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As almost any cereal containing certain sugars can undergo spontaneous fermentation due to wild yeasts in the air, it is possible that beer-like beverages were independently developed throughout the world soon after a tribe or culture had domesticated cereal. Chemical tests of ancient pottery jars reveal that beer was produced about 7,000 years ago in what is today Iran, and was one of the first-known biological engineering tasks where the biological process of fermentation is used in a process.
In Mesopotamia, the oldest evidence of beer is believed to be a 6,000-year-old Sumerian tablet depicting people drinking a beverage through reed straws from a communal bowl. A 3900-year-old Sumerian poem honoring Ninkasi, the patron goddess of brewing, contains the oldest surviving beer recipe, describing the production of beer from barley via bread. (Full article...)
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A number of independent peer-reviewed studies in modern medical literature support the finding that moderate alcohol consumption is associated with benefits in longevity because of reductions in coronary heart disease, stroke, and some other diseases (Dairdron et al.; Ely & Berne; Facchini et al.; Langer et al.; Mennen et al.; Paassilta et al.; Rimm et al.; Thun et al.; Wang & Barker; Zhang et al.). Proposed mechanisms of these benefits include the effect of alcohol on cholesterol levels, insulin activity, blood pressure, and the chemistry of blood clotting. Frequently, such studies qualify these findings with admonitions against heavy alcohol consumption or abuse, due to the negative health effects often associated with this behavior. (Full article...)
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- hops contribute a bitterness that balances the sweetness of the malt,
- hops also contribute aromas which range from flowery to citrus to herbal and,
- hops have an antibiotic effect that favours the activity of brewer's yeast over less desirable microorganisms.
While hop plants are grown by farmers all around the world in many different varieties, there is no major commercial use for hops other than in beer. Today, the principal production centers for the UK are in Kent (which produces Kent Golding hops) and Worcestershire. Other important production areas include the state of Washington in the USA, Belgium, Germany, and the Czech Republic. (Full article...)
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Brewing specifically refers to the process of steeping, such as with tea and water, and extraction, usually through heat. Wine and cider technically aren't brewed, rather vinted, as the entire fruit is pressed, and then the liquid extracted. Mead isn't technically brewed, as heating often isn't used in the mixing process, and the honey is used entirely, as opposed to being heated with water, and then discarded, as are hops and barley in beer, and or tea leaves for tea, and coffee beans for coffee. Spices could technically be brewed into a mead though.
Brewing has a very long history, and archeological evidence suggests that this technique was used in ancient Egypt. Descriptions of various beer recipes can be found in Sumerian writings, some of the oldest known writing of any sort.
The brewing industry is part of most western economies. (Full article...)
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Portal:Beer/Selected article/5 Brettanomyces is a non-spore forming genus of yeast in the family Saccharomycetaceae, and is often colloquially referred to as "Brett". The genus name Dekkera is used interchangeably with Brettanomyces, as it describes the teleomorph or spore forming form of the yeast. The cellular morphology of the yeast can vary from ovoid to long "sausage" shaped cells. The yeast is acidogenic and when grown on glucose rich media produce large amounts of acetic acid. Brettanomyces is important to both the brewing and wine industries due to the sensory compounds it produces.
In most beer styles, Brettanomyces is viewed as a contaminant and the characteristics it imparts are considered unwelcome "off-flavours". However, in some styles -- particularly certain traditional Belgian ales -- it is appreciated and encouraged. Lambic and gueuze owe their unique flavour profiles to Brettanomyces. (Full article...)
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Ethanol for use in alcoholic beverages, and the vast majority of ethanol for use as fuel, is produced by fermentation: when certain species of yeast (most importantly, Saccharomyces cerevisiae) metabolize sugar in the absence of oxygen, they produce ethanol and carbon dioxide. The overall chemical reaction conducted by the yeast may be represented by the chemical equation
The process of culturing yeast under conditions to produce alcohol is referred to as brewing. Brewing can only produce relatively dilute concentrations of ethanol in water; concentrated ethanol solutions are toxic to yeast. The most ethanol-tolerant strains of yeast can survive in up to about 25% ethanol (by volume). (Full article...)
