (wine) or honey (mead), and distilled beverages are not classified as beer.
Beer is known to have existed 7,000 or more years ago. Pottery from Mesopotamia dating back to 4200 B.C. depicts fermentation scenes and shows kings sipping their version of beer through gold tubes.
References to brewing have been found in hieroglyphics on walls of ancient caves in Egypt.
In the 3rd century B.C. in China, beer was known as Kin. Even the Vikings made beer at sea in their war ships and drank it out of the horn of a cow. Viking Beer Bong
In the middle ages, brewing was done in the home by the women who were known as “brewsters’. Modern day “lady brewsters”
On February 13, 1602, the father of bottled beer, Dr. Alexander Nowell, died. He was the first to put ale into a glass bottle and seat it with a cork. Dr. Alexander Nowell
Beer is made by brewing. The essential stages of brewing are smashing, sparging, boiling, fermentation and packaging. Most of these stages can be accomplished in several different ways, but the purpose of each stage is the same regardless of the method used to achieve it.
Mashing manipulates the temperature of a mixture of water and a starch source (known as mash) in order to convert starches to fermentable sugars.
The barley malt is ground into grist, which is fed into a container called mash tun along with hot water. Adjuncts – usually corn or rice – are precooked and added to the mash tun. Mash tun
Everything is mixed and cooked together at low temperatures (up to 169 0F or 76 0C) for one to six hours. During this process the malt enzymes are activated and turn starches to sugar. The grain residue is strained out (sparging) and the remaining liquid – now called wort – is conveyed to the brew kettle.
Sparging (a.k.a lautering) extracts the fermentable liquid, known as wort, from the mash.
During sparging the mash is in a vessel known as a lauter tun, which has a porous barrier through which wort not grain can pass. The brewer allows the wort to flow past the porous barrier and collects the wort.
The brewer allows adds water to the lauter tun and lets it flow trough the mash and collects it as well. This rinses fermentable liquid from the grain in the mash and allows the brewer to gather as mush as fermentable liquid from the mash as possible. The leftover grain is not further used in making beer.
Boiling (a.k.a. brewing) sterilizes the wort and increases the concentration of sugar in the wort. Brew kettle
Boiling the wort with hops this extracts the distinctively bitter hops flavor that makes beer taste like beer. In huge copper or stainless steel brew kettles, the wort-plus-hops is kept at a rolling boil for one to two and a half hours.
The boiling also sterilizes the wort and draws out antiseptic elements in the hops that protect beer from spoilage. After brewing, the hops are strained out and the wort is cooled. At this point the techniques very according to whether a lager beer or an ale is being made.
For ales the wort is cooled to 500 to 700F (100 to 210C). For lager beers it is chilled to 370 to 490F (30 to 100C).
Fermentationuses yeast to turn the sugars in wort to alcohol and carbon dioxide.
If a lager beer is being made, the yeast settles to the bottom. The yeasts for ales – different strains that work at warmer temperatures – rise to the surface and work from the top.
The usual fermentation time is a week or more – a bit less for ales, a bit more for lagers. During fermentation the carbon dioxide being given off may be collected and stored under pressure, to be added again at a later stage.
Lagering – storing or conditioning (from the German word lagern, to be stored) – matures or ripens the beer, mellowing its flavor. Some further slow fermentation may also take place and impurities may settle out.
Lagering of beer takes place at near-freezing temperatures. It may last for several weeks to several months. Ales are ripened too, for a much shorter time at warmer temperatures.
Both beer and ale are matured in stainless-steel or glass-line tanks, in contrast to the wood casks in which spirits are aged. Wood casks spoil the beer taste.
Packaging, the final stage of the brewing process, prepares the beer for distribution and consumption.
During packaging, beer is put into the vessel from which it will be served – a keg, bottle or can. Beer is carbonated in its package. Kegs, or half-barrels containing 15 ½ gallons, provide bar supplies of draft beer – beer drawn from the tap into the glass.
The basic ingredients of beer are water, a fermentable starch source, such as malted barley; and yeast. It is common for a flavoring to be added, the most popular being hops.
A mixture of starch sources may be used, with the secondary starch source, such as corn, rice and sugar, often being termed as adjunct, especially when used as a lower cost substitute for malted barley.
Malted barley before roasting. Malt is the soul of beer. Malt is barley, a cereal grain that has been soaked in water, germinated and then kilned. The amount of heat and water sprayed on the grain during malting also produces varying colors, with further roasting giving the deepest color and flavors. The blend of these types of malt give beers their color, body, and fermentable sugars.
Malt provide color to the beer. Pale malt gives us golden beers. 100% pale malt is used in Light Lager. The Pale Ale has pale malt and a little caramel, or roasted malt for its copper color. Pale caramel and chocolate, dark roasted malt, give the Brown Ale and Porter their distinctive deep brown appearance.
Water. Beer is composed mostly of water, and water used to make beer nearly always comes from a local source. The mineral components of water are important to beer because minerals in water influence the character of beer made from it. Water makes up 92-95% of each glass of beer.
Starch source. The starch source in a beer provides the fermentable material in a beer and is a key determinant of the character of the beer. The most common starch source used in beer is malted grain.
Grain is malted by soaking it in water, allowing it to begin germination, and then drying the partially germinated grain in a kiln. Malting grain produces enzymes that convert starches in the grain into fermentable sugars. Different roasting time and temperatures are used to produce different colors of malt from the same grain. Darker malts will produce darker beers.
Hops. If malt is the soul of beer, then hops are the spice. Hops provide bitterness and aroma to beer. Hops grow on vines, producing tiny flowers that look like soft pine cones. They are resinous and sticky. Once they are harvested and dried, they are vacuum packed as whole hops or hop pellets.
Add whole hops in cheesecloth bags to the cellar tanks to provide a more intense hop aroma. This process is called dry hopping. The flower of the hop vine is used as a flavoring and preservative agent in nearly all beer made today. The flower themselves are often called “hops.” Hops were used in beer by Jews in Babylon around 400 B.C. and by monastery breweries.
Hops contain several characteristics that brewers desire in beer, hops contribute a bitterness that balances the sweetness of the malt, hops also contribute flora, citrus, and herbal aromas and flavors to beer, hops have an antibiotic effect that favors the activity of brewer’s yeast over less desirable microorganisms, and the use of hops aids in “head retention”, the length of tie that a foamy head created by carbonation will last.
