I'm re-publishing this diary by esquimaux because for some reason it will not show up in the Recent Diaries stream. Hopefully this will work. So, just to be clear, everything below is by esquimaux NOT me. - Bob
Happy Friday again beer lovers - this week I finally start the long-threatened series on home brewing. FNBB is all about drinking beer, don't you want to know where it came from?
Part 1 is Ingredients. As everyone who's seen a commercial for German beer knows, there are four basic ingredients: water, malt, hops and yeast.
First Principles: Yeast are microscopic animals that consume sugar water and excrete ethanol and carbon dioxide. This is called "fermentation". If the sugar you start with is honey the product is called mead, if you start with fruit juice the product is called wine or cider, and if you start with grain the product is called beer or ale.
Grape or apple juice is ready to ferment as soon as it's pressed; turning barley into sugar water requires a lot more processing.
Water: In the old, pre-sanitation days, people drank lots of beer partly because the water couldn't be trusted. The brewing process involves boiling, killing any nasty stuff in the water, then the alcohol content of the product helped it stay drinkable for a while without spoiling. They didn't understand why this worked, but observed that it did. The mineral content can influence beer flavor, but in general any water you can drink you can brew with.
Malt:
Malting is a process applied to cereal grains, in which the grains are made to germinate and then quickly dried before the plant develops. Malted barley dried at a sufficiently low temperature contains enzymes such as amylase which convert starch into sugar. Therefore, sugars can be extracted from the barley's own starches simply by soaking the grain in water at a controlled temperature; this is mashing.
Trivia: the patriot Samuel Adams was probably never a brewer, at least not commercially, he was a maltster; making barley into malt and selling it to brewers.
The "barley dried at a sufficiently low temperature" must always be the majority of the recipe because it still contains those enzymes; it's also the palest in color. In the jargon, this is "base malt". Lagers or very pale ales might use only the base malt, but most ale recipes would have at least one "specialty" malt, made by treating the malt at higher temperatures. Varying the temperature, time and water content at this stage produces the whole spectrum of colors and flavors that we love, allowing the brewer to create light roasted Oktoberfest, medium roasted dunkel, caramelly English ESB, very roasted Irish stouts. The homebrew store should have 20 or more different malts available. The very complicated chemistry behind the color and flavor changes is referred to as "Maillard" reactions, and was well diaried by dKos scientist Translator.
Barley is the primary grain used for brewing. Wheat and rye can also be malted; oats, corn and rice are all sometimes used but always added to a barley base.
Brewers of industrial lager are fond of adding corn or rice because they're cheaper than malt. They are also more fermentable, increasing the alcohol without making the beer heavier. Extra-strong beers like Imperial IPA and Imperial Stout and Belgian "Tripel" are made with a big portion of plain sugar to make them stronger without getting syrupy.
Hops: The earliest beers certainly were only fermented grain, but malt with no other flavoring is going to give a syrupy, one-dimensional beverage that badly wants some bitterness for balance. Pretty much every edible and semi-edible herb on the planet has been tried for flavoring beers, also with the goal of making it keep longer (in pre-sanitation and pre-refrigeration days) and about 500 years ago hops took over as the most popular beer herb in western Europe.
The brewing hop is the flower of Humulus lupulus, a perennial herb whose closest botanical relative is Cannabis sativa (aka hemp or marijuana). Its long, long thin vines clearly show the rope ancestry (commercial growers trellis to 18-20 feet), but like cannabis the interesting parts are the aromatic green buds :) There are 30 or more commercial varieties with different flavors. Germany and Czech Republic grow some of the finest, known to brewers as "noble hops". Most U.S. hops are grown in Washington and Oregon, and varieties with names like "Cascade", "Mt. Hood" and "Willamette" show this origin (though "Amarillo" hops are not from Texas). Cascade hops are the distinctive flavor of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and many other American pale ales and IPAs.
Yeast: Any kind of yeast, including bread yeast, will ferment any kind of beverage, but the little beasts have been bred to have preferences and also to have flavors. Brewing yeast comes in two species: top fermenting or ale yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and bottom fermenting or lager yeast (S. uvarum), and each of these in numerous variants with slightly different flavors. Your typical homebrew store will have a couple dozen types to choose from.
Brewers "joke" that you can understand wine pretty well just by drinking it, but can't really understand beer until you've brewed. You have to learn how to combine the many varieties of base and specialty malts, and hops, and yeasts, to craft the flavor you want.
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The next chapter in the Brewing series will discuss how we combine the ingredients to create a fermentable "wort". This will probably run on the first Friday in January.
How are you all doing this week? I've got homebrewed pale ale with a lot of Cascade hops, also some Union Jack. What are you drinking?