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High esteem of Belgian beer is supported by beer experts such as Michael Jackson. Although beer production in Belgium is now dominated by InBev (the world's largest brewer by volume) and Alken-Maes, there remain 125 breweries in the country, producing about 500 standard beers. When special one-off beer styles are included, the total number of types of Belgian beer exceeds 1000.
These days, Belgian beers are sold in brown (or sometimes dark green) tinted glass bottles (to avoid negative effects of light on the beverage) and sealed with a cork, a metal crown cap, or sometimes both. Some beers are refermented (subjected to a final fermentation phase) in the bottle. These are often labeled "bottle-conditioned." Although many major brands of beer are available at most supermarkets, beverage centers located throughout the country generally offer a far wider selection, albeit at somewhat higher prices. (Full article...)
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Portal:Beer/Selected article/8 Gruit (or sometimes grut) is an old fashioned herb mixture used for bittering and flavouring beer, before the extensive use of hops. Gruit or gruit ale may also refer to the beverage produced using gruit.
Gruit was a combination of herbs, some of the most common being mildly to moderately narcotic: sweet gale (Myrica gale), mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), yarrow (Achillea millefolium), heather (Calluna vulgaris) and Marsh Labrador Tea (Rhododendron tomentosum, formerly known as Ledum palustre). Gruit varied somewhat, each gruit producer adding additional herbs to produce unique tastes, flavours, and effects. Other adjunct herbs were juniper berries, ginger, caraway seed, aniseed, nutmeg, and cinnamon or even hops in variable proportions; many of these ingredients may have psychotropic properties too. Some gruit ingredients are known now to have preservative qualities.
Some traditional types of unhopped beers such as sahti in Finland, which is spiced with juniper berries, and twigs, have survived the advent of hops, although gruit itself hasn't.
The 1990s microbreweries movement in the USA and Europe has seen a renewed interest for unhopped beers and quite a few have tried their hand at reviving ales brewed with gruits, or plants that once were used in it. Notorious current commercial example would be, to name but a few, Fraoch (using heather flowers, sweet gale and ginger) and Alba (using pine twigs and spruce buds) from Williams Brothers in Scotland, Myrica (using sweet gale) from O'Hanlons in England, Gageleer (also using sweet gale) from Proefbrouwerij in Belgium, and the Cervoise from Lancelot in Brittanny (using a gruit containing heather flowers, spices and some hops). (Full article...)
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Some methods involve filtration media such as sheets or candles, while others use a fine powder made of, for example, diatomaceous earth, also called kieselguhr, which is introduced into the beer and recirculated past screens to form a filtration bed.
Filters range from rough filters that remove much of the yeast and any solids (e.g. hops, grain particles) left in the beer, to filters tight enough to strain color and body from the beer. Normally used filtration ratings are divided into rough, fine and sterile. Rough filtration leaves some cloudiness in the beer, but it is noticeably clearer than unfiltered beer. Fine filtration gives a glass of beer that you could read a newspaper through, with no noticeable cloudiness. Finally, as its name implies, sterile filtration is fine enough that almost all microorganisms in the beer are removed during the filtration process. (Full article...)
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Portal:Beer/Selected article/10 Bock is a strong lager, which has origins in the Hanseatic town Einbeck, Germany. The name is a corruption of the medieval German brewing town of Einbeck. The original Bocks were dark beers, brewed from high-coloured malts. Modern Bocks can be dark, amber or pale in colour. Bock was traditionally brewed for special occasions, often religious festivals such as Christmas, Easter or Lent.
Bocks have a long history of being brewed and drunk by Roman Catholic monks in Germany. During the Spring religious season of Lent, monks were required to fast.
In the twentieth century, bock beers gained an undeserved reputation (primarily in the United States) for being brewed from the dregs of previous brewings. This is impossible, as the "dregs" were not clearly defined and the leftovers from the brewing process are not fermentable. The rumour may have started because some brewers used inferior ingredients or a large quantity of adjuncts in their bocks. (Full article...)
