How It’s Made (Brewing in a Nutshell)

It may be light or dark, hoppy or malty, dry or sweet, or just about any flavor under the sun, but all beer is tied together by its four base ingredients- malt, hops, water, and yeast. Other additives may be included, such as fruit or spices, but at the base these four are the primary inputs of the brewer.

Malting

At the very beginning, the beer begins with malt. Barley most often dominates the grain bill, but wheat, rye, oats, rice, corn and other starches may be used. The barley is harvested and malted by a maltster (separate from the brewer). The seeds are tricked into germinating, thus creating the enzymes needed to convert their starches into sugars. Before they can sprout, the maltster halts the germination. The malted barley may go directly to a brewer as a base malt, or it may undergo additional kilning or roasting, which affects color, aroma and flavor.

Mashing

The brewer takes a base malt and potentially some specialty grains and soaks the grains in steeping water in a process known as mashing. The brewer must closely monitor his mash temperature because different temperatures yield different sugars, which the yeast in turn break down differently. After the steeping period ends, the grains are removed and sprayed with hot water to remove any additional sugars.

The Boil

The brewer takes this hot sugar liquid, referred to as wort, and adds it to a kettle. The wort comes to a boil, and then hops are added in at different increments. Hop additions often occur at different times during the boil; early additions contribute to the beer’s bitterness, while late hop additions provide the hop flavor and aroma.

Fermentation

The bitter wort must be cooled as quickly as possible. The brewer strains out any debris and channels the cooled wort into a fermentation vessel. This vessel is where the beer will spend its next one to two weeks. The chamber is designed to let air escape without exposing the beer to outside air by means of an airlock. The brewer takes his yeast, combines it with the wort, then secures the airlock. The yeast consumes the sugars created in the mash, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide. Once the yeast has consumed a majority of the sugars, the beer is transferred into a bottle, a keg, or a secondary fermentation chamber as a finished product.

Other Procedures

There are many other steps that may or may not take place. The brewer may have to perform two mashes if certain grains are used, in order to derive all of the sugars possible. Hops may be added to the secondary fermentation chamber in a process known as “dry hopping” that gives beers like IPAs their signature resiny bite. The beer may be aged in a barrel to impart flavors of another spirit that soaked into the wood. However, the process described above is the bare bones of grain brewing.

For further reading, see John Palmer’s “How to Brew”, an excellent book on the science of homebrewing, which is made available free online. http://www.howtobrew.com/intro.html