You might be thinking that now that you are forced to stay home, why not try brewing beer at home? But you are also wondering about the whole process starting from the raw materials used to make beer, and how beer is actually made at home. If you are in search of a kit to get you started, head on over to albryg.dk/olbrygning and order your at-home brewing kit today.
But before you start brewing your own beer, you need to first understand the process starting at the raw materials.
Beer: starting from the raw materials
The whole process of brewing beer is an art form, but in order to create a final product that looks amazing and tastes amazing, you would first have to understand why the raw materials are extremely important in the brewing process.
Beer is made up of many raw materials which include:
- Grain: a combination of barley and corn or only rice
- Hops: taken from the Humulus Lupus plant
- Pure water: it is water that has been mechanically filtered and contains no impurities whatsoever
- Brewer’s yeast: yeast that is derived from a one-cell fungus called Saccharomyces Cerevisiae. This type of yeast can be found in certain breads as well
So now that you know what raw ingredients are used in making beer, you need to also understand the importance each raw ingredient has through every step of the process in making beer.
Each ingredient adds a different flavor and color to the beer depending on the process. Some flavors are also responsible for giving beer the alcohol content we often see on bottles. Some beers tend to have a stronger alcohol content then others and this is because of the raw materials used during the fermentation process.
Let’s look at the grain ingredient. As mentioned earlier, beer can contain either barley and corn or rice alone. The importance of grain in beer is that the grain is what adds the color to the beer. That distinct yellowish tinge you see in beer is made from the malting of barley or other grains such as wheat. When corn or rice is added in the process, it is just used to enhance the color even more. This is why you will sometimes see a darker color beer.
The second ingredient mentioned earlier is Hops. This ingredient is taken from the flower of the Humulus Plant. Without this vital ingredient, beer would have had the taste of being a sweet drink. Brewers use this ingredient to add bitterness to the beer. But did you know that Hops also plays an important role? By adding Hops to the beer at the end of the brewing process, brewers are adding a sort of preservative. Hops acts as a preservative, which allows for beer to have a longer shelf life.
Now that you understand how flavor and color are added to the beer, there is another step that binds the ingredients together before alcohol is added. This is called pure water. Pure water acts as a binding agent to really tie in the aroma from malted barley and the bitterness from Hops.
But the best and most important ingredient in beer is the ingredient that gives beer that alcohol content we have come to know and love today. This final ingredient is called brewers yeast. Yeast is a kind of fungus that is used in the fermentation stage of beer. Without yeast, the sugar from malted barley would not be broken down and turned into carbon dioxide and ultimately alcohol.
The more yeast added to the beer, and the longer the fermentation process the higher the alcohol content each batch will have.
Without all these ingredients, beer would just be colored water.
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