Beer
Beer is an alcoholic beverage produced by the brewing and fermentation of starches from cereal grain—most commonly malted barley, although wheat, maize, rice, and oats are also used. The grain is mashed to convert starch in the grain to sugars, which dissolve in water to form wort. Fermentation of the wort by yeast produces ethanol and carbonation in the beer. Beer is one of the oldest and most widely consumed alcoholic drinks in the world, and one of the most popular of all drinks. Most modern beer is brewed with hops, which add bitterness and other flavours and act as a natural preservative and stabilising agent. Other flavouring agents, such as gruit, herbs, or fruits, may be included or used instead of hops. In commercial brewing, natural carbonation is often replaced with forced carbonation.
Beer is distributed in bottles and cans, and is commonly available on draught in pubs and bars. The brewing industry is a global business, consisting of several dominant multinational companies and many thousands of smaller producers ranging from brewpubs to regional breweries. The strength of modern beer is usually around 4% to 6% alcohol by volume.
Some of the earliest writings mention the production and distribution of beer: the Code of Hammurabi included laws regulating it, while "The Hymn to Ninkasi", a prayer to the Mesopotamian goddess of beer, contains a recipe for it. Beer forms part of the culture of many nations and is associated with social traditions such as beer festivals, as well as activities like pub games. Beer can cause health issues if consumed often or in excess; alcohol is an IARC group 1 carcinogen.
Etymology
In early forms of English and in the Scandinavian languages, the usual word for beer was the word whose Modern English form is ale. The modern word beer comes into present-day English from Old English bēor, itself from Common Germanic; it is found throughout the West Germanic and North Germanic dialects. The earlier etymology of the word is debated: the three main theories are that the word originates in Proto-Germanic *beuzą, meaning "brewer's yeast, beer dregs"; that it is related to the word barley; or that it was somehow borrowed from Latin bibere "to drink".Christine Fell, in Leeds Studies in English, suggests that the Old English/Norse word bēor did not originally denote ale or beer, but a strong, sweet drink rather like mead or cider. Whatever the case, the meaning of bēor expanded to cover the meaning of ale. When hopped ale from Europe was imported into Britain in the late Middle Ages, it was described as "beer" to differentiate it from the British unhopped ale, later acquiring a broader meaning.
History
Prehistory
Beer is one of the world's oldest prepared alcoholic drinks. The earliest archaeological evidence of fermentation consists of 13,000 year-old residues of a beer with the consistency of gruel, used by the semi-nomadic Natufians for ritual feasting, at the Raqefet Cave in the Carmel Mountains near Haifa in northern Israel. There is evidence that beer was produced at Göbekli Tepe during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. The earliest clear chemical evidence of beer produced from barley dates to about 3500–3100 BC, from the site of Godin Tepe in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran.Early civilisations
Beer is recorded in the written history of ancient Egypt, and archaeologists speculate that beer was instrumental in the formation of civilisations. The Sumerians drank a variety of beers, eight types from barley, 12 types from wheat and 3 from a mixture of grains. The Sumerian goddess Ninkasi was believed to oversee the brewing process, and the production and distribution of beer was attributed there to women. Approximately 5000 years ago, workers in the city of Uruk were paid by their employers with volumes of beer. During the building of the Egyptian pyramids, each worker got a daily ration of four to five litres of beer, which served as both nutrition and refreshment and was crucial to the pyramids' construction.Some of the earliest Sumerian writings contain references to beer; examples include a prayer to the goddess Ninkasi, known as "The Hymn to Ninkasi", which served as both a prayer and a method of remembering the recipe for beer in a culture with few literate people, and the ancient advice to Gilgamesh, recorded in the Epic of Gilgamesh by the alewife Siduri, may, at least in part, have referred to the consumption of beer. The Ebla tablets, discovered in 1974 in Ebla, Syria, show that beer was produced in the city in 2500 BC. A fermented drink using rice and fruit was made in China around 7000 BC. Unlike sake, mould was not used to saccharify the rice ; the rice was probably prepared for fermentation by chewing or malting. During the Vedic period in Ancient India, there are records of the consumption of the beer-like sura. 4th century BCE Greek philosopher Xenophon noted that during his travels, "barley wine" was being produced in Armenia and drunk through straws.
Medieval
Beer was spread through Europe by Germanic and Celtic tribes as far back as 3000 BC, and it was mainly brewed on a domestic scale. The product that the early Europeans drank might not be recognised as beer by most people today. Alongside the basic starch source, the early European beers may have contained fruits, honey, numerous types of plants, spices, and other substances such as narcotic herbs. This mixture was called gruit, where if some were improperly heated could cause hallucinations. The mixture of gruit was different from every brewer. What they did not contain was hops, as that was a later addition, first mentioned in Europe around 822 by a Carolingian Abbot and again in 1067 by abbess Hildegard of Bingen.In 1516, William IV, Duke of Bavaria adopted the Reinheitsgebot, perhaps the oldest food-quality regulation still in use in the 21st century, according to which the only allowed ingredients of beer are water, hops, and barley-malt. Beer produced before the Industrial Revolution was made and sold on a domestic scale, although by the 7th century AD, beer was also being produced and sold by European monasteries. During the Industrial Revolution, the production of beer moved from artisanal to industrial manufacture, while domestic production ceased to be significant by the end of the 19th century.
