Beer |
Beer
Beer is human with a epic history worthy of study! Beer is the most widely consumer beverage in the world and the third most popular drink behind water and tea. Dating back to 9500BC, beer was produced during the early development of cereal grain farming in Egypt. Lets take a look at how beer is made with pictures!
First you need a brewing pot.
This can range from a gal pot to a 5000gal ambev vessel.
High Quality Home Brewing Pots From Blitchmann Engineering |
Stove for a small pot, banjo cooker for a larger pot, custom heat source for huge pots.
Fire is a popular heat source for beer making: propane banjo ect. |
Water
Use the Pot and Fire to Heat the Water |
Brewing Barley is a Cereal Grain |
You buy the grain for brewing pre-roasted, or you can roast your own. The longer it is roasted the darker it becomes. Dark grains make darker colors in beer; light grains make lighter colors in beer. The more grain you add to the water, the more sugars get into the water, and the stronger and thicker the beer becomes.
Brewing Grains: Cereal Grain with Ferment-able Sugars |
The hot water is combined with a mixture of different grains to produce mash. The hot water brews out the sugars from the grain, producing mash. The mash grain is filtered from the mash producing sugar filled wort.
Beer and hot water and brewed to produce mash. |
The filtered mash is put into a boiling pot and boiled. This process of heating the wort causing a whole bunch of chemical reactions that change the nature of the wort. During this boiling of the wort hops are added for flavor and preservation.
An Organic Hop Farm |
Hops
Hops are another agricultural product that are used in brewing. In brewing they are added to the boil as a processed pellet or as a fresh hop.
Fresh hops are added to the wort. |
After the wort boil is completed, the wort is cooled down using special devices and transferred to a fermentation vessel. Glass is popular because it does not interact with the beer. A special air trap is used to seal the fermentation vessel in a way that lets CO2 escape while also keeping funk out of the beer.
Wort Fermenting in a Glass Fermentation Vessel |
This single cell organism is the workhorse mechanism of all alcohol production. In beer brewing the yeasts eat the wort sugars and produce CO2, ethanol, and flavors. The yeast are mixed up into a starter and added to the fermentation vessel with the wort and the beer making begins.
Brewing yeast up close! |
It takes anywhere from 1 week to 6months for the yeasts to completely eat all of the sugars in the wort, converting the wort to beer.
Beer Keg and CO2 the Final Step |
The finished beer is decanted out of the fermentation vessel and transferred into a keg or bottle. Here CO2 is added to the beer. From here it then goes into your glass for enjoyment.
Beer
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