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Portal:Beer/Selected article/11 Steam beer may be defined as a highly effervescent beer made by brewing lager yeasts at ale fermentation temperatures. It has two distinct but related meanings:
- Historic steam beer, by all accounts bad-tasting, produced in California from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s;
- Modern California Common beer, the official name for the beer family which includes Anchor Steam® beer.
Historic steam beer, associated with San Francisco and the U. S. West Coast, was brewed with lager yeast without the use of refrigeration. It was an improvised process, originating out of necessity, perhaps as early as the Gold Rush. It was considered a cheap and low-quality beer, as shown by references to it in literature of the 1890s and 1900s.
Modern steam beer, properly known in the brewing community as California Common beer, was originated by Anchor Brewing Company, which trademarked the name Anchor Steam® Beer in 1981. Although the modern company has corporate continuity with a small brewery which was still making traditional steam beer in the 1950s, Anchor Steam beer is a craft-brewed lager. The company does not claim any close similarity between it and turn-of-the-century steam beer.
Explanations of the word "steam" are all speculative. The carbon dioxide pressure produced by the process was very high, and one possibility is that it was necessary to let off "steam" before attempting to dispense the beer. According to the Anchor Brewing Company, the name "steam" came from the fact that the brewery had no way to effectively chill the boiling wort using traditional means. So they pumped the hot wort up to large, shallow, open-top bins on the roof of the brewery so that it would be rapidly chilled by the cool air blowing in off the Pacific Ocean. Thus while brewing, the brewery had a distinct cloud of steam around the roof let off by the wort as it cooled, hence the name. (Full article...)
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The event traditionally takes place during the 16 days up to and including the first Sunday in October. The schedule was changed following German reunification in 1990 so that if the first October Sunday is the 1st or 2nd then the festival will go on until the October 3rd (German Unity Day). Thus, the festival is now 17 days when the 1st Sunday is October 2nd and 18 days when it is October 1st. The festival is held on an area named the Theresienwiese (Field [or meadow] of Therese), often called “d’ Wiesn” for short. Beer plays a central role in the fair, with every festival beginning with a keg of beer tapped by the Mayor of Munich who declares “O'zapft is!” (Bavarian: “It’s tapped!”). A special Oktoberfest beer is brewed for the occasion, which is slightly darker and stronger, in both taste and alcohol. It is served in a one-liter-tankard called Maß. The first mass is served to the Bavarian Minister-President. Only local Munich breweries are allowed to serve this beer in a Bierzelt, a beer tent which is large enough for thousands.
Visitors also consume large quantities of food, most of it traditional hearty fare such as sausage, hendl (chicken), käsespätzle (cheese noodles), and sauerkraut, along with such Bavarian delicacies as roast ox tails. (Full article...)
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Ales are common in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, Germany, the eastern provinces of Canada and among craft beer consumers in the United States. The German word for "top-fermenting" is "obergärig"; the French equivalent is "Haute fermentation".
Ale typically takes 3 to 4 weeks to make, although some varieties can take as long as 4 months. The Sumerians are credited with discovering beer in approximately 3000 BCE. They made ales in a shorter time than we do now because they did not add any hops. Lagers take a lot longer than ales to make and tend to be less sweet. (Full article...)
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Porter was first recorded as being made and sold in London in the 1730s. It became very popular in Great Britain and Ireland, and was responsible for the trend toward large regional breweries with tied pubs. With the advent of pale ale the popularity of dark beers decreased, apart from Ireland where the breweries of Guinness, Murphy's and Beamish grew in size with international interest in Irish (or dry) stout. (Full article...)
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The Trappists, like many other religious orders, brewed beer to fund their work, and monastery brewhouses existed all over Europe. Many of them were destroyed during the French Revolution and the World Wars. Among these monastic breweries, the Trappists were certainly the most active brewers. The growing popularity of Trappist beers drew some unscrupulous brewers with no connection to the order to label their beers as "Trappist". After some unsuccessful lawsuits, the order successfully sued one such brewer in 1962 in Ghent, Belgium.