Modern
In 1912, brown bottles began to be used by the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the United States. This innovation has since been accepted worldwide as it prevents light rays from degrading the quality and stability of beer. The brewing industry is a global business, consisting of several dominant multinational companies and many thousands of smaller producers, ranging from brewpubs to regional breweries. As of 2006, more than of beer are sold per year, producing global revenues of US$294.5 billion. In 2010, China's beer consumption hit, or nearly twice that of the United States, but only 5 per cent sold were premium beers, compared with 50 per cent in France and Germany. Beer is the most widely consumed of all alcoholic drinks. A widely publicised study in 2018 suggested that sudden decreases in barley production due to extreme drought and heat could in the future cause substantial volatility in the availability and price of beer.Brewing
Process
The process of making beer is brewing. It converts the grain into a sugary liquid called wort and then ferments this into beer using yeast. The first step, mixing malted barley with hot water in a mash tun, is "mashing". The starches are converted to sugars, and the sweet wort is drained off. The grains are washed to extract as much fermentable liquid from the grains as possible. The sweet wort is put into a kettle, or "copper", and boiled. Hops are added as a source of bitterness, flavour, and aroma. The longer the hops are boiled, the more bitterness they contribute, but the less hop flavour and aroma remain. The wort is cooled and the yeast is added. The wort is then fermented, often for a week or longer. The yeast settles, leaving the beer clear. During fermentation, most of the carbon dioxide is allowed to escape through a trap. The carbonation is often increased either by transferring the beer to a pressure vessel and introducing pressurised carbon dioxide or by transferring it before the fermentation is finished so that carbon dioxide pressure builds up inside the container.Ingredients
The basic ingredients of beer are water; a starch source, usually malted barley; a brewer's yeast to produce the fermentation; and a flavouring such as hops. A mixture of starch sources may be used, with a secondary carbohydrate source, such as maize, rice, wheat, or sugar, often termed an adjunct, especially when used alongside malted barley. Less widely used starch sources include millet, sorghum, and cassava root in Africa; potato in Brazil; and agave in Mexico.Water is the main ingredient, accounting for 93% of beer's weight. The level of dissolved bicarbonate influences beer's finished taste. Due to the mineral properties of each region's water, specific areas were originally the sole producers of certain types of beer, each identifiable by regional characteristics. Dublin's hard water is well-suited to making stout, such as Guinness, while the Plzeň Region's soft water is ideal for brewing Pilsner, such as Pilsner Urquell. The waters of Burton in England contain gypsum, which benefits making pale ale to such a degree that brewers of pale ale add gypsum in a process known as Burtonisation.
The starch source provides the fermentable material and determines the strength and flavour of the beer. The most common starch source used in beer is malted grain. Grain is malted by soaking it in water, allowing it to begin germination, and then drying the partially germinated grain in a kiln. Malting produces enzymes that convert starches into fermentable sugars. Different roasting times and temperatures produce different colours of malt from the same grain. Darker malts produce darker beers. Nearly all beers use barley malt for most of the starch, as its fibrous hull remains attached to the grain during threshing. After malting, barley is milled, which finally removes the hull, breaking it into large pieces. These pieces remain with the grain during the mash and act as a filter bed during lautering, when sweet wort is separated from insoluble grain material. Other grains, including wheat, rice, oats, and rye, and less frequently, corn and sorghum may be used. Some brewers have produced gluten-free beer, made with sorghum, for those who cannot consume gluten-containing grains like wheat, barley, and rye.
File:Humulus Lupulus Hopfendolde-mit-hopfengarten.jpg|thumb|Hop cone in a Hallertau, Germany, hop yard
Flavouring beer is the sole commercial use of hops. The flower of the hop vine acts as a flavouring and preservative agent in nearly all beer made today. The flowers themselves are often called "hops". The first historical mention of the use of hops in beer dates from 822 AD in monastery rules written by Adalard of Corbie, though widespread cultivation of hops for use in beer began in the thirteenth century. Before then, beer was flavoured with other plants such as grains of paradise or 'alehoof'. Combinations of aromatic herbs, berries, and even wormwood were combined into aflavouring mixture known as gruit. Some beers today, such as Fraoch' by the Scottish Heather Ales company use plants other than hops for flavouring. and Cervoise Lancelot by the French Brasserie-Lancelot company,
Hops contribute a bitterness that balances the sweetness of the malt; the bitterness of beers is measured on the International Bitterness Units scale. Hops further contribute floral, citrus, and herbal aromas and flavours. They have an antibiotic effect that favours the activity of brewer's yeast over less desirable microorganisms, and aids in "head retention", the length of time that a foamy head created by carbonation will last. The acidity of hops is a preservative.
Yeast is the microorganism responsible for fermenting beer. It metabolises the sugars, producing ethanol and carbon dioxide, and thereby turns wort into beer. In addition, yeast influences the character and flavour. The dominant types of beer yeast are top-fermenting Saccharomyces cerevisiae and bottom-fermenting Saccharomyces pastorianus. Brettanomyces ferments lambics, and Torulaspora delbrueckii ferments Bavarian weissbier. Before the role of yeast in fermentation was understood, fermentation involved wild or airborne yeasts. A few styles, such as lambics, rely on this method today, but most modern fermentation adds pure yeast cultures.
Some brewers add clarifying agents or finings to beer, which typically precipitate out along with protein solids, and are found only in trace amounts in the