Humble Beginnings

So as my first real post about beer, I thought I would start this blog off by explaining how beer is made (for those of you reading that don't know). It's funny how much in life we consume without ever stopping to discover what actually makes up the product we're eating or drinking. We just sit back and say, "Damn that's good", and continue consuming. Beer, as it turns out, is a very simple and organic concoction, consisting of four main ingredients.

The first ingredient is Malted Grains. This is the chief influencer on the beers color, alcohol level, and the malty flavour characteristics you taste in a beer. A malted grain is basically any grain that goes through a soaking and drying procedure that creates a chemical reaction which allows the sugars to be properly absorbed from the grains when brewing. I'll explain why the sugars are important at the last step.

From here we move on to the ingredient that makes up the majority of beer: H2O, also known as water. This ingredient can have a huge effect on the outcome of your beer. Any region with a decent water filtration system in place will usually be fine for homebrew, but basically the harder your water, the more you'll need to use certain additives to create a better PH balance, as well as decrease the amount of certain minerals... this is the scientific part of brewing that I find incredibly interesting, but I won't bore you with this right now, as I've got a lifetime to blog about that. If you have just regular tap water, you're good to go. The neat thing is that many world beers use specific unique water sources to them or their region that help them create very unique beers.

The next ingredient in the mix is a plant referred to as 'Hops'. Basically there's this plant that secretes an oil used in beer as A) a preservative, and B) a bittering agent and aroma agent. This is what gives your cool refreshing lager it's 'tang', or mouth-puckering bitterness, as well as those great beer aroma's. This ingredient is used at varying amounts to create the desired balance of bitterness flavour with the malt flavour. Brewers typically use leaflets of this plant often referred to as 'whole hops', or they'll use hops that have been processed into pellets, referred to as 'Pellet Hops' (duh). Pellet hops are far more stable and so are usually far more popular, even among the big breweries.

The final ingredient, and actually the most important ingredient in your homebrew, is the Yeast. Once the above three ingredients have been mixed, boiled, and cooled, the yeast is added to seal the deal. Yeast chemically reacts with all the sugars from the malts, and converts them to our best friend in the whole wide world... ALCOHOL! It also produces carbon dioxide, which is allowed to escape during this stage called 'fermentation'. This stage is important as it tempers the sweet malty slurry into a drink with a ton of great characteristics. Now this ingredient, although SO important, often gets entirely overlooked by beginner homebrewers or those who just want to make cheap beer. It's essential that a high quality, preferably liquid, yeast is used. Yeast comes in literally a bajillion different varietys, some good for certain foods or drinks, while others totally inappropriate. Within those that are good, most breweries around the world have cultivated their own, allowing their beers to be entirely unique and specific to certain types of beer (ie. Stouts, Lagers, etc...).

So those are the four main ingredients, although many others can be utilized in your beers to help create whatever your imagination comes up with. Interesting to note though, Germany sports an incredible law, known as 'The Purity Law', which dictates that nothing other than the four ingredients above can be used in brewing beer in their country. This Law dates back hundreds of years to I think the 1500's. It's relaxed slightly over the centuries, as it was found that yeast was what made beer what it is. Until then they honestly thought that God blessed the beer and that's what turned it into what it became. All the while it was actually just airborne yeasts from their regions. A scientist discovered this way back, and thus the Purity Law was amended.

Anyways, I blathered on long enough for now. I'll follow up shortly with a post that details the process as opposed to the ingredients. Cheers.