How Beer is Made

July 13, 8:00 PMFairfield County Craft Beer ExaminerJim Armstrong

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Beer is a fascinating beverage – written evidence of brewing has been found dating back to the Sumerians, and every culture on the planet has their own version of this fermented beverage. We all enjoy drinking beer (at least you should, if you are reading this column!), but how the heck is it made? If you find yourself wondering how exactly that delicious beverage got inside your pint glass, read on…

The process of making beer is called brewing. There are four critical phases involved: mashing, lautering, boiling, and fermentation.

Mashing
During the mash, malted grain (typically barley or wheat, but many other grains can be used, allowing for some amazing flavor profiles) is mixed with heated water. The water activates enzymes in the grain, which converts the starches into various sugars. Some of these sugars can be consumed by yeast, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation. Other types of sugars cannot be consumed by the yeast - these remain in the fermented beer and add body and a grainy sweetness (the taste referred to as “malty”). The brewer can control the rough ratio of fermentable to unfermentable sugars by adjusting the temperature of the mash water, controlling which enzymes in the grain are activated. Aside from the grain selection, the mash temperature is one of the first creative decisions a brewer makes.

Lautering
After the mash, the mash water (now called wort, essentially unfermented beer) needs to be drained from the grain and collected for the boil. The process of separating the spent grain from the sweet wort is referred to as lautering. As the initial runoff from the mash is being collected, sparging is performed - sparge means “to rinse” in German, and involves rinsing the mashed grains with fresh water. This makes sure none of the good sugars the mash produced are left behind in the grain.

Boiling
The collected wort is then boiled - usually for at least an hour, although longer boils are becoming more common. The boil accomplishes several functions:
• it acts to sterilize the wort and kills any wild yeast or bacteria present
• it drives off certain volatile compounds, such as DMS (dimethyl sulfide), ketones, and harsh hop compounds, which can cause off-flavors in the finished product
• it extracts alpha acids from the hops
• it can produce carmelization in the kettle, desirable in some styles of beer

The boil stage is where the brewer adds most of the hops. As hops are boiled, their aromatic compounds are driven out of the wort and their bitter alpha acids are dissolved into the wort. So, hops which are added early in the boil contribute bitterness to the beer, helping to balance the sweet malty flavor. Hops added late in the boil contribute aroma instead of bitterness, because their aroma doesn’t have time to boil off. There are many varieties of hops, some of which are bred specifically as bittering or aroma hops. The brewer can create very different beers just by altering the amount of hops, the varieties used, and the length of time they are boiled.

Fermentation
The saying goes, “Brewers make wort. Yeast make beer.” After the boil, the wort is cooled down as quickly as possible and transferred into a fermentor. Once the wort is cool, infection becomes a concern - airborne bacteria and wild yeast would just love to belly up to that sweet wort, so care must be taken to keep anything that will touch the cooled wort sanitary. Once in the fermentor, yeast is added and the wort is oxygenated. Getting oxygen into the wort is essential at this stage, since the yeast need it to do their job, but it is worth noting that this is the only time oxygen is a friend of beer. After fermentation, exposure to oxygen can cause the beer to become oxidized, reducing its shelf life and producing a wet cardboard flavor which doesn’t go over well with most palettes. Once fermentation begins, the wort can now officially be called beer!

The yeast selection is also very important to the finished product - there are many specialized strains of yeast, each contributing different esters to the beer. Some, like German Hefeweizen strains, are known for their esters, producing banana, clove, and bubblegum flavors. Others, like Kölsch yeasts, ferment very clean and produce a very crisp flavor profile, allowing the flavors of the grain and hops to steal the show.

Once the fermentation is complete, you now have beer! Of course, it is warm and flat beer sitting on a yeast cake, so the next steps involve transferring (or racking) the beer off the yeast into bottles or kegs, and carbonating the beer.

Additional steps may be performed depending on the style of beer and brewer’s preference. Beer can be lagered or conditioned (aged) to allow it to clear and allow flavors to mellow - some very flavorful beers can taste almost undrinkable when brewed, but turn out wonderfully when given time to age. The beer may undergo secondary fermentation to allow for the addition of spices or fruit. Beer can also be filtered to produce a crystal clear beer and to remove any yeast in suspension.

There you have it - brewing in a very small nutshell. No two brewers create beer exactly the same way, and that is part of what makes this an amazing craft. It is a perfect combination of art and science. Next time you crack open a bottle of your favorite brew, think about all the work that went into producing it.

Then, go brew your own and create a beer no one has ever tasted before!
 

  For more info: Visit my brewing blog, Lootcorp!

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