Make Your Own Beer

Make your own beer

Beers main ingredients

There are 4 main ingredients in beer: water, barley, hops, and yeast. Although this does not sound to complicated, it can get to be.

Malted Barley

Barley is a seed of a grain that looks like wheat. It’s used in many foods such as cereals, and of course, it’s needed to make your own beer. But before it can be used, it must be malted. To malt the barley it be soaked in water for several days. This will allow the barley to germinate. Then the barley must be drained and kept stored for 4-5 days at 60 degrees Fahrenheit. This process will allow the husk to open and the barley to sprout. The stage is now called green malt. The important thing to the malting process is to stop the germination of the barley at a point when the sugar-producing enzymes are present but most of the starch is still unconverted. The enzymes will produce the sugars that will feed the yeast to essentially make alcohol in our beer.

Hops

Hops are the flower of a hop vine. Hops contain acids (that’s where the bitterness comes from in beer) and oils that will give the beer some of it’s aroma and flavoring. Hops also inhibit the formation of bacteria that can ruin the beer. There is a great variety of different hops each which give a different taste and aroma to the beer.

Yeast

Yeast, a single celled micro organism, is responsible for creating the alcohol and the carbon dioxide found in beer. There are many different kinds of yeast used in beer. The different types of beer yeast will give the beer it’s various tastes.

I don’t think need to explain what water is but it would be good to get some filtered water of some kind for your brewing.

For more information on brewing and getting started check this site out: www.ezbrew.com

Cheers