Beer Ingredients

Beer has four main ingredients- water, hops, yeast, and malted barley. I was impressed to learn that this is all! From pale ales to stouts, only four ingredients! Here's some basic info on all the ingredients in traditional beer.

Water
It seems silly to include this, but it is pretty important. Certain beers are defined by a particular regions water supply. When making beer at home you'll run across water salts that mimic the mineral content of regions around the world. Good water will make good beer, and nasty water will definitely put you in an uphill battle for tastiness.

Cool fact- Tucson has a great mineral profile for producing ales, something like the Burton region in England. The largest brewery in Tucson, Nimbus, has some neat info in their history

Hops
Hops are a small leafy cone used to give bitterness and aroma to beers. They grow all over the place in temperate climates. There was a point in brewing when hops were just one of many different herbs and spices added. Hops as a plant are pretty crazy, with lots of fascinating oddities. There are a limited variety of hops available for use. Most fall into the category of bittering or aromatic.

Bittering hops have a high value of something called Alpha Acid Units (AAUs). These give the bite that beers like an Indian Pale Ale (IPA) have. They are usually added immediately when you start boiling the wort (future posts on that...).

Aromatic hops are added late in the boil, usually the last 30 or 15 minutes. These give that really great flavoring without much bite. A great example of this is an American Pale Ale. This type of beer has less bite than an IPA, but allot of hoppy aroma from the very-American Cascade hops variety. Check out Deschutes Brewery's Mirror Pond for a really tasty example!

Yeast
This is the critical component of beer, but it's presence wasn't understood until Louis Pasteur's work in 1857. Yeast do two important things for brewing:

1) Yeast eat sugars and produce ethanol (C₂H₅OH)
2) A byproduct of this sugar-eating is carbon dioxide (CO₂)

The ethanol is the alcohol which allows beers to be stored and safely consumed after long periods. The carbon dioxide is what gives beer that delicious bubbliness.

Yeast occurs naturally in all sorts of variations. This is how the very first fermented drinks came about. Anything with sugars in it (water and honey, grape juice or any other fruits, or water mixed with malted barley) can spontaneously ferment when left in a cool place for a short period of time. If you keep using the same vessel to ferment, it will begin to maintain a natural yeast colony.

Today yeast strains have been picked that work best with certain styles of beer. Unique strains exist for stouts, wheat beers, pale ales, and all sorts of other varieties.

Side note: Ales vs. Lagers
You will run across this eventually and be confused like I was... What is the difference between an ale or a lager? Is that a style of beer like stouts or porters?
Quick Answer:
Ales are beers that use a top-fermenting yeast, and lagers are beers that use a bottom fermenting yeast. Ales generally can be brewed at much higher temperatures (65-75F), while lagers require very cold temps (>45F). For people like us who brew at home, it's tough to make a lager! Luckily most of my favorite beers are considered ales, so we can still make some tasty drinks!

Malted Barley
This is the final ingredient for traditional beers. Barley is a grain, something like wheat or rye. Barley supplies the sugars needed for yeast to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. The 'malted' part refers to how the raw barley is processed. To really get the most sugar from the barley you need to being sprouting the seeds. Once this sprouting begins the plant starts converting the endosperm into brewable sugars. The sprouting is stopped after a short period of time, then roasted. So, malted barley is a brewing-ready seed that contains lots of sugar for the yeast!

Roasting the malted barley is where lots of variety comes in. Most beers have a base malt, something very light, to provide the necessary sugars. The real fun comes in when using specialty grains that have been roasted for different periods of time. This can give a huge variety of flavors to a beer. From caramel to chocolate, biscuit aroma to red colors, different roasts have a huge impact on the final product.



Final Notes
Beer is very well understood within the realm of these four ingredients. A neat point in the history of beer is the Reinheitsgebot, or the German Beer Law. This is an actual law that was established in 1516 in Germany. It restricts beers to only these ingredients (they added yeasts to the list when it was understood in the brewing process a couple hundred years later). Penalties for brewers who didn't follow the law included the barrels in question being confiscated without compensation! Crazy!


So there you have it. This is a pretty quick and dirty run down on beer ingredients, but hopefully you've learned something!