Beer Ingredients

In 1516 a law was passed in Germany that is known today as the German Beer Purity Law, or Reinheitsgebot. This law is often cited as the world’s first food and consumer protection law, mandated by legal decree, that no ingredients other than water, hops, and malted barley were to be used in the production of beer. (The four main beer ingredients!)

The reasons for this law were many, but the most important aspects were the inclusion of hops as a bittering agent to be used not only because of its efficiency in balancing out the sweetness of the malt, but also for its preservative nature. Prior to this law, some German brewers would use things such as soot, herbs, fruits, vegetables, bile, blood, and any other number of odd and disgusting beer ingredients to flavor or preserve their brews. A common problem with beer at the time was spoilage and many less than scrupulous brewmeisters would try to mask the off putting flavors of spoiled beer with things you wouldn’t normally care to consume (i.e. aweful beer ingredients such as blood, bile, semen, etc). By passing this new beer ingredients law, production of beer was much cleaner, and more akin to what we know as beer today.

An interesting side-note about the German Beer Purity Law of 1516 is the absence of yeast as a mandated beer ingredient. It wasn’t until yeast, and its fermentation properties, was discovered by Louis Pasteur in 1857 that brewers began to fully understand its contribution. The Reinheitsgebot has since been changed to include yeast as one of the mandated beer ingredients.

Today, the four main beer ingredients are: grains, hops, yeast and water.

Grains

Grains are one of the most important contributors to the flavor of your beer and one of the most common types of grain used in beer production is malted barley.

Beer uses malted barley to not only provide the framework for sugar fermentation from the starches within the grain, but also to add color to the beer. It is malted barley, for example, that makes your stout beer both roasty and dark, just as it is malted barley that gives your IPA enough sweetness to balance out the bitterness of the hops.

Malted barley, as its name suggests, is a term applied to barley that has undergone the malting process, which is a series of events similar to seed germination. With the right moisture and pH content, a seed will sprout and produce enzymes necessary to facilitate growth and, eventually, turn into something beautiful. Malting allows this process to occur, not in the ground, but in your fermentation vessel, and with a few exceptions.

After soaking barley for a set length of time (usually long enough to absorb a substantial amount of its body weight in water), the grain is removed from the water and allowed to dry and sprout. At this point a sprout forms and grows from inside of the grain. In order for this process to occur, the enzymes in the grain have to be active. Those enzymes became active during the soaking process and are used to generate the sprout. Maltsters, as they are known, will then apply heat to the sprouting grains so that the sugar inside the seed is not fully consumed in the process of creating and growing the sprout. The barley is then dried and the enzyme activity inside the grain is high enough to continue conversion of starch to sugar if reactivated by steeping in water at the right temperature. This steeping process is called “mashing.”

During the final heating process, the duration of heat and the temperatures applied will determine the majority of flavor that the malted barley will impart on your beer. With malts designed to provide more fermentable sugar (something known as “diastatic value”), less temperature is applied so as to not denature the enzymes necessary for starch conversion.

For grains used for either color, texture or flavors akin to caramel, toffee, fresh bread or dried fruit, varying lengths of heat are applied at different temperatures in order to produce a wide variety of colors and tastes.
Roasted malts, for example, which are dark in color, are responsible for the burnt coffee flavors of a stout, and underwent a higher temperature kilning and roasting process. Caramel malts, on the otherhand, lend a flavor of caramel or toffee and undergo a less extreme exposure to heat than their roasted brethren. But because of the high level of heat applied, the ability to convert the starches to a simpler sugar has been traded for flavor and color contribution.

While barley is the most commonly used malted grain in beer production, nearly any grain type can be malted. Beer ingredients such as rye, oats, wheat, spelt and even rice or corn can be used. Should you feel truly adventurous, you can even malt your own grains. For beginners, however, I recommend you let the professionals do the malting for you. In light of the growing popularity of brewing on both a commercial and amateur level, barley production has increased greatly and, as a result, the cost of buying beer ingredients such as malted barley has remained relatively low.

Yeast

As awful as its name may sound, yeast is an extraordinary beer ingredient that has a profound impact in determining a beer’s flavor, strength, aroma and appearance. Yeast is the tiniest of your beer brewing ingredients, but don’t lets its small stature fool you. Without yeast added to your brew, you’d end up with little more than a soup of cloudy sugar water. Therefore, yeast is one of the most important beer ingredients!

Yeast, in case you don’t know, is a single-celled organism that reproduces asexually as it feeds on sugars in your wort. As a result of its feeding, yeast produces alcohol, among other byproducts. It is the efficiency of the yeast and the byproducts it produces that determines what flavor contribution the yeast will impart on your finished beer.

Before 1857, brewers had no idea about the importance of yeast as a beer ingredient and assumed that fermentation was caused by a chemical reaction rather than by a separate, and microscopic, catalyst. It wasn’t until this discovery was made that brewers were able to cultivate and propagate their own yeast cultures. Up until that point, only airborne yeast was used. Due to the wonderful scientific achievements that have been made over the years, many companies (and individuals alike) have since developed their own unique yeast strains that are bred and cultivated to possess certain qualities and flavor contributions.

