Beer
Barley:
The main constituent in beer; as grapes are to wine, barley is to beer. Barley grains are low in fat and protein but rich in starch. Starch is the grain’s food reserve that is made up of chains of sugar molecules. In nature this would feed the growing barley plant but in brewing we hijack the starch to make beer! Malting starts the process of releasing the sugar and making it available for brewing. Brewers use specially selected varieties of barley that are particularly suited to being malted and making high quality beer.
Hops
A climbing plant that can grow to a height of over 20 feet. Hop cones contain a wealth of resins and essential oils which give the beer its distinctive bitterness and hop flavor. Contrary to public perception, beer is not “made from hops”. Typically a barrel of beer is made from 20kg of malt and 150g of hops. Hops are used rather like a spice. Hops are picked in the late summer and dried in Oast Houses. Traditionally they are packed into tall sacks called pockets. Nowadays they tend to be compacted into pellets and vacuum packed in foil, like coffee, to preserve their freshness.
Water:
High quality water is essential to the brewing process with four to six pints needed to produce every pint of beer. Some of us on the older side of life will remember the old Coors commercials…”Brewed with pure Rocky Mountain spring water.” The water makes a difference…big time!
Yeast:
A microscopic member of the fungus family. The Latin name for brewing yeast is Saccharomyces cerevisiae – literally “beer sugar yeast”! Yeast grows on sugar producing alcohol and carbon dioxide in a process called fermentation. Yeast also produces a vast array of flavor compounds and much of the subtlety of beer flavor comes from the yeast strain and the fermentation conditions. Brewers use their own specially selected and jealously guarded yeast strains to produce the distinctive flavors of their own particular beers.
Beer & Nutrition
Beer is packed with many of the nutrients the body needs for a healthy diet. In the old days it gained the accolade ‘liquid bread’. We know cereals are good for us, beer is made from cereals…but we often fail to make the healthy connection. Unlike other alcoholic drinks it is chock full of vitamins and minerals. A pint of beer will supply about 5% of your daily protein needs, whereas wine has none. It has absolutely no cholesterol or fat and useful quantities of soluble fiber. It has fewer calories than milk or apple juice. Alcohol itself has been shown to benefit our heart and circulation systems. Polyphenols in beer are as effective at scavenging harmful cancer inducing free radicals as those in red wine. In moderation, beer does not make you fat and its constituents are proven to help in a balanced diet. This message echoes the 1930’s campaign with the tag-line ‘Beer is good for you’.
Beer and Food
For years beer was the principal accompaniment to food in Western Europe. There are still many countries such as the Czech Republic, German and Belgium where beer would be chosen ahead of wine to accompany any meal. Beer provides the ideal companion for food. The complexity of beer flavors is much broader than any other beverage. There is the perfect beer to go with any food. To date, the wine industry has successfully created an association of wine and food. However, many wines are limited by the relatively short range of flavors available and their relatively high alcohol content. The beer industry is encouraging people to match appropriate beers with foods. Everyone knows that beer is great with pizza and spicy foods, but try smoked porter with a char grilled rib eye steak or a fruit beer with chocolate. There are many other great combinations. The lower alcohol concentration of most beers makes it a more suitable choice for lunch times.
Tasting Beers
With a world of styles and flavors to choose from, beer tasting can be great fun. There are thousands of different beers you can try from home and abroad. Why not try something other than “the usual”?
Different to tasting wine, isn't it?
Actually it isn’t. Just as tasting wine uses all your senses, appreciating great beer requires ears, eyes, nose and mouth. Ears? Just think of that ‘schh’ as the bottle top comes off or the gurgle as you poor yourself a cold one.
Does it have Legs?
Beer should look good. Ales and lagers should be clear and bright; stouts are dark with a thick creamy head. Even ‘cloudy’ beers such as wheat beers should be lively and enticing and not flat and dull.
Work your Nose
Few of us take any time sniffing our glass of beer but the idea that this sort of behavior should be restricted to strange men with beards and sandals is like saying the only people who like wine have cut glass accents and wear pin-striped suits!
Steady On...!
If you don’t give your beer a sniff then, how can you pick out the sweet, toasty, malty nose of a Scottish heavy; the citrus hoppiness of an IPA or the cloves and bananas leaping out of a wheat beer? Drinking beer straight from the bottle robs you of great sensations. Pouring a half glass first and taking deep inhalations of the noble elixir will tell you, this is something you want to drink.
Savor Each Sip!
After your first mouthful, you will notice all the flavors. The sweetness at the front of the mouth and the drying bitterness from the hops at the back as the beer slips down your throat to a satisfying ‘finish’. Each style has its own character: the sweet and sour attack of a great Belgian fruit beer, the hoppy surge of the IPA, the roasty richness of a creamy porter, the perfumed bite of a traditional Pilsner. You’ll soon find that beer is as diverse as wine.
Beer Styles
Drinkers today can choose from tons of different styles of beer covering every imaginable flavor.
This dazzling array includes pilsners, pale ales, porters, stouts, barley wines and bocks to name but a few.
Lager
The world’s most popular beer style varies from the pale gold of a classic Czech Pilsner, through every shade of yellow to the deep golden color of the strong German ‘doppelbocks’. Lagers are fermented cold so in comparison with ales, more of the delicate flavors from the malt and hops come through into the glass. Lagers are normally light in color and they vary widely in flavor and strength. From standard products (4% ABV) through premium beers (5% ABV) up to Austria’s Samichlaus, at a very robust 14% ABV. US lagers tend to be low in bitterness and delicately flavored.
Ale
Ales are generally fruitier and fuller flavored than lagers due to a higher fermentation temperature and vary from straw-colored to the jet black of Guinness. Historically, until the arrival of lightly kilned malts in the early 1800s, all ales would have been brownish and rather smoky from the wood fired kilns.
Specialty Beers
This ‘catch-all’ term covers a huge collection of beers with fascinating flavors. There is an exciting array ranging from the wheat beers of Germany, through the fruit beers of Belgium, to the exotic smoked beers from Bamberg and Alaska. Wheat beers are a fairly recent phenomenon, their naturally cloudy nature being formerly viewed with suspicion by those used to a haze-free pint. Germany’s Weiss beers, have yeasty aromas of clove and banana and are brewed with a mixture of barley and wheat malts. The Wit (white) beers of Belgium and Holland may also be brewed with wheat but are flavored with coriander and orange peel – Gulpener and Hoegaarden being leading examples. Still in Belgium, fruit beers are a big part of their brewing tradition, made by steeping beer with fruit such cherries (kriek) and raspberries (framboise). These beers can act either as aperitifs, if tart, or as dessert beers if they are higher in alcohol and sweeter. In the last twenty years, brewers have started to create exotic specialty beers flavored with summer fruits, heather flowers, ginger, sweet gale, elderflower, coriander, honey and chocolate. Most of these ‘flavorings’ hark back to what might have been used by brewers before the arrival of hops. One of the great things about beer – and specialty beers – is their infinite variety: Variety of colors, aromas, textures, flavors and alcoholic strengths – from 2.5% to Sam Adams Utopia at an astonishing 27% ABV. There is a beer for every food and every occasion. As your taste buds are aroused, you will soon find that to have your own ten to twenty bottle ‘beer cellar’ is a must.
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