In 1997, eight Trappist abbeys — six from Belgium, one from the Netherlands, and one from Germany — founded the International Trappist Association (ITA) to prevent non-Trappist commercial companies from abusing the Trappist name. This private association created a logo that is assigned to goods (cheese, beer, wine, etc.) that respect precise production criteria. There are currently seven breweries that are allowed to have their products wear the Authentic Trappist Product logo: Bières de Chimay, Orval Brewery, Rochefort Brewery, Westmalle Brewery, Westvleteren Brewery, Achel Brewery, and De Koningshoeven Brewery. (Full article...)
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It typically reaches an alcohol strength of 8–12% abv and is brewed from specific gravities as high as 1.120. Their natural sweetness is usually balanced with a degree of hoppy bitterness. Most barley wines range in colour from ambers to deep reddish-browns.
It is called a barley wine because it can be as strong as wine; but since it is made from grain rather than fruit, it is in fact a beer. In the United States barley wines are required for this reason to be called "barley wine-style ales." This is taken by some to imply that they are not truly barley wines; in fact it only means that they, like any barley wines, are not truly wines. (Full article...)
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Beer is the most popular alcoholic beverage in Japan, accounting for nearly two thirds of the 9 billion liters of alcohol consumed in 2006. Major brewers include Asahi, Kirin, and Sapporo, while small local breweries supply distinct tasting beers. Lager beers are most common, but beers made with lower grain contents called Happoushu (low malt beer, sparkling alcoholic drink) have captured a large part of the market due to lower taxes.
Japan has liberal laws in regards with the selling and consumption of alcohol. Beer can be purchased at a wide variety of outlets, including supermarkets, convenience stores, kiosks at train stations, and in vending machines. Some vending machines have motion activated advertising that play beer commercials and jingles on small TV screens embedded into them. (Full article...)
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The oldest brewery still in operation is the Cascade Brewery, established in Tasmania in 1824.
The majority of the large Australian breweries are now owned by the conglomerates Foster's Group and Lion Nathan. A notable exception is Coopers, which is the only large brewery that is still privately owned. Boutique brands of beer are fast becoming the flavour of the masses which is forcing the large brewhouses to change their ideas on what the drinkers want. Australia's numerous microbreweries are gaining decent market share.
Despite its heavy international presence, the so-called original Australian beer, Foster's Lager, has relatively low appeal throughout Australia. (Full article...)
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Lager is distinguished from ale by its yeast. Lager yeast ferments at colder temperatures and flocculates on the bottom of the fermenting vessel, while ale yeast ferments at warmer temperatures and settles on the tops of fermentation tanks.[citation needed] The organism most often associated with lager brewing is Saccharomyces pastorianus, a close relative of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
As the modern definition of lager relates only to the method of fermentation, lager beers' characteristics are quite varied.
The default lager encountered in worldwide production is light in color and usually represents the helles, pale lager or Pilsener styles. The flavor of these lighter lagers is usually mild and the producers often recommend that the beers be served refrigerated. However, the examples of lager beers produced worldwide vary greatly in flavor, color, and composition.
In color, while helles and pale lager represent the lightest lagers at as pale a color as 6 EBC, the darkest are Baltic porters which can be as dark as 400 EBC; darker German lagers are often referred to as Dunkel lagers.
The flavor of a lager can be quite simple, with the most mild being light lagers. The most complexly-flavored lagers are usually the darkest, although few lagers feature strong hop flavoring compared to an ale of similar alcohol by volume. In general, however, lagers display less fruitiness and spiciness than ales, simply because the lower fermentation temperatures associated with lager brewing cause the yeast to produce fewer of the esters and phenols associated with those flavors.
In strength, lagers represent some of the world's most alcoholic beers. The very strongest lagers often fall into the German-originated doppelbock style, with the strongest of these commercially produced, Samichlaus, reaching 14% ABV. (Full article...)
