Home Brew - Ingredients.

I know some of you have been interested in home brewing yourselves, and i hope my previous blogs about the process of brewing have been helpful in that regard. I'm now going to go back to basics and look in more depth about the ingredients that go into making your beer. Looking at how each ingredient affects that overall flavour, colour, style and indeed drinkability of the beer. With your help at each stage, through the comments section at the bottom and voting through the facebook page - i'd like to come up with a crowd brew recipe for my next brew and one collaborater will receive a case of 6 bottles of the finished brew.

So, this post will give a general overview of the ingredient areas and how they affect the beer, and then i'll do seperate blog posts giving different ingredient options for each area from which we chose what goes into the final brew. So those areas are Water, Malt, Hops, Yeast.

Water is a lot more important than you'd think. It's the biggest part of your beer in the end and you'd be surprised how much of an affect different impurities and additives to the water supply in different areas of the country can radically change the taste of a beer. This is why different countries and different regions produce vastly different tasting beers even when the other ingredients are fairly similar. To this end a lot of home brewers use mineral water where the local water supply is not so great, or boil their water first to boil off impurities. Additives can be added, to change the characteristics of the water as well, such as the Gypsum i've used in my Hefeweizen recipe. Water quality is that important that in Germany there was a law (now not enforced) called the Water Purification Law that set a standard of water purity that must be used in the brewing process.

Malts inform the colour and the base flavours of the beer as well as providing the majority of the sugars that will be turned into alcohol in the brewing process. They can come in the original grain format, which needs mashing (essentially boiled in water for a long period to extract the sugars and flavours and create a wort (the liquid extraction of the malt). It can also come in liquid malt extracts which make for easy home brewing by providing a wort in a can that just needs poured into your beer mix. Lastly, Dry Malt extract which i haven't actually encountered yet but which is a dry powder that you add to hot water to create a wort. There are a world of different malt varieties to choose from and you would normally use a mixture of malts to create a complex flavour base. The main characteristic you'll get from a malt is its colour rating, which will be found as a score under the Standard Reference Method (SRM) scale. I've read a bit about this scale and don't quite understand how it works but essentially a lower score is a lighter colour and a higher score is a darker colour. A lighter colour will generally have a more delicate flavour and a darker one a more intense flavour. Low levels generally being single figure and a higher level being 20+.

You can also get speciality grains that will have flavourings such as whisky malts which can be added to add an extra flavour dimension to the brew.

Hops provide the top notes of the beer and affect the aroma, and the aftertaste of the beer. These provide the spicy, floral notes that you get in some beers. Like malts these can come from a more than one form, you can get pellets which are a concentrated form of hops or leaves which is the natural form of the hops. The main characteristic you'll look at in a hop is the alpha acid level. This will normally be given in the form of a percentage level from a low acid hop of around 3-4% to a high level of around 13-14%. This figure affects the bitterness of the beer, the higher the alpha acid level the more bitter the beer will be.

Yeast is the ingredient that will determine how much of the sugars in your brew will turn to alcohol and how quickly this will happen. Yeast has a huge say in the style of the beer you will produce and how strong it will be. There are two scales that you can look at to see what a yeast will do to your beer. These are attenuation and flocculation. Attenuation is a simple percentage that refers to the percentage of sugars in your beer that will be turned to alcohol. Flocculation refers to the clumping together of the yeast once it has been turned into alcohol. The level for a yeast will be given as high, medium or low. This refers to how quickly the yeast forms together and either rises to the top of the beer or sinks to the bottom out of the main body of liquid. A high flocculating yeast is quicker than a low one. Yeast can either come in liquid form or as a dry powder.

When making a recipe it is important to make sure all these ingredients compliment each other and are well balanced. Too hoppy and you'll get an overly bitter beer, too malty and it'll be more cloying, not enough malt or sugar and you'll have a very low alcohol beer, too much and you'll have a high alcohol beer.

So, we'll begin with Water - and ill have a blog up about that in the next few days.