Beer Ingredients and Their Unique Features Articles | Beer

By: Darren Williger

For someone to brew and taste their own beer, it’s important to know what the ingredients are. If the right ingredients aren’t used, not only will the beer taste badly, but will let you down. Key ingredients to make beer are malted barley, hops, yeast and water. You can also use other ingredients such as flavoring sugar to add to the taste. Starch is used to convert the mashing process easily to fermentable sugars that help in the increase of alcohol content, also adding flavor and body.

Let’s now understand the importance of each ingredient one by one:

Water

This is the most abundant ingredient one can use to make beer. It has a major impact on the character of the beer manufactured. Though the effect of minerals present in brewing water is complex, soft water can be accommodated to light styles, while hard water is used to make dark styles of beer.

Malt

Malt is another key ingredient used in brewing of beer. Among them, barley is most extensively used due to its high content along with a digestive enzyme that helps in the breakdown of starch to sugars. Several other malts and unmalted grains can be used depending on what can be used. Rice, Rye, Oats and Wheat are some of them. Malt is extracted by soaking grain in water and allowing the same to germinate. Once this process is completed, one has to dry the germinated grain using a kiln. These enzymes will gradually convert the starches in the grain into fermentable sugars once the process of malting the grain is completed.

Hops

How are Hops useful in the making of beer? The evidence is mind boggling. Since seventeenth century, hops have been used to add bitterness to beer and different alcohols. They help to provide bitterness that will balance the sweetness of the malts used. Not only this, they also offer different aromas ranging from citrus to herbal in beers. They also offer an antibiotic effect that influences the brewer’s yeast over the less preferred microorganisms. International bitterness units’ scale determines the amount of bitterness to be added in brewing beer.

Yeast

Fermentation is achieved by using yeast. Depending on the type of beer we wish to produce, specific strains of yeast are to be chosen. Of all, the two most common strains used are ale yeast and lager yeast, with other variations available based on requirement. It helps in metabolizing sugars that are taken off from the grains and produces carbon dioxide and alcohol as a result. In olden days before the importance of yeast was understood, brewers used wild yeasts or airborne yeasts to process fermentation.

Clarifying agents

There are some ingredients that aren’t published, yet they are used to add value to the brewing of beer. These are termed as clarifying agents in the beer fraternity. One of them being Isinglas finings obtained from swim bladders of Irish moss and fish, similar to red alga. If you are someone who is against consuming animal products, contact your brewer to know if these ingredients have been used.