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| FACTS & FIGURES | |
| Beer Culture | |
| Raw Materials | |
| How Beer is Made | |
| Beer Types | |
| Cooking with Beer | |
| Beer Facts | |
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How Beer is Made
Beer is a natural drink made from malted cereal (usually barley) hops, yeast and water. The brewing of beer is based on an ancient and simple principle - natural fermentable sugars are extracted from a malted cereal using hot water (known as mashing). Malting But first the cereal has to be malted. The barley is soaked in water and encouraged to germinate – a process that starts to release fermentable sugars. The grain is then heated to prevent further growth, which also produces the multitude of malt flavours and colour that we find in our beers.Milling The malt is then milled to produce a fine mixture of flour and husks known as grist.Mashing The grist is then mixed with hot water and left to stand – a process known as mashing. The enzymes in the malt break down the starch to release soluble sugars – glucose and maltose.At the end of mashing a clear sugary solution known as wort, is run-off leaving the insoluble spent grains which are sold to farmers for animal feed. Boiling The sweet wort is boiled with hops in a vessel called a copper to release the hop flavours and characteristics.The bitter wort is the cooled and aerated to dissolve the oxygen that the yeast will need to begin the fermentation. Fermenting Yeast is added to the cooled wort in a fermenting vessel. A living organism, the yeast feeds off the sugars and other nutrients extracted from the malt, producing carbon dioxide and alcohol.When most of the sugars have been used up, the yeast becomes inactive and the fermentation is complete. Conditioning, filtration and pasteurisation The final process depends upon the type of beer being produced.Most beer is conditioned in the brewery. After fermentation, the beer is chilled in large tanks, a process known as lagering. Most of the yeast sinks to the bottom and it is then filtered and pasteurised to keep it fresh longer, before being put into a keg, bottle or can. Some beer, especially in the United Kingdom, is conditioned, in the cask or bottle from which it is served. This is know as cask-conditioned beer or real ale. The beer, which contains a small amount of yeast from the fermenting vessel is run into a cask or bottle before it leaves the brewery and continues a process of secondary fermentation in the container. |
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The Brewers of Europe 23 - 25 Rue Caroly B - 1050 Brussels Belgium VAT BE 428.031.108 |
Tel. : (32) 2 - 551 18 10 Fax : (32) 2 - 660 94 02 http://www.brewersofeurope.org info@brewersofeurope.org |
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