Home Brewing Lesson #03
What's in a beer?
In reality, the ingredients that go into beer are relatively simple. There are four primary ingredients:
- Water
- Malted Barley
- Hops
- Yeast
The water provides the liquid base that sustains everything else. The malted barley provides the fermentable sugars. Hops provide bitterness to balance the sweetness from the fermentable sugars as well as an added aroma for the beer. The yeast is the magician that converts fermentable sugars to alcohol. With only four basic ingredients, why do we have so many different types and flavors of beer?
The malted barley is a rather generic term that covers all the types of grains that are used to make beer. There are lots of different specialty grains that are used for flavor and color properties required for various styles of beer. The actual matled barley is only a portion of the grain bill that is used to make most beers. The primary purpose of the malted barley and other grains used to make beer is to provide a source of sugar. The amount of grain used in any given beer will determine how much fermentable sugar goes into that beer.
There are also many different types of hops that are used to make beer. Each hop variation has different bittering and aroma properties, so the combinations of bitterness and aroma that a brewer might choose are almost endless. Bittering hops are hops that are added early in the boiling process. When they are added early, they give up a lot of their oils to the beer, which provides bitterness to help balance the sweetness of the malted barley and grains. Hops that are added late in the boiling process do not give up much of their oils and only provide aromatic properties for the beer.
Yeasts are micro-organisms that have one sole purpose in life as far as beer is concerned. Their job is simple. They eat sugar and poop carbon dioxide and alcohol. As with the grains and hops, there are many different variations of yeast used in brewing. The choice of yeast used provides characteristics for the beer style being brewed. Some varieties of yeast will produce more alcohol than others. Some yeasts will provide flavors and aromas that others won't.
The Process:
Home brewers have several ingredients choices to make when they decide to make beer. The choices mostly come into play with the grains that will be used in making the beer. There are three basic roads to choose from:
- Extract brewing
- Partial-mash brewing
- All-grain brewing
A lot of beginning home brewers will start out on the extract brewing path. This is, by far, the easiest road to take in making your own beer. An extract is either a dried (powdered) or liquid (syrup) concentrated malt that simply has to be dissolved in boiling water to provide the fermentable sugars for your beer. After it has dissolved in the hot water, you bring it back to a boil and add your hops at timed intervals and boil for one hour. After the hour is up, you cool your wort (unfermented beer) to 70 degrees or so, transfer it to your fermenter, add the yeast, seal it up, put the air lock on it and let it ferment for a few weeks. After the ferment is complete, you can bottle or keg the beer (discussed in a future lesson).
The partial-mash option uses a combination of extracts and grains. This process is a little more complicated because the brewer must use a process called mashing (discussed in a future lesson) to extract fermentable sugars from the grains that will be used in the beer. Once the fermentable sugars are extracted from the grains, they are added to the brew kettle along with the extracts, and the process from this point follows the same procedures as extract brewing.
All-grain brewing uses no extracts. All of the fermentable sugars that go into the beer are extracted from grains through the mashing process. Those fermentable sugars are added to the brew kettle and then the process is the same as extract brewing.
What are the differences in the above processes?
Partial mash and all-grain brewing require a little extra time and equipment. The mashing process, whether it be partial-mash or all-grain, will probably add 1.5 to 2 hours to your brewing schedule, but the main reason brewers choose these options is because it gives them finer control over the flavor and color of their beers. These processes also require the use of a mash / lauter tun. The MLT is a simple device usually made from a cooler, and they aren't difficult or expensive to make. When using the MLT, you add hot water (at a specific temperature) to the tun and then add your crushed grains and stir them in. You let those grains soak for about an hour at a specific temperature (discussed in a future lesson) and then drain off the liquid into your brew kettle. After that drain is complete, you add some more hot water at a specific temperature to rinse out as much of the leftover fermentable sugars as possible. With this process, you have total control over your beer. You choose specific types and amounts of grain to produce your beer. You don't have any control over the grains used to make extracts. If this has peaked your interest in the process, check out the How-To page on this site and watch some of the videos. There are two videos that describe how to make a mash tun, and there is an 8-part series on brewing an all-grain beer from start to finish.
Some extract beer recipes also use specialty grains, but they aren't mashed by the process described above. They are simply soaked in hot water at a specific temperature for about 30 minutes. After that soak is complete, the water is brought to a boil and then the extracts are added. This technique is very easy and it allows you to have some additional control over the flavor and color of your beer.
What's Next?
In our next lesson, we will walk step-by-step through a complete home brewing session with an extract recipe that might have some specialty grains involved. I haven't decided exactly what I will be making yet, but I will be cooking outside where we will be doing a full 5-gallon boil rather than a stove-top session. I will also have my immersion chiller completed by then, so I'll be able to demonstrate how that works. There is a video on my How-To page that shows the process of building an immersion chiller, and I'll be following those instructions as closely as possible when I build mine. The lesson will include photos and possibly some videos with detailed instructions of everything involved in the process.