Preserves Online: Brewing Home Beer

Thursday 19 July 2012

Brewing Home Beer

Here’s a quick, informative post on how home beer brewing works – particularly how beer is made, and a quick overview of the overall process.

As you know, making beer isn’t very straight forward. There are a lot of variables to consider, and unless you have a tried and tested strategy, it’s going to be very difficult for you to make it taste good (not to mention consistent, because who wants beer that changes how it tastes each time?)

The beer that you drink has four necessary ingredients: Water, Hops, Barley, and Yeast.

Barley is a kind of grain (actually, it’s a seed.) But before you can even use the barley, you have to let it germinate. You can do this, generally, by allowing it to soak in water for a week or so. From that point you can drain it and sit for a couple more days.

Without getting more technical, that’s generally what the Barley needs before you can use it in beer. It’s really easy to do the above, but you have to wait a little while before you can use it in your recipe.

Now for hops. These are the flowers of a vine called Hop. They have a lot of acids which generally give beer the authentic bitter taste, and it also contributes oils which help the flavor. Ultimately, though, hops will help to defend against other bacteria which can ruin your beer.