What is brewing?

In this post we’re going to into a bit of a background in brewing, what it is, its history as a profession and hobby. We’ll also discuss an aspect of brewing that is one of my favourites, the culture that surrounds it.

You’ve no doubt heard or guessed that brewing is a long-practiced art form. Ever since there was cultivated crops, there was beer. The earliest known beer of any form was residue found in pottery from the region of present day Iran, it was 7000 years old. It’s mind-blowing to think that people figured out that sweet grainy liquid left out would produce a tasty beverage when the thought of it is actually quite revolting. It’s essentially a bread recipe gone as wrong as it could possibly go, then left out in the open air in a clay pot for several months. I commend the man that was the first one brave enough to try that liquid, let alone stick with it and make it into beer!

Obviously the process has developed immensely since those clay pots left out in the Iranian sun. Today brewing beer is a multi-million dollar business and has firm roots in the forefronts of agriculture, science and industry. This said, what I love is that at the end of it you can still sit down with a drink you made and think “damn, beer is good! And I made this!

” in the same way people did thousands of years ago.

But back onto our topics, what is brewing?

Brewing is, in it’s simplest form, a process that turns grains (predominantly Barley) into an alcoholic beverage through fermentation with yeast. The basic process is:

• Germination or Malting – The harvested grain is grown and developed in a malt house under careful conditions to allow the endosperm to germinate. The germination process produces starches and enzymes that will be later used to extract sugar. The process is stopped by kilning the grain before the plant can begin to consume the starches and sugars produced, allowing the use of these sugars by the brewer.
• Mashing – The malted grain is added to warm water to activate the enzymes within. The enzymes convert the starch into sugars which seep into the surrounding water, which is then siphoned off to a large pot. At this point the liquid is referred to as ‘Wort’.
• Sparging – The mashed grains are then rinsed with more of the warm water to extract further sugars from the grains.
• Boiling – The wort is boiled to remove impurities that can cause off-flavours and to allow adequate time for the addition of hops to add bittering, flavour, and aroma characteristics to the wort. This process typically takes 60 minutes, after which the wort is cooled and yeast is added. Once yeast is added, the liquid is technically (and legally) beer.
• Fermentation – The beer is left in a container with the yeast for an adequate amount of time for the yeast to consume the sugars and produce alcohol. Sometimes there are more hop additions during this stage, referred to as “dry hopping”.
• Packaging – This is arguably every brewer’s least favourite step in the process, especially if they are bottling! Packaging is simply the process of transferring the beer to a vessel from which it can be served, be it bottles or kegs.

The stages of this process have remained the same but our ways of doing them is what’s changed. Brought around by advances in agriculture and micro-biology, we have now been able to modify malts to produce more of the kinds of sugar we need and harvest and cultivate different strains of yeast that are more suited to brewing. We no longer need as much grain to brew and can ferment in closed, controlled conditions as opposed to large open fermenters relying on wild yeast in the air to ferment the wort.

As stated before, brewing is now big business and drives constantly forward to develop new technologies and techniques. Many of the techniques and processes are used in both professional and home brewing although they were almost all born out of the professional brewing industry and not always 100% proven as making a big difference on the home scale.

Commercial breweries have many other concerns to look out for. Their ingredients per batch are incredibly expensive compared to a home brewery. The worst that happens if I screw up a batch is I waste $50-100 on ingredients and have to dump and remake it. If the same mistake happens in a commercial brewery it costs thousands of dollars in ingredients, wasted time, wages, cleaning products and even potential charges from the council for having to dump a large amount of live organic waste into the sewage system which can wreak havoc with sewage treatment plant ecosystems.

In short, it’s in a brewery’s interest to take as many chances as possible to reduce the risk of a bad/inconsistent batch so methods of control are born to govern and standardise almost every aspect of the process. Many however, do not make sense or make a noticeable difference on the home brew scale. More on that in a later post. Check out our links page for links to a website/podcast/blog that puts many of these theories to the test!

One of the most important aspects to me, one that would keep me in the hobby during doubtful periods, is the culture surrounding beer and brewing. I love that there is a never-ending supply of people that enjoy the process as much as myself, love discussing the end result and giving feedback or giving advice if something has not gone right. There are many ways to immerse yourself in this culture:

• Forums or other online communities
• Social Media Groups
• Home Brew Clubs
• Learning to appraise beer with practical methods (going to bars serving good beer with friends and exploring their range on offer)

For some examples of these visit the links page.

Thanks for joining us this week for our discussion on what brewing is, its history as well as a discussion on commercial vs home brewing and beer culture. Join us next time for a look at the ways you can get into this hobby and the types of brewing methods commonly available to home brewers.

Until next time,

Best,

Sean

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