How is beer made?

Guys, we’ve been making beer for 5000 years (at least) and the love affair has yet to wane even a little. While they weren’t drinking dank IPAs in ancient Sumeria (that would be a real Doritos versus medieval peasants sort of situation), our ancestors were busy kicking off the noble tradition of fermenting grains into alcohol, even if they didn’t necessarily know how it works.

These days, we definitely know what’s happening: grains are processed to release their hidden sugars, then yeast turns those sugars into alcohol. Hops are added to flavour and preserve the beer and, at the most basic level, that’s it. There’s science, there’s magic, there’s art – beer making is a beautiful process.

With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at how beer is made.

Beer is basic, baby – it’s just four ingredients:

• Malt: Malting is the process of taking a grain (it’s usually barley, but it can really be any grain) and soaking it in water to make it germinate. The science behind it isn’t so important – what is important is that this process turns a starchy grain into a sugary one, and sugar is super important to our beer, as you’ll see.
  

• Hops: Hops are the flowers of the humulus lupus plant (although they look more like little green pine cones) and they have two purposes in beer: they add flavour and they preserve the beer. Hops are pretty bitter, but they can also have all sorts of other flavours like floral, citrusy, tropical, spicy or piney.
  
  
• Water: Most of a beer is water, so it’s pretty important. Brewers care about the quality of the water (like its mineral content) because that can affect the flavour in the end. At various times in history, low-alcohol beer was supposedly safer to drink than water, so we can just about consider beer to be upgraded water.

• Yeast: We humans have found plenty of companions outside of our own species (looking at you, cats and dogs), but few have been as important as yeast. Yeast is a single celled fungus that eats sugars and leaves behind carbon dioxide and alcohol, so you can see why that might be important to a drink like beer.

From the haziest NEIPAs to the darkest imperial stouts and crispest lagers, beer basically follows the same formula every time. The differences come from variations in the recipe (different types of malts, hops or yeasts, different amounts of everything, other additives – all sorts of stuff) but making beer is a pretty consistent process and it always includes the four basic ingredients. If it doesn’t have all four, it’s not beer. Here’s how beer is born:

Step one: Malting

Beer needs sugar to ferment and grains like barley have that sugar – they just need a helping hand. As we already covered, malting is where grain is steeped in water so that it germinates, which is where it sprouts and tries to become a big plant, turning starches into sugars in the process. Brewers don’t want plants, of course, so the sprouting seeds are thrown in a hot kiln to stop the process, giving the malt some bonus toasty, roasty flavours.

Step two: Mashing

Grain isn’t much good by itself, and the idea of the mashing step is to turn those sprouted, toasted grains into a beer-friendly liquid. The grains all get crushed and then spend some time in warm water, converting even more starch to sugar. This sugary, malty liquid is called wort (pronounced like ‘wert’) and, when the process is done, the spent grain is filtered off and only wort remains.

Step three: Boiling and hopping

In the boiling step, the wort is added to a big tank called the brew kettle and (as you might guess), brought to a rolling boil. This concentrates the sugars again (meaning  more flavour and fermentation potential) and kills bacteria so that the yeast can do its job unimpeded. Hops – those flavoursome flowers we spoke about – go in during the boil, too, lending flavour and antimicrobial properties to the mix.

Step four: Fermentation

At this point, we’ve got a sweet, bitter liquid that kinda, sorta resembles beer – but it’s not alcoholic and it’s not quite beer. Fermentation is the step that ties it all together and, once all the hop and grain solids are removed, yeast is pitched and the tiny little fungi go to work converting those sugars to alcohol and carbon dioxide. Generally, yeast takes about a week to fully ferment the beer.

A little note on yeast: it’s not just one thing. There are different species of yeast (generally Saccharomyces cerevisiae for ales or Saccharomyces pastorianus for lagers) and different strains, all of which result in unique styles and flavours of beer, so it’s an important choice.

Step five: Packaging

Once the beer is fully fermented, it’s generally left to rest (‘cellared’) for a week or two, then filtered to remove yeast cells and any other bits and pieces in the beer before being packaged. Beer has historically been packaged in glass bottles, but cans are super common these days, because aluminium is much lighter than glass (and so cheaper to transport) and cans keep light out (and UV can make a beer turn bad).