brewing 101

            So I missed last week’s entry, but it will be coming soon on the history of brewing.  This week, for anybody who is unfamiliar, I will be discussing the brewing process in as much depth as a blog entry will allow.  Next week I’ll dive into specific beers or something equally entertaining.  But in order to give a base of knowledge for anyone who isn’t in the know…

            There are traditionally four ingredients needed to create a beer.  They are barley malt, hops, water, and yeast.  Beer can essentially use anything as an ingredient depending on the style and desire of the creator, but in order to be called a beer, the four cornerstones are required.  For the purposes of the basic tour through brewing, I’ll stick with the main ones. 

            The first step which is incredibly important is malting the raw barley.  The barley must be malted to activate essential enzymes needed for sugar creation later in the process.  First, the raw barley is harvested, and thrown in a warm room at high humidity levels to allow the seeds to grow.  Once the seeds begin to sprout, the barley is transferred to a kiln, where the growing is stopped by roasting the seeds to the desired level of darkness. 

Once the barley is malted and roasted it is then ready to be used in brewing.  The next step is where we start brewing.  The barley malt is now added to the mash cooker along with water, and depending on batch size cooks for hours at 150-160 degrees Fahrenheit.  The enzyme created in the malting process (maltase) can now break down the starch of the grain into a fermentable sugar (maltose).  This sugar provides the food for the last ingredient yeast to consume and ferment the product.

After mashing, the mash is strained in a process called lautering which involves straining out the spent grain to get all the sugar rich liquid (wort) extracted for the brewkettle.  In the brewkettle, the wort is brought to a boil and hops are added for bittering, flavoring, and aroma.  The longer the hops are in the boil, the more bitterness they tend to give to the beer.  Many people wonder why make beer bitter…hops and malt balance each other out.  Bitterness can many times go undetected in a product, but it is designed to balance the rich malty flavor given by the barley.

After the wort is brewed, it is cooled and sent to fermentation.  This step is where we add the final ingredient, yeast.  Yeast is a living organism which actually eats the fermentable sugars created in the mash cooker and as a by-product, creates ethyl alcohol, CO2 and flavor compounds.  Fun fact: yeast provides roughly 60-80% of the flavor compounds in your beer, which is why sterile maintenance and certain yeast strains are crucial to the vitality of the product.  There are plenty of  styles of yeast strains, some meant for lagers, some for ales, all which but that’s for a different blog…

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