Home Brewing Ingredients and Why They Are So Important
Home brewing beer can be quite a fun and educational process. Although there are many different ways a home brewer can make his or her home brewed beer, there are some essential ingredients which must be included at all times when homebrewing. These main homebrew ingredients are malt, hops, yeast, sugars, and water.
The first most basic homebrewing ingredient is malt. The most commonly used is barley malt. There are also other types of things such as corn and rice which can be added to the home brewed beer, but these are considered as adjuncts. Barley malt comes in two different types, 2-row malt and 6-row malt where 2-row malt has larger grains and less husk.
The whole malting process begins by simply steeping the grains until they are in germination mode, then they are quickly dried. What happens is the enzymes which convert the starches to sugars are “frozen” in their tracks until the steeping, or mash, begins during the home brewing process.
The next ingredient is hops. Hops add the flavors, aromas and bitterness often found in beers for over 1,000 years. They act as a balancing factor in home brewing with their special oils which are released during the brewing process. Hops consist of many different levels of acidity and can be purchased in pellet, leaf, or whole hop forms.
The next home brewing ingredient is yeast. There are two types of yeasts for home brewing. The two types of home brewing yeast are ale and lager yeasts. The main differences between the two yeasts are through the characteristics they provide to the end home brewed product. Ale yeasts offer a much more “floral” aroma and such and are much easier to handle during fermentation for many new and experienced brewers. Ale yeast is a top fermenting yeast, which means it ferments and foams at the top and then settles to the bottom. Ale yeast can also ferment and much higher temperatures that lager yeasts.
Lager yeasts actually require much lower temperatures for fermentation and are referred to as “bottom-fermenting” yeasts. It is the lower temperatures during fermentation which keep the yeasts from providing similar characteristics such as a floral aroma like that of ales.
Most yeasts are manufactured commercially and can be purchased in liquid or dry form for home brewers.
Water, of course, is one of the most essential ingredients and it can also alter the outcome of your end home brew product. Waters come in many “styles”. For example, water in London could be much more “minerally”, or hard, that that of water from Los Angeles, California. These characteristics are actually considered in the official styles of beers. In order to keep in line with the official style of the beer, many additions will have to be made in order to emulate the hardness or softness of the water where the original style came from.
Sugars are another thing which many home brewers may use during the home brewing process, especially for such beers as Belgian Strong ales and such. These sugars are added in order to affect the taste and alcohol levels of the home brewed beer, giving the yeast much more sugar to ferment. In addition, priming sugars are often used for the bottling process in order to add carbonation in the bottle.
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