All beer is made from five essential ingredients.
Water is the most important ingredient in beer. Beer is mostly water, so it is essential to have clean water that tastes good in order to make good beer. Many of the world’s classic beer styles have evolved because of good local water profiles—the balance of minerals and salts naturally dissolved into the water that give it a hard or soft character, as well as a distinctive flavor.
North Carolina typically has good, neutral, relatively soft water that makes excellent beer.
Malted barley is the source of most of the sugar in beer. Barley is a grain commonly grown throughout the world but especially in northern Europe, the American Midwest, Canada, and Australia. Unlike other cereal grains, it is high in starch and low in protein and has a fibrous husk. All of these characteristics make it ideal for use in making beer.
When barley is harvested, it is not immediately ready for beer production. It must first be malted. Malting is a process in which the grain is soaked in water, which causes germination of the seed to start. Natural enzymes in the barley then begin to change the starch already present in the kernel into sugar. Other enzymes break down cell walls in the barley, making the hard, pebble-like barley kernel soft and sugary. The maltster then applies heat, arresting the germination process and caramelizing the sugar in the kernel.
Maltsters use many different types of heating and roasting techniques to make different colors and flavors of malt, ranging from extremely light pilsner malt, used as a base malt in the lightest beers, to deep black roasted malt, which can impart an espresso-like character and color to a beer. A vast array of caramel and toasted malts lies in between. Brewers can choose from well over 200 different types of malts from different maltsters and suppliers. All impart different flavors, colors, and even textures to beer.
Hops are the flowers and fruiting bodies of the plant Humulus lupulus. They have bright green flowers resembling pine cones growing in bunches from perennial bines 20 to 30 feet tall. Brewers use hops to add bitterness to beer to counteract the sweetness of the malt. The hundreds of different types of cultivated hops provide their own flavors to beer. The flavors can range from citrusy and pine-like to grassy, earthy, or leathery, and even to apple, pear, blueberry, or other fruit flavors.
Hops weren’t always used in beer. Throughout history, many other herbs have been put into beer to counteract sweetness, among them sweet gale, yarrow, spruce, pine, heather, bee balm, and even some fairly dangerous ingredients like wormwood and witch hazel. Over time, hops were adopted not only for their pleasant flavor but because they are a natural antibacterial agent. Their presence in brewing has significantly increased the shelf life of beer.
Yeast is unique as an ingredient in brewing because it is actually a living organism. For thousands of years, brewers merely made liquids they knew would eventually turn into beer, then left them out for the apparently spontaneous reaction that would sooner or later occur. They knew that if they added some of the beer from previous batches, or even bread made from a previous batch of beer, that the reaction would happen more quickly. It wasn’t until Louis Pasteur’s groundbreaking work in the mid-19th century that people understood that live organisms in the liquid were eating the sugar-rich solution and excreting carbon dioxide and ethanol—two of the components that make beer most pleasant to drinkers—as well as up to 900 other chemicals that add flavor.
Brewers use two major families of yeast: ale yeast and lager yeast. These are often incorrectly referred to as “top fermenting” yeast (ale yeast) and “bottom fermenting” yeast (lager yeast) because of how brewers used to harvest the yeast before the advent of modern technology. In reality, fermentation takes place throughout the solution. The primary difference between ale yeast and lager yeast is the temperature at which they best ferment. Ale yeast ferments around room temperature, from 60 degrees to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, whereas lager yeast ferments best between 45 degrees and 60 degrees. Ale yeast also tends to have a much more robust ester profile, evoking a wide range of fruit flavors, while lager yeast creates much more neutral, crisp, clean beers.
Literally thousands of yeasts from these two families are used around the world to make beer.
Adjuncts often get a bad rap. Adjuncts are sources of sugar used for brewing that are not malted barley. When people speak of adjuncts in brewing, they are typically referring to a macrobrewery’s use of corn and rice in light American lagers, primarily to add more fermentable sugar to the beer without adding any flavor or character.
However, adjuncts can also be used to add an enormous amount of flavor to beer. Any non-barley grain is considered an adjunct. Rye, wheat, oats, buckwheat, spelt, and sorghum are all used as adjuncts, and all impart their own flavor. Adjuncts can also refer to sugar additions like turbinado, demerara, brown sugar, molasses, agave syrup, candi sugar, honey, and maple syrup. Finally, many clever brewers use a wide range of fruits and vegetables as sources of starch and sugar as well. These include sweet potatoes, pumpkins, and squash. Anything with natural starch or sugar can be used as an adjunct in beer.
When a brewer starts a batch of beer, the first thing he does is mill the barley. Barley usually comes to a brewery in whole-kernel form. Those kernels must be crushed to expose the insides to water more efficiently in the later steps. Brewers only crush grain. They do not mill it to a flour. They want to leave the husks of the barley intact to use as a natural filter later in the process.
Once the grain is milled, the brewer adds heated water. The heat and water reactivate the enzymes that were at work in the barley during germination, which restarts the conversion of starches into sugars. Since water is an excellent solvent, it also acts as a base for the sugars to dissolve into, meaning that the sugars can easily be extracted from the grain.
Lautering is the process of removing the liquid—now considered wort—from the grain. The wort is drained through the grain itself, the husks from the barley acting as a natural filter bed. While this is happening, clean hot water is sprayed over the top of the grain bed in a process called sparging. Sparging rinses the remaining sugar from the grain bed, allowing the brewer to use as much as possible of the sugar that was originally present in the barley.
The wort is then transferred to a kettle and boiled. Boiling serves several important functions in brewing. It sterilizes the wort, ensuring that no bacteria or wild yeasts are present. It drives off volatile sulfuric compounds naturally found in barley that can lend an unpleasant egg or cabbage flavor and aroma in beer. Boiling allows for the formation of certain calcium compounds that help protein precipitate from the solution to create clearer beer. Finally, boiling is when brewers add the majority of the hops—and sometimes other ingredients—to the beer.
Brewers are very careful about when hops are added to the boil. The longer hops are in contact with the boiling wort, the more bitterness is derived from the hops, and the less aroma and flavor. Because of this, brewers normally use a hop schedule that specifies the amount of hops to be added at the beginning or middle of the boil for bitterness, and the amount to be added near the end of the boil for flavor and aroma. Since aroma compounds are delicate and can easily be boiled off, any ingredients the brewer wishes to retain the aroma of are normally added right at the end of the boil.
Boiling normally takes an hour at minimum. Afterward, the wort is chilled to fermentation temperature, and yeast is added. It is at this point that the liquid actually becomes beer. Yeast can finish fermenting in as little as three days to as many as 30 days, depending on the strain of the yeast, the amount of sugar in the solution, and the temperature of fermentation. Brewers often allow the beer to sit through a period of cold conditioning after fermentation is complete.
After the fermenting and conditioning are completed, the beer is carbonated and packaged. In North Carolina, every major type of packaging is employed: kegs of all sizes, bottles, cans, and growlers (half-gallon jugs). Once the beer has been packaged, it is on its way to consumers for their enjoyment.