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How Beer Is Made - Discover The Secrets
Author: Jason (The Snob)
How Beer is Made - Making beer is easy, inexpensive, and most of all, fun. With the rise in popularity of home brewing, there are a wide variety of top quality ingredients available. You can literally make thousands of styles of beer that will taste great and impress your friends. Getting started making beer will only cost you a small amount of money, depending on your level of interest. Most beer making kits range from only $60 to $200 and make great, unique gifts.
How to Make Beer
Making Beer is just like cooking. Each recipe requires different ingredients and techniques. This page is an attempt to go over the basics of home brewing in order to give you an understanding of how beer is made.
First of all, beer is made from 4 basic ingredients: water, malt (malted barley), hops, and yeast.
Water is the most abundant ingredient in any style of beer. When making beer at home try to use filtered water instead of plain tap water. If your water doesn’t taste good from the tap, you probably won’t like it in your beer either. Do not use distilled water because it has been depleted of its oxygen.
Malted barley is barley grain that has been carefully soaked in water until it sprouts and then dried. This malting process develops the necessary sugars and soluble starches needed for fermentation. The malt is then taken through a process called mashing which extracts the sugars and starches from the grain. Although advanced home brewers can accomplish this step at home, most will buy the malted barley already mashed in a product called malt extract.
Hops are a green flower that grows on a vine and looks similar to a pine cone. Hops perform several roles in the beer making process. Most notably are the taste and aroma they impart on a beer. Since not all of the sugars will ferment, the malt will cause the beer to be really sweet. Hops will balance out the sweetness by adding a degree of bitterness. Hops will also add a distinctive aroma to the finished brew.
Yeast is the catalyst that makes it all happen. In short, yeast is a living organism that feeds off of the sugars in the malt. The yeast will convert the sugars to alcohol and carbon dioxide in a process called fermentation. There are many strains of yeasts (even in the air we breathe). In order to get the results needed for making beer, a specially cultured beer yeast is required. The yeast will also impart taste and mouth feel qualities to the beer.
The Beer Making Process:
To summarize, the malt, hops, and water are boiled for a period of time. This mixture is called wort (pronounced wert). Then the wort is poured into fermenter and allowed to cool. Next, the prepared yeast is pitched into the fermenter and an airlock is placed over the opening. Now it’s the yeast’s job to do its thing. The yeast will multiply like crazy as it consumes the sugars in the brew. After a period of time, usually within 7 to 10 days, the yeast will have consumed all that it can and fall to the bottom of the fermenter. Finally, the beer is bottled and set aside for a couple of weeks to mature and carbonate.
Making beer at home really is a fantastic hobby and can be a great social activity. Have some friends over and let them try your new brew. Better yet, get them involved and see who can make the best batches. Have blind taste tests with your buddies. Most of all, have fun!
About the AuthorAuthor of the 2BASNOB.com website about the enjoyment of coffee, tea, wine and beer. ********* Beer Wine Liquor Articles ********* We will be adding more Aussie wines articles. To add your favourite wine and your health articles please fill in the form below. We will be happy to add them to our wine and your health articles. To add to your enjoyment and please check out these other information links. For the live one on one discussion of your favourite Aussie wines articles or other great stories join your friends here. Are you interested in adding your Aussie wines article but you think your writing skills are not what they should be? Think again... What a pleasant surprise. I ran across this fabulous book. I only wish that all the text books where written this way when I was in school and college life would have been so much simpler and a whole lot easier...
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