Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: It’s complicated, but easy.
Let’s dive in.
For the novice taking on home brewing for the first time, the list of materials, equipment and ingredients can seem daunting. But once compiled, the process of making craft beer is inherently simple. AND FUN!
Our goal? We essentially want to make sugar water and leave it up to the yeast to make the beer. That’s right, we make the sugar water and yeast do the heavy lifting by eating the fermentable sugars to make carbonation (CO2), alcohol, and some smaller groups of fermentation by-products.
But, as most things in life, the quality (and consistency) is in the details.
Starting with your recipe, brewers – like chefs – will want to ask themselves, “What do I want my craft beer to taste like?” For it is in the concept that a brewer can then begin to imagine and eventually create the product of their imagination. Creating a recipe is a great topic for another time, however, for now, I’ll stick with the process…
Once a brewer has their recipe, it’s time to turn on some burners. Step one is mashing…with your grain milled, the idea is again very simple: let’s combine milled malt with hot water to extract sugar. Depending on temperatures, enzymes in this process will create a combination of fermentable and non-fermentable sugars. It may be easiest to think about this part in a different way… the amount of desired future alcohol (ABV) content AND the body of the beer. Naturally, different specialty malts will of course contribute to the overall flavor of the finished beer, but in terms of mashing we are trying to get our recipes’ desired fermentable sugars and non-fermentable sugars.
After mashing we want to separate our sugar water (wort) from the malt. This process is called lautering whereby a brewer will essentially recirculate the wort over the grain bed until the wort strains off into a clear liquid. We then move that clear wort over to our boiling vessel, and proceed to sparge (rinse) the remaining grain bed with hot water in order to strip away the last bits of sugars that have been trapped in the grain bed.
Now that we have our volume of wort we will begin our next part of the process: the boil.
In terms of craft brewing, the idea behind this step in the process is straight forward with an end result of the following two main points: boiling creates a sterilized environment and extracts different acids from hops that will contribute to bitterness and aroma.
I’m going to stop right there for the simple fact that there are a lot more complex reactions as well as opportunities to toss in adjunct ingredients for other flavor compounds and more, but for us, in terms of the underlying process that’s sufficient for today’s post.
So now that we have a boiled wort with hop additions, the time has come to cool the wort and add oxygen so the yeast have the best environment for them to do their thing: eat.
Depending on the yeast, the set temperature range will be different, but with an ideal temperature the yeast will be happy and will begin eating the fermentable sugars in order to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide (as mentioned above there are other byproducts).
If the proper amount of yeast is pitched and the proper temperatures are maintained, in a few days to weeks the yeast will finish eating and begin to settle to the bottom of the fermenter- of course not all yeast flocculate (settle) the same, but the now-beer will be more or less complete.
For the hobbyist or commercial brewer, the next step is to get this craft beer packaged…bottles, cans, kegs, whatever you want to do is up to you! Each packaging offers its own benefits so we can save that for a future topic too!
