See How Beer Is Brewed
with
Garrett Oliver
It may taste great with peanuts, but beer brewing can be as much of an art form as wine-making. Take a trip through Brooklyn Brewery with Garret Oliver and see how a bottle of beer goes from barley malt to your drink of choice.
Transcript: See How Beer Is Brewed
Hi, my name is Garrett Oliver and I'm the brew master of the Brooklyn Brewery here for About.com. Today, I'm going to show you how beer is made.Brewing Beer: Ingredients and Flavors
The basic building block for traditional beer is barley malt. You know beer is kind of a strange food in that most people who may drink it every day really don't have the slightest idea what it is.In this case, this is pilsner malt that is coming from Germany. We have malts here from the UK. We have malts from the United States, from Canada, from Belgium. They all are varietal like wine grapes. They have different flavors, and they give us different aromas. But, this is where were getting our sugar from. What we're going to do is, we're going to use this grain. We're going to break the starch down into sugar and were then going to end up fermenting that.
Brewing Beer: Prepare the Barley Malt
So, what I have here in my hand is barley malt and what barley malt is, is barley that’s been sprouted. It's been put in water, steeped in water for a few days, and it starts to sprout. We actually arrest that process about three days in -we drain off all the water. It's put into a kiln and then it's dried, and we end up with this. We can now use those enzymes in the mashing process to break down the starches into sugars so that we can use them to ferment.Beer Brewing: Mash Stage
What you're looking at here is the mash. This is the starting point of the brewing process. And whenever you're making an alcoholic beverage you have to start off with sugars to ferment. But it's not like wine - in the case of beer you are actually starting off with starch. And here's our starch. Now if you look at these little white flecks here that's that starch from the barley. We're going to be using the natural enzymes that are in the malt to convert all this starch into sugar. Then were going to separate that sugar away from the grain husk and were going to end up boiling it and later in the process we’re going to be fermenting this into beer.Grapenuts is made from malted barley, so if you ever had Grapenuts you'd realize what this smells like and what it tastes like. Then it's time to separate the sugars away from the grain husk. We don't need the grain husk in the brewing process. So, were going to do that in a vessel over here called the laudertung. And the laudertung is essentially a sieve. You can see a fine set of screens and it's these screens that are going to hold the grain husk in place while we rinse the mash with hot water and rinse all of the sugars away from the grain husk.
So, when we’re done this vessel will be full of grain husk and the kettle behind me will be full a sweet liquid which is called the wort. And the wort is what were actually going to ferment into beer.
Beer Brewing: Add the Mash to a Sieve
And now the mash is ready for transferring over to our laudertung. Now as you can see this looks quite a bit different then it did earlier. You don't see all that white starch and that because all the starch has broken down into sugars. All we have left here are these little bits of husk and here is our sweet liquid which is called the wort and what you're seeing now is the entire mash being pumped over to the laudertung. The rakes that you see that are rotating have a set of knives that cut through the grain bed and allow the liquid to flow through more easily.Brewing Beer: Hops
Once we have this all transferred over to here, were going to start to send the wort which will now be clear over to our kettle. And the kettle is where we’re going to end up boiling the wort with hops. The hops are the main spice in beer that our going to give us bitterness, that are going to give us flavor and they're going to give us aroma. This is going to be steam fired. So, were going to heat this up to 216 degrees, well bring that wort to a boil, and it'll be boiling for about an hour and a half.Brewing Beer: Heat Exchanger
So, once were finished boiling over here in the kettle, the next step, once we've removed the hops, is to send it through the heat exchanger. And that's the blue device over here on the floor. And what it does is hot wort which is at 200 something degrees goes in and cold wort comes out. And cold water goes in and hot water comes out. What actually happens is that we recapture the heat from the wort and send it back to our hot water tank. So we can't put the yeast into hot wort so were bringing it down to about 58 degrees Fahrenheit. It'll then run through a sterilized hose into one of these vessels that you see behind me into the fermentation tank.Brewing Beer: Yeast and Fermentation
Now, in this tank we've added our yeast and the yeast is consuming the sugars in the wort and it's giving off carbon dioxide and its giving off alcohol, Its giving off a lot of the flavors that we associate with beer. The yeast is very active and you can see the beer is completely cloudy. It's actually not quite beer yet it s somewhere between being beer and wort.And you have a lot of carbon dioxide being created there. It's a little bit of a spray that's carbon dioxide and yeast. And in fact, what you're seeing here, that's the carbon dioxide that’s being created inside this tank. When we want to trap some all we do is close that and then in this tank all of this carbon dioxide is going to dissolve into that beer and give us a nice natural carbonation. But not quite yet.
Brewing Beer: Finishing Stages
Now, once we finish fermenting over here well drop down the temperature of this vessel. As you can see, its cone shaped at the bottom, this allows the yeast to settle into the bottom of the cone. It will then undergo an aging process. Once were done with that the beer may or may not be filtered depending upon what kind of beer we're making and it will run into this tank. This is called the bright tank, and the bright tank is where we make any adjustments in carbonation and at that point the beer is ready to be kegged or bottled.And now the final step, enjoying our beer. That's great. Thanks for watching. To learn more visit us at About.com.