Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Get To Know Home Brew Ingredients

By Shirley Baker


Home beer-making process stands as an educative and way of having fun. A brewer can opt to use one of the several styles of brewing that exist, but he will have to use the same home brew ingredients as the rest of the brewers who use different styles. Get to know more information about the components of home-made beer from this article.

Malt forms the main ingredient during a brewing process, and barley malt stands as the most commonly used form. It comes in two types: two-row malt and six-row malt. The earlier type has husks sand larger grains that the latter. Besides the malt, you can use other adjuncts such as corn and rice.

Steeping forms the first step of home beer making process where grains are made to appear germinating. They are then dried in a quick manner to arrest the enzymes that convert starch into sugar. When the brewing process starts, the enzymes are released.

Yeast is the other ingredient in domestic beer making, and it comes in two types: lager and ale yeasts. The main difference between the two types of yeasts stands out in the resultant product that they produce.

When a brewer uses ale yeast, the resultant beer bears a floral aroma. It is a type of yeast that beginners use, and it classifies as top fermenting yeast due to its behavior of foaming at the top, and then settling. It calls for a brewer to use high temperatures during the brewing process.

Lager Ale works at lower temperatures than its counterpart, and this is one of the main differences that two kinds of yeasts have. It belongs to a bottom fermenting class of yeast. Given that lower temperatures are used on lager ale, it does not have the floral aroma that the other kind of yeast exhibits.

A common characteristic in both yeasts is that they are manufactured commercially, and they take dry of liquid form. They are usually available for sale to home brewers.

Water plays a significant role in the quality that the domestically made beer possesses. This is because water is different according to the regions where it is found. The mineral content that is found in water, as well as its hardness or softness, gives beer certain characteristics that become the official quality of beer from that region. The variance in the quality of beer makes water have different styles.

Brewers have come with a way of giving home-made beer characteristics of beer from a certain region. What they do is that they use additives that either makes the water hard or soft to match with water from the specific region of their choice.

Sugars determine the taste of the resultant beer and its alcohol content. The fermentation of yeast requires sugars, and an addition of it brings a difference.

Use of priming sugars during the bottling process makes the beer become carbonated. Start making your own beer and you shall enjoy it more.




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