Homebrewing: A Look Into the Process

Homebrewing has become very popular lately, turning into a hobby enjoyed by thousands upon thousands of individuals. Before you begin brewing your own beer, though, it's important to understand a little bit about the process behind it. How does barley become beer? How does beer become carbonated? What exactly is yeast, and what does it do?

Alcohol is made from many things, but beer begins its life as barley. The barley is processed into a sugary substance call wort. This wort is created by cooking the starches from the barley in a method that turns them into sugars. These sugars become one of the main ingredients in beer, and can influence the flavor tremendously. You can also just use a malt extract to create your wort, which is much simpler and will definitely yield more consistent results.

After you have your wort, the next step will be adding yeast to the mixture which is what begins the fermenting process. Yeast is a living organism that feeds on the sugars in your wort mixture. As the yeast eats the sugar, it excretes alcohol back into the mix, which is what gives you that nice little buzz from your beer. It takes about a week or two to allow the yeast to ferment your mixture to the proper point for bottling. During this process, you allow all of the carbon dioxide to escape from the beer, so it's very flat and won't taste very good. This leads to the next step, which is bottling.

The most important part about bottling your beer is remembering to add the sugar to your mix. This is what causes the beer to become carbonated, and turns it into the final product that we all love. Since the yeast is still alive, it consumes the extra sugar that you mix in with it, and creates the carbon dioxide that carbonates the beer. That's why it's important to bottle your beer right away, and make sure that each bottle is well sealed. Letting your bottles sit for a week or so will allow them to become properly carbonated, and ready to drink. At this point you want to make sure that you refrigerate them in order to put the yeast into a dormant state. If you don't do this, then it will keep fermenting and carbonating your drink until there's too much pressure in the bottle and the seal breaks somehow. This will ruin your drink and waste money, so you'll want to be very aware at this time in the beer lifecycle.

As you can see, there's really not much to homebrewing beer. Just a few main steps and you've got a great alcoholic beverage that's sure to liven up any party. Remember to keep track of your ingredients with each batch, though. You don't want to stumble on the perfect recipe and not be able to reproduce it.