Beer

Beer is also the name of a place in Devon, England - Beer (Devon)

A glass of beer. This one is Viking, a beer from Iceland

The Belgian beer Kwak should preferably be drunk from a special glass.

Beer is a type of alcoholic drink. It is made with water, hops, barley (types of cereal grains), and types of yeast (a fungus that produces alcohol). A process called fermentation turns sugar into alcohol, using yeast. Another product of the fermentation is carbon dioxide.

In general, all alcoholic drinks where yeast turns sugar into alcohol are called beer. In these cases, distillation is not used. The difference to wine is that with wine, sugars from plants, such as fruit sugar, or that made by animals is used. As an example, mead is a wine made from honey. Japanese sake is made from rice, and uses yeast for fermentation; so even if some people call it rice wine, sake is really a kind of beer.

Making beer

The act of making beer is called "brewing". Beer is made by adding warm water to malted barley and other grains. The enzymes in the barley change the malted barley and other grains into simple sugars. This is called mash. The water is then sparged (drained) from the grain. The water is now called wort. The wort is boiled and hops are added. Hops provide flavour and preserve the beer. After boiling the wort, it is cooled and yeast is added. The yeast turns the sugars into alcohol and the wort into beer.

Different beers can have different natures, depending on the ingredients used; for example, an ale uses top fermenting yeast. Top fermenting yeasts eat more sugar and produce more alcohol. A lager uses bottom fermenting yeast. Bottom fermenting yeasts eat less sugar and produce a crisper, cleaner taste. Adding hops makes the beer more bitter and aromatic. Specialty malts (different types of cooked barley) produce different flavours and colours. These flavours and colours are most notable in dark beers like Porter and Stout.

Different countries have different ways to make beer. In Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, beer is usually made from just hops, malt, water, and yeast. This is because of the Reinheitsgebot. The Reinheitsgebot was a law that said says that beer can only be made from hops, malt, and water. Yeast was discovered after the Reinheitsgebot. The law was overturned by the European Union in 1992. In Belgium, however, beers have always been made with wheat, sugar, fruit, and other ingredients.

Different ways to make beer

The type of yeast used determines the kind of beer made:

• Some kinds of yeast ferment at a higher temperature, usually at 15-20 °C. The fermentation process is quicker.
• Other kinds ferment at a lower temperature, usually 4-8 °C. Beers made with this kind usually have a longer shelf-life.
• Some beers ferment spontaneously from yeast that can be found in the environment.

History of beer

Beer has been made since prehistoric times. Around 10,000 BCE, early humans began to store food and supplies. They settled in one spot, and gathered grains that naturally grew there. Then, by accident, the ancient humans discovered that the grains, especially barley, became some pleasant liquid, now called beer. At first, the early people thought that the making of beer was spontaneous (sudden and unnatural), but now we know that the fermentation by yeast chemically formed beer.

Mesopotamia was the first civilisation that ever made beer, at 7000 BCE and the Sumerians were probably the first people to brew beer. The earliest records of beer were written around 7000 years ago by the Sumerians. They began adapting beer, by adding berries, adding or reducing the amount of fermented grain, and making other experiments with the beverage. One seal (paper that is stuck on beer) around 4,000 years old is a Sumerian "Hymn to Ninkasi", the goddess of brewing. This "hymn" is also a recipe for making beer. A description of the making of beer on this ancient engraving in the Sumerian language is the earliest account of what is easily recognised as barley, followed by a pictograph of bread being baked, crumbled into water to form a mash, and then made into a drink, that is recorded as having made people feel "...wonderful and blissful". It could even be possible that bread was first baked to be a way to make beer that is easy to carry around. They had found a "divine drink" -- they felt it was a gift from the gods.

Beer and Bread

Ancient beer makers used a kind of hard bread made from barley called 'bappir', meaning beer-bread. This was used by the Egyptians to control the colour, density, and taste of beer. While it was usually not eaten, Bappir was sometimes consumed during times of famine.

Some historians argue that bread was invented after beer to make it taste better, while others say that bread came first, and accidentally used in the process of brewing beer.

Amount of alcohol in beer

Normal beers have around 3-6 % alcohol (for the volume, i.e. in 100ml beer there is 3-5ml alcohol). In brewing beer, the amount of alcohol can be made more or less quite easily. The Belgian types of beer are made by adding more sugar. Through the fermentation, this will then turn to alcohol. Today, there are beers with between 2% and about 16% of alcohol (about the same alcohol content as wine). Spirits can have up to 80% alcohol. Some beer labels say there is no alcohol in them because it was taken out later. This is not completely true, though. Beers "without alcohol" usually do have less than 1% of alcohol.

Related pages

• Brewing
• Light beer