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Sugars are the common substrate of fermentation, and typical examples of fermentation products are ethanol, lactic acid, and hydrogen. However, more exotic compounds can be produced by fermentation, such as butyric acid and acetone. Yeast carries out fermentation in the production of ethanol in beers, wines and other alcoholic drinks, along with the production of large quantities of carbon dioxide. Fermentation occurs in mammalian muscle during periods of intense exercise where oxygen supply becomes limited.
Fermentation, as a step in the brewing process, starts as soon as yeast is added to the cooled wort. This is also the point at which the product is first called beer. It is during this stage that sugars won from the malt are metabolized into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Fermentation tanks come in all sorts of forms, from enormous tanks which can look like storage silos, to five gallon glass carboys in a homebrewer's closet. (Full article...)
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Because of its unique shape, extra care must be taken when pouring a beer into a wheat beer glass to produce the desired head volume. The traditional method of pouring Weißbier is to first rinse the glass with cold water, then, without drying the glass, hold the bottle and glass almost horizontally while slowly pouring the beer. When the level of the beer touches the lip of the bottle, slowly bring the glass upright. When there is less than one inch (or a few centimeters) of beer left in the bottle, swirl the bottle vigorously to pick up the sediment and create foam, which is poured on top. If done correctly, the foam should just crest the lip of the glass without pouring over. (Full article...)
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IPA descends from the earliest pale ales of the 17th century, when the term "pale ale" probably simply distinguished ales which were light in color compared with brown ales of that day. By the mid-18th century, pale ale was mostly manufactured with coke-fired malt, which produced less smoking and roasting of barley in the malting process, and hence produced a paler beer. One such variety of beer was October beer, a pale well-hopped brew popular among the landed classes, who brewed it domestically; once brewed it was intended to cellar two years.
Double India Pale Ales (also abbreviated as Double IPAs or IIPAs) are a strong, very hoppy style of pale beer. Also known as Imperial IPAs, perhaps in reference to the Russian Imperial Stout, a much stronger version of the English Stout, these beers are essentially India Pale Ales with higher amounts of malt and hops. Double IPAs typically have alcohol content above 7% by volume. IBUs are in the very high range (60+). Such "style" labels can seem arbitrary however, since the aforementioned Ballantine IPA in its original formulation was certainly well above these benchmarks. (Full article...)
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Despite a widespread belief that beers in Scotland used fewer hops than in England, all the available evidence shows that the Scots imported hops from around the world and used them extensively. (Full article...)
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Ingredients which are standard for certain beers, such as wheat in a wheat beer, may be termed adjuncts when used in beers which could be made without them — such as adding wheat to a pale ale for the purpose of creating a lasting head. The sense here is that the ingredient is additional and strictly unnecessary, though it may be beneficial and attractive. Under the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot purity law it would be considered that an adjunct is any beer ingredient other than water, barley and hops; this, however, is an extreme view and is not standard.
The term adjunct is often used to refer to corn and rice, the two adjuncts commonly used by pale lager brewing companies as substitutes for barley malt. This use of ingredients as substitutes for the main starch source, usually to lower the cost of production, is where the term adjunct is most often used.
Adjuncts can be broadly separated into solids and liquid syrups. Solid adjuncts are ingredients such as cereals, flakes, grits and flours which must be added to the mash tun in order to convert the starch into simple sugars which the yeast can utilise during fermentation. Some cereals have a higher gelatinisation temperature than the standard mashing temperatures and must be cooked in a cereal cooker to gelatinise the starch before adding to the mash. Liquid syrups, on the other hand, are designed to be added directly to the kettle and therefore can be used to reduce loading on the mash and lauter tun and effectively increase the brewhouse capacity.
Other benefits of using adjuncts include reducing cost, improving consistency, diluting wort nitrogen (thereby improving shelf life) and reducing colour (or increasing colour with roasted cereals and caramels.) (Full article...)
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