How does beer become alcoholic in the production process?
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It starts off with barley malt. That’s barley grain that’s been moistened, allowed to germinate, and then kilned to stop the germination. It’s then crushed to give you “grist” (if you’ve ever heard the expression “grist to the mill”).
The grist, thanks to the germination, is chock full of wonderful starch. You then put it in water, and raise the water to a specific magic temperature. At this temperature a wonderful thing happens. Some enzymes in the malt turn the starch into sugar. In a miracle of nature, the magic temperature is reached when the surface of the water goes cloudy, a reminder that the Good Lord wants us to drink beer.
This sugary liquid is called “wort”. In the real olden days you’d do a couple more mashes to get progressively weaker wort, to make beer for the ladies and children respectively. Regardless we next boil up the wort with some hops, to add flavour.
So we’ve got our hoppy, malty, sugary solution, the next step is to turn that sugar into alcohol. Fortunately, yeast, within a reasonable temperature range, eats sugar and pisses out alcohol, all the while belching out carbon dioxide. Give it a week, and if you’re a real ale man, and not doing industrial brewing, congratulations, you’ve got beer, and you can now make other people more interesting, ladies more attractive, and yourself more debonair.
Ps. About 25 years since I’ve done brewing but I think this is right, so welcome any corrections!
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