How To Make Beer For Fun And Profit

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Just kidding! When you learn how to make beer, you're learning a fun hobby. Leave the profit to those other guys. You know the ones - the big corporate breweries with their watered down swill. You're better than that.
You know beer. What's more, you know good beer. You not only know the difference between and ale and a lager, you know why there's a difference. You can tell a Russian imperial stout from a wet hopped double IPA and you know the best glass to use to serve each. You love beer. You have a passion for beer. You, my friend, are a beer head and now you want to learn how to make beer of your own.
There's no mystery in learning how to make beer. It's four basic ingredients combined together and left alone for few weeks. What could be simpler?
Well, beer making, like all great art forms, is deceptive. The process is easy to learn and can take a lifetime to perfect. In other words, you can learn how to make beer in a day. Learning how to make beer right could take a bit longer.
To start with lets look at those four basic ingredients - water, malt, hops and yeast. These four can combine together in so many ways, it boggles the mind! The reason for this is variety.
There are a staggering amount of varieties of each ingredient, with the exception of water. The water in beer is always fairly basic. It only needs to be cold, clean and free of impurities in order to provide a blank base to build a beer upon. That's not true of the other three ingredients though.
Malt is roasted barley, rye or wheat. Simple enough! However, the different types of each grain and the different levels of roasting each can be subjected to makes for a number of different taste possibilities. In general though, barley is the most common grain used in brewing. In addition, the darker the roast, the more powerful the effect the malt will have on the beer.
Hops are the flowers of the hop plant. They were first used in beer as preservative. The bitter floral taste that we now almost universally associate with beer is due to the addition of hops. There are many varieties of hops available. Each one is rated in IBUs, or international bitterness units.
Some hops are mildly floral, while others can take your head off with their strength. They can also be added to the beer wet, meaning fresh off the plant, or dried. The addition of a high IBU wet hop will make a lot more of a statement, beer-wise, than a dried hop with a lower IBU. That's the great thing about learning how to make beer. The choice of what to add is yours!
Finally, the yeast. There are hundreds of varieties of yeast to choose from. Each one will, of course, convert the sugars in your beer to alcohol. However, in doing so, each one will also give off what are called esters. Esters are chemical agents that flavor beer. In addition, there are good esters and bad esters. Bad esters, as the name implies, give off bad flavors. That's why brewing has to be a fairly sterile process.
There are "wild" yeasts in the environment. If one of these gets into your beer, it will likely give off bad esters and you will have a batch of beer that has an aroma of skunk or a cabbage finish. Not the result you were hoping for.
In any event, learning how to make beer is a lifelong process. Shouldn't you get started?

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

John Gergets is a former attorney turned stay-at-home dad and works as a content writer at Class Act Content. An avid home brewer, you can read more about home brewing at John's website, Beer Brewing Information.

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