Brewing Process 101 - Now you're a Brewmaster!

I'm completely kidding with the title, seriously. We understand how totally awesome, rigorous, educationally and apprenticeship-driven the Brewmaster's job is. We just wanted to grab your attention. Now that we have it...

For the purposes of making future posts cleaner when referencing specific pieces of the brewing process (and not having to rely on constantly annoying parentheses, like this one), we’ve decided that it would be a most excellent idea to quickly break down the beer brewing process into some simple steps, throw in some diagrams, and call it a day.

Let’s start with some basic lingo:

• Malt – aka Malted Barley; Barley (cereal grain) is germinated in water, then dried or heated with hot air
• Mash tun – a piece of equipment during the brewing process used for mashing, or the creation of wart
• Wort – A sugary liquid created when malt is mixed with hot water and the starches in the malt break down
• Hops – Bitter, flowery, citrusy flower clusters used to flavor beer (and to offset the malt)
• Hopback – Vat filled with hops used to add aromatic flavoring (think citrus/grass) to the hopped wort and act as a filter
• Yeast – a microorganism used in the brewing process to actually create beer. A strain called brewer’s yeast breaks apart hopped wort into CO2 and alcohol
• Fermentation – The metabolic act of yeast turning wort into carbon dioxide and alcohol

Brewing steps (fix your peepers on this section):

1. Malted Barley is mixed with hot water in a mash tun.
2. In the mash tun, upon heating of the malt, enzymes are released that break down the starch into sugars creating wort
3. The grain is washed and the wort is then separated from the grain
4. After separation the wort is transferred to a kettle where the wort is boiled and hops are added (various amounts can be added multiple times)
5. At this point, some breweries will pass the hopped wort thru a hopback
6. The hopped wort is cooled and yeast is added in a Fermenter
7. In the Fermenter, CO2 is removed from the beer
8. After a period of time (weeks to months usually) the solution is now beer and can be transferred to bottles or oak barrels (where it can continue to ferment), casks or kegs for storage and transport

What I’ve just described to you is your garden variety brewery, not necessarily your typical homebrew setup. However, many of these same steps apply - you just have to get creative to fulfill the requirements of each step before you move to the next step. For example, wort can be purchased directly so that you don’t have to do your own mashing. Second, you can recreate the effects of a hopback by just adding hops multiple times during the brewing process. Lastly, your fermenter can be a large, sealed bucket, with a glass carboy or two preferable for primary and secondary fermentation.

I know this seems complicated, but please don’t get freaked out - we aren’t talking String Theory. With that being said, we’re going to take our own advice, start with a $50 homebrew kit with everything included and just start “going to town”. Brew a basic lager or pilsner multiple times, then begin to upgrade styles. Graduate to harder recipes, experiment with extracts, and upgrade your equipment – if you weren’t planning to before, buy glass carboys, bigger stockpots, and try to automate pieces of the process, if at all possible. The only way you’ll learn is by experimentation, which you’ve probably been told at other points in your life about other things…illegal things, perhaps? Remember, as in robbing banks, “practice makes perfect".