h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm a 23 year old chick from New Zealand doing a bartending course and I have to do a research project on beer. This led me to quite a few articles on this site (and where else would I have looked?). These accounted for a lot of the first third of my essay, (with a little help from some national geographic articles on ancient egyptians and my own preference for playing a bartender in online rpgs).

I have now hit a brick wall. I need to do a section on brewing, and this is not something, surprisingly, that there is a lot of information on online. So it would seem anyway. I was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction, as I would like to follow the ale path (I'm a stickler for the past and doing things the "right" way) and what little information I can find seems to be about lagers.

I would sincerely appreciate any help anyone could offer.

Thanks heaps

Kammy

Well, there are a lot of people here who claim to know a lot about ale, inncluding at least one (former?) researcher who brews the stuff, U179952 though it looks as if Toccata hasn't been here for a while.

You might get better results asking the same question either on <./>askh2g2</.> or on A4108330

Good luck with your quest.

Ben

Thanks heaps. Hopefully all that leads me somewhere. I didn't think it would be this hard to find instructions on how to make alcohol!!

Hi there...

I've brewed beer on a small scale before (and spent far too much time in various breweries), so I might be able to help a little...

Here's a quick description of the brewing process for real ale...


1)Choose your ingredients... There are three types of malted barley,
a) Pale Malt - produces the most sugar but doesn't add much in the way of colour or flavour
b) Crystal (or roast) malt... less sugar but much more flavour
c) Chocolate malt... the colour of roasted coffee beans - turns your beer completely black (think guinness), but adds very little sugar to the mixture and if used in too large a quantity will give a 'burnt' taste to your beer.

Most beers are made with a mixture of the various types of malt - nowadays very few breweries actually make their own malt however.

2)Take some malted barley, put it through a mill to break up the grains (don't turn it into flour - you just want to break the shells on the grains)

Breaking up the shells of the grains will allow water to extract sugars from the grain - next stage...

3) Throw the malt into what is called a 'mash tun', with very hot water... This water will extract the sugars and enzymes from the malt and after a few hours you'll end up with a 'wort' - the colour of beer, but without any alcohol in it (it's a horrible sugary, sticky mixture.

4) Drain off the wort - sell the solid residue to a local farmer for animal feed.

5) Add hops to the wort and boil for a couple of hours... The hops add the 'bitter' flavour to ale and also help improve the life of the beer (it'll keep longer).

6) Cool it down (to below 35° if memory serves me) and throw in some brewers yeast...
Some breweries never ever actually buy yeast, they'll take some yeast from the last batch of ale they made and add that to the next batch...
The only trouble with that method is that you risk yeast infections being transferred from one batch to the next (turning your lovely beer into malt vinegar).

After a week or so, your beer should have finished fermenting... drain off the liquid, leaving the dead yeast cells in the bottom of the container (again, this can be sold as animal feed). This is then usually left to stand in conditioning tanks for a week or so before being thrown into a barrel with some 'finings' (traditionally powdered fish swim bladders).

The finings are added as they attract the remaining dead yeast particles suspended in the liquid, the resulting 'clumps' of yeast and finings are then heavy enough to sink to the bottom of the barrel, leaving you with a clear, sediment-free beer.

Stick your beer on the back of a lorry and take it to the pub...

After that, if you want information about looking after the beer once it gets into the pub - have a look at this one A2346266

Hope that helps a little - if you need any other information - just shout!

Hi Kamorth

I don't know what detail you need but I just Googled(UK) 'Brewing process' and came up with a few hits.

Here are some basic ones
http://www.hogsback.co.uk/acatalog/The_Brewing_Process.html
http://www.hops.co.uk/sectiontwo/Brewing.htm - There is a diagram on this page.
http://www.greeneking.co.uk/brewing_process.htm - Some nice pictures of the brewery here.

...and it goes on. Interestingly all the hits on the first page are real ale independent breweries!

This lot might have some helpful info too - http://www.camra.org.uk/

Good luck
turvy

Thanks Guys!! I came top of the class!

We're doing Coffee now....

Yay!

turvy