Despite the broad spectrum of flavors that can be derived from yeast when brewing your own beer, a beginner such as yourself will likely be dealing with only two main kinds of yeast – Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Saccharomyces carlsbergensis. Saccharomyces cerevisiae is an ale yeast and prefers to exert the bulk of its activity at the top of the fermentation tank, at temperatures close to room temperature, whereas Saccharomyces carlsbergensis is a lager yeast and ferments mostly on the bottom of the tank at well below room temperature.

Each type of yeast has several variants that are specifically bred to do a specific job. Some strains of yeast are selectively bred to drop out of suspension better than others (something known as “flocculation”). Some yeasts are bred to produce more alcohol, some to produce more esters or phenolic compounds, and some to ferment at warmer or cooler temperatures.

As a rule of thumb, just keep in mind that the yeast you add to your beer (or pull from the air naturally) will consume the sugar in your mash while producing alcohol and carbon dioxide during the fermentation process. Other compounds will be produced at this same time, contributing in a number of small ways to the overall flavor of your beer.

Hops

Hops are a flower that grow on a long bine (similar to a vine) and look much like a small, green pine cone. Most hop farms will hang their hop bines from a trellis twenty or more feet off the ground and then allow them to grow until the flowers are at peak flavor or have tested adequately for certain compounds that will contribute properly to the flavor of the final beer.

Once the hops have finished maturing on the bine, the hop farmer will unhook the bine from the top and sever it from the bottom, removing every single flower from the strand. After all the flowers have been removed, they undergo a drying process in an oast (a kiln built specially for drying hops). This stage is critical to preserving the bitter and flavorful properties of the flowers.

Hops are important in beer production because the natural bactericidal properties inside hops allow beer to last longer when it’s stored inside a bottle, keg, cask, barrel or fermenter. Hops also play an important role in the overall taste and bitterness of each and every brew.

There are well over 200 varieties of hops being grown and used as beer ingredients all around the world, with even more experimental varieties emerging on the brewing scene each and every year. Whether it’s the bitterness in your IPA, the flavor of your Scotch Ale, or that distinct aroma in your Pilsner, there are an endless number of hop combinations to please your palate and experiment with.

Regardless of where you live in the world, odds are you’ll be able to find hops at your local homebrew store which are either grown locally or produced on a commercial scale. If you’re lucky, you might even find hops growing in a neighbor’s backyard or somewhere in the wild. (Hey, FREE beer ingredients!)

Should you be inclined to grow your own hops, it’s important to realize that while hops grow well in a variety of climates, hop plants are incredibly resilient (meaning they can take over your yard if you’re not careful) and are toxic to many animals, including your dog. If growing your own hops sounds like an attractive enterprise, the plants you need to get started can usually be purchased from either your local homebrew store or from a garden center or nursery in your area.

Water

Water is the largest of the beer ingredients used in the production of any beer, and some would argue, the most important. Water not only makes up the most volume of the final beer drink, but it’s the one beer ingredient that tends to stay pretty much the same (depending on the chemistry of the water you’re using), while all of the other ingredients and their flavor contribution can be augmented and tinkered with.
Because water plays such an important role in beer production, most homebrewers (and commercial brewers alike) go to great lengths to filter and purify their water source. While you may be tempted to use the water that flows from the tap in your home kitchen, this water contains cleansing and disinfecting agents (such as chlorides and other metals) that many homebrewers try to remove from their finished beers.

As a brewer in this day and age, you’re fortunate that you not only have access to clean water, but you also have the ability (should you choose to do so) to augment your local water supply to fit the flavor profile you wish to create. Your local homebrew store will likely carry a whole line of salts and beer ingredients you can use to change the minerality, pH or hardness of your water. Adjusting your water chemistry in this way will give you an entirely new set of tools that you can use to brew unique and flavorful beer concoctions.

Other Beer Ingredients

In addition to the four main beer ingredients mentioned above, there are a number of additional ingredients that are also included in some (but not all) beers. For example, the following list is just a small sampling of the various foods and ingredients that are found in many of today’s modern beers:

Now that we’ve covered the basics of fermentation and the four main beer ingredients you’ll be using to brew your own delicious beers, let’s bring it all together for the sake of understanding.

Malted barley is added to hot water and provides the starches that are then converted to a simpler, more fermentable sugar. We call this liquid barley/sugar water the “mash.” Adding flowery hops to this mixture balances out any lingering sweetness left after fermentation and injects varying levels of bitterness, aroma and flavor depending on the hop variety used. The yeast we add next then eats most of the fermentable sugars in the mash and, in doing so, produces carbon dioxide, alcohol, and any number of esters, phenols, and other byproducts that will add to the flavor and appearance of the finished beer. Finally, our concoction is drained of any barley or hop particles and is then carbonated, bottled and cooled. And that, my friend, is how beer is made with the use of just four simple ingredients!

If you wish to learn how to brew your own delicious beers, be sure to pick up a copy of Dr. Hombrew’s How-To Beer Book.