Though it's something you typically find in a bar or grocery
store, beer is surprisingly easy to make and enjoy at home. With the
right equipment, the right ingredients and a little patience, you can
be on your way to creating a true microbrew all your own.
Beer in Brief
If you take a trip to your local grocery store and peruse the cold
drink aisle, it's sometimes surprising how many brands and kinds of
beer are available to the general consumer. Even in remote country
stores you can usually find two or three different kinds of beer to
quaff on a hot summer day, and major outlets can carry dozens of
varieties.
Beer production itself is nothing new; Egyptian, Chinese
and Mesopotamian cultures concocted their own varieties as far back as
3000 B.C.E., and beer as we know it was brewed in monasteries
throughout the Middle Ages as a safe substitute for questionable
drinking water. But the multitude of varieties available today
represents only a fraction of the possibilities when you alter the
amount and type of any of the four main ingredients: water, grain,
yeast and hops.
At its most basic, beer is really just a fermented tea; flavorful
plant matter and complex sugars are steeped in boiling water, then
cooled and placed in a vessel where yeast is added to convert those
sugars into alcohol. The simplicity of this formula allows for an
almost infinite variety of flavors, but the two main branches of the
beer family tree are lagers and ales.
Lagers are made from "bottom-fermenting" yeasts, which (as the name
would suggest) settle at the bottom of the brew and work at cooler
temperatures over a longer period of time. The beer that results from
using this yeast is often lighter in color and flavor, and examples
include pilsners, bocks and dunkels. Germans have a long tradition of
brewing world-class lagers, and many of the most popular American
beers (Coors, Miller and Budweiser to name a few) are technically
lagers, but through mass production, they have lost much of the
character that makes lagers so appealing.
Ales on the other hand are made from "top-fermenting" yeasts, which
thrive at warmer temperatures (55-75 degrees F) and produce beers that
are darker, richer and more full-bodied. Most British beers are
classified as ales, and some of the most common include bitters,
stouts, porters and blondes. Ales are usually more forgiving than
lagers in terms of timeline and temperature, so this how-to will focus
on the production of a smooth, mildly-flavored amber ale, but with a
little practice and experimentation you can make nearly any kind of
beer you want in the comfort of your own home.