by Chuck Hallett | Barley. Hops. Yeast. Water. You’ve probably heard these words touted around in relation to beer in an advertisement, or maybe you’ve seen them printed on the side of a bottle. But do you really understand how they go together to make our Favourite Beverage? Do you just put them in a blender and hit “pulse”? Is it a bit more complicated than that? In a few minutes from now you’ll know the answers to these questions and more. Welcome back to beer school!

Brewing is both an ancient art and a modern science, and boy is it ever a lot more technical that just putting some barley in a bucket and hoping for the best. There are millenia of history behind making beer. Seemingly most of that time was devoted to inventing new slang for the process: malt, wort, mash, pitch, and many other terms have muscled their way into the process’ parlance, making communication in beer speak a chore for the uninitiated. If you ever find yourself in a discussion with one of the (often bearded) beererati, his occasional incomprehensibility is perfectly normal. It’s kinda like how I feel with art. Or music. Or the weather. (Pretty much anything but beer, really.)

Luckily, the basic concepts behind brewing beer are not that hard to grasp. The following list of terms won’t teach you how to actually make beer, but it will – at the very least – familiarize you with the core concepts in beer-making, allowing you hereafter to nod knowingly the next time your sister’s weird homebrewing boyfriend corners you at a party. Read ’em up and don’t forget your delicious homework!

Malting. First, barley is not just reaped with a giant scythe then fermented, as cool as that would be. Before the magic can happen, barley must be malted, or allowed to germinate. Germination tricks the barley into thinking it’s been planted and it’s go-time for growing. The result is that the barley seeds generate the enzymes required to convert starch into sugar to support that growth, but this is just a tease: before any real growth occurs the germination is rather rudely halted with dry heat.

Milling. Next, all that malted barley (or malt for short) is ground up in a mill in a process rather creatively called Milling. The result here is a pile of ground up grain called grist. I’m not really sure what else you’d expect.

Mashing. The grist is added to a bunch of hot water in a process called “mashing in.” The hot water is called “Liquor” but, disappointingly, this is just a label. Mashing occurs in a “mash tun” which is vaguely Gallic for “big pot in which one make beer.” The reason the water is hot is that the heat activates the enzymes in the malt to complete the starch-to-sugar conversion. There are several different enzymes and several different ideal temperatures involved, but you get the drift. The result is a grain/water/sugar slurry called mash that can be filtered to create “wort,” the immediate precursor to beer.

Boil. Because we’re all slobs, and also because wort is effectively just a giant barrel of perfect bacteria food that, if left around, would grow enough nasty shit to kill everyone in a three mile radius, the next step is to sanitize things. The easiest way to sanitize a liquid is to boil the ever loving fuck out of it, so we proceed to do just that.

Hopping. During the boil hops are added at different points to balance out all that sugar with bitterness, flavours and awesomeness. Very generally, the earlier the hops are added, the more flavour they provide, while later means more aroma. Hops, being natural preservatives, have the additional benefit of scrubbing unwanted proteins out of the wort.

Chill. Next we bring the steril wort down to a safe temperature for yeast. This is done quickly through a heat exchanger for a few reasons, but a major consideration is that it just takes freaking forever for 15,000 litres of wort to cool down by itself and we don’t have all day, dammit.

Pitch. Once cool, a bucket of yeast is dumped, or “pitched,” into the mixture. Most people don’t suspect it, but yeast contributes most of the flavour to any given beer. Change the yeast, change the beer. With the yeast added, the wort slowly begins turning into beer (wort + booze = beer), and an angel gets its wings. From here the wort is left to ferment for a period of time, which depends on what kind of beer is being made.

Conditioning. Eventually most of the yeast is done, and it settles to the bottom of the fermenter. This inactive yeast is removed, and the beer is left to settle for a while (days or weeks). This lets flavours in the beer blend and mellow, and gives time for undesireable by-products of brewing to off-gas. If you’re drinking a flavoured beer, like a pumpkin ale, odds are the pumpkin was added during this stage.

Bottling/Kegging. Pretty much what you’d expect. The beer might be additionally filtered prior to bottling or kegging to increase clarity, but frankly that’s a horrible thing to do to beer. Sure, it looks good, but it steals much of the yeast’s flavour from the body of the beer, and I’ll take body over looks any day. Yes, this whole article was written specifically to support that joke.

And there you go! You now know more about brewing than I did a decade ago, and perhaps even just enough to horrifibly burn yourself in your kitchen. Congratulations! Homework after the jump…

HOMEWORK

Since we started with the basic ingredients of beer, let’s highlight some of the differences those ingredients can make.

Malt: Darker or roast malt can bring in chocolate, caramel and coffee flavours into beer, while lighter malt yields cereal, straw and grain tones.

Light Malt: Hoyne “Hoyner” Pilsner

Dark Malt: Howe Sound Rail Ale Nut Brown

Yeast: Compared to run-of-the mill yeasts, Belgian yeasts can introduce tones of cloves, and plenty of fruity undertones.

Normal: Driftwood Eponymous Ale

Belgian: Lighthouse Deckhand

Hops: Some hops can be more subtle, while others can smack you with tones of mango, citrus and exotic fruits.

Subtle: Fernie Lone Wolf IPA

Whoa: Lighthouse Switchback IPA

MORE BARLEY MOWAT

——————————————————————————————————————————

Chuck Hallett lives and works in downtown Vancouver. His passionate obsession with craft beer borders on insanity. When not attempting to single-handedly financially support the local brewing industry through personal consumption, he spouts off on his award-winning beer-themed blog: BarleyMowat.com. If you’re in a good beer bar reading this, odds are he’s sitting next to you. Be polite and say hi.