Knowing Is Half the Battle: How to Talk About Beer. Part I – Brewing

Everyone has hobbies. Maybe you like model trains, or collecting Beanie Babies, or S&M, or putting lipstick and mascara on your face and doing love things to a mirror. Those are all fine hobbies! But probably your hobby is beer. And yet how many men out there are forever stuck in the Coors Light phase of their drinking lives just because they don’t know a few simple things about how different beers look and taste? Don’t get me wrong – Coors Light is great, if you like the taste of a yeast infection. But out there is a magical world of lagers and ales, hops and malt. What, exactly, are these things and why are they in your beer? Come away with me and find out. 

I’ll keep this simple. Beer is made by combining water, malted grain (barley, wheat, or rye, usually), hops, and yeast, in that order. Often, that’s all there is to it. Here’s how it works.

1) The malted grain is dried, sometimes roasted (more roasting = darker beer), and crushed. It is now malt. Malt is to beer what grapes are to wine, and much of the flavor in beer is owed to the what kind of malt is used and how much of it is fermented.

2) The malt is mixed with hot water in a vat in a process called “mashing.” The starches in the malt become sugars. A high concentration of malt in relation to the amount of water used means a full-bodied, heavy beer. Guinness is a pretty common fairly full-bodied beer.

3) Next, there’s some straining done, and the liquid left over (“wort“) is collected in a copper tank called a kettle. Here, the hops are added. Hops are the female flower of the hop plant, and they give the beer a bitter or “clean” taste.  A particularly hoppy beer that’s easy to find is the new Sierra Nevada Torpedo IPA. Sometimes spices and other morsels are added to the tank as well, which is why “winter warmer”-style beers often taste the way Christmas smells. This mishmash is boiled.

4) The mix goes off to the fermentation tank, where yeast breaks down the malt’s sugars to make alcohol (hooray!), among other carbon products. This usually takes a few weeks. The beer is then “conditioned” for between a week and several months.

5) The beer makes its way to your supermarket shelf or local watering hole, and, from there, to your mouth, liver, and bladder. Two minutes later, it is urinated into a non-functional toilet or sewer grate, to be ferried through sewers to a water filtration and treatment plant. This water is then used to make more beer, and the process continues eternally as men live and die and civilizations rise and crumble around it.

Oh, and the difference between lager and ale? With lager, the yeast ferments at the bottom of the tank at a cold temperature (50* F). In ales, the yeast ferments at the top of the tank at a warmer temperature (closer to 65*F). Most pool party beers are lagers, and many, if not most, pipe-smoking beers are ales. It’s usually mentioned in the name of the beer. Budweiser is a lager. Budweiser American Ale is… right, no tricks here. Tune in next time to learn about different types of beer.