Beer Matters

BY THOMAS VINCENT, Head Brewer, Hatchet Brewing Co.

WITH THE START OF NEW YEAR, I THOUGHT I’D GET BACK TO THE BASICS. What is beer? It seems like a simple enough question. The answer involves a short list: a combination of water, malt, hops and yeast. So, let’s dig into these ingredients a little deeper.

Water

Dave Barry once wrote, “Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.” Water makes up over 95 percent of beer—a straightforward thing at first glance, but that’s deceiving.

Where does the water come from? Is it collected rainwater or does it come from a stream? Or perhaps it was pulled from wells deep within the earth. Depending on the source, there are different chemical compounds and salts present. Is the water hard or soft? All this information can be impactful.

Guinness, for example, uses soft water to makes its famous stout, which helps give the beer its roasty character. Burton on Trent, however, uses hard water to make its India Pale Ale shine.

Today, most brewers have the advantage of reviewing their local water report and adjusting the chemical makeup of the water to fit the beer profile they are brewing.

John Mallett, author of the book Malt, calls malt the “soul of beer.” Malt is a grain that has been steeped, germinated and dried. Barley is the most commonly used malt, but wheat, rye, and other grains can be used.

Barley—the seed of the barley plant— must be specially prepared by a malster for use in brewing. The sugars inside the seed are not available to the brewer while the seed is in its native state. Only after the seed has been transformed, or tricked into thinking it’s time to grow into a plant, are the sugars readily available for the brewing process. So the maltster steeps the barley in water to get the seed to begin to sprout, and then bakes the sprouting seed to lock in the sugars in a fully usable form.

Maltsters and breweries historically were co-located until industrialization and the relocation of breweries to urban centers caused their separation. German brewing schools still teach brewing and malting in a unified program.

Depending on the beer, generally 80–95 percent of the grain used in a beer is made up of a base malt. The skill of the maltster is fully realized when malts are roasted or caramelized into specialty grains. These specialty grains may constitute the other 10–15 percent of the total malt, but they transform a simple beer into dark, roasty stout or sweet amber ale. And note, it’s not the color of a beer that determines the strength. It’s the quantity of malt that controls how much alcohol is in a beer.

Hops are the dried female flower clusters (cones) of the common hop plant. They contain a number of oils like myrcene, humulene and farnesene. Roughly 66 percent of the world’s hops are grown in the United States and Germany. Of the hops grown in the United States, 99 percent are grown in just three states: Washington, Idaho and Oregon.

Hops don’t make an ideal crop in North Carolina because of latitude, and because the ground doesn’t get cold enough for the plant. Hops impart two important characteristics. First, early in the boil of a beer they add bitterness to balance the sweetness from the malt; and second, they can aid aroma if added late in the boil (or even afterward). These aromas may have an earthy quality like in a classic English Pale Ale or in your IPA, where tropical and fruity aromas prevail.

Yeast are fun guys, excuse me, fungi. They are single-cell organisms that consume simple sugars and are what makes fermentation happen.

Ultimately, a brewer can only make wort. Wort (pronounced wert) is the brew of water, malt and hops. Yeast feasts on the wort, giving off carbon dioxide, heat and, yes, the alcohol that makes beer such a lovely beverage. Yeast used in fermentation breaks the beer down into generally either an ale or a lager.

Ales historically have been more popular, but in the last few hundred years, lagers have come to dominate. Ales (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) are fermented at warmer temperatures, a process often referred to as top fermenting, producing a fruitier character. The result is our IPAs, brown ales, hefeweizen and stouts.

Lagers (Saccharomyces pastorianus) ferment at lower temperatures, said to be bottom fermenting, and have a more crisp and clean character. Examples of lagers would be pilsners, bock, and baltic porter. Mass-produced domestic lagers fall into this group as well. While their origin hasn’t been completely explained, it’s believed they started in the caves of Germany and the Czech Republic.

Of course, there are other things like fruit, kid’s cereals or even pickles being added to beer these days. But when we are discussing the essentials, water, malt, hops and yeast are the foundation. SP

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