As the first of a two-part series, we are going to explore various beer terminologies and break down what beer actually is in terms of ingredients and how it’s made, as well as distinctive qualities of several prominent styles in America. 

What is beer? Simply: beer is an alcoholic, carbonated drink made from fermented grains. Specifically: yeast, malt and hops. Together with water and some food science, we have beer.

Malt: This cereal grain determines carbonation, color, alcohol content and the viscosity of a brew. Just like planting a seed in a garden, it is covered in liquid and starts to grow. Once it starts sprouting, the malt is dried and roasted. This allows the starch in the seeds to turn into fermentable sugars.

Hops: Hops are the flowering cones of the hop plant. They counterbalance the sweetness malt creates by adding bitterness to the beer (think of the combination of tea leaves and water). Coincidentally, they look like small, flowery pinecones and belong to the same scientific family as cannabis (aka marijuana).

Water: You all know what water is, but interestingly enough, how hard or soft it is can drastically change the flavor of the beer, just as it would tea. 

Yeast: Yeast is a living fungus that forms colonies of single cells. It’s in charge of eating the fermentable sugars from the malt and releases carbon dioxide and alcohol as a byproduct.

Fermentation: The process by which something becomes alcoholic. As you may have put together, the yeast eats the sugars in the malt and creates alcohol and beer bubbles — thus we have beer.

These are the only ingredients necessary to make beer, but consider how many different areas of the world beer is made in. Companies often use different hop strains and malt, creating thousands of unique brews with different flavor characteristics. Dark beers are created when malt is roasted more and light beers when they’re roasted less. The heavy pine smell and bitter taste is from more hops overbearing the malt in the beer. A sweeter beer has leftover fermentable sugar that wasn’t eaten up by the yeast and turned to alcohol. Lastly, very alcoholic beers require more hops and malt to allow for more sugar to be created and fermented.

Read next week to learn how to taste and rate a beer, as well as key characteristics of common styles.

— Compiled by Lucas Sacks, staff writer, ldsacks@syr.edu

Published on February 23, 2011 at 12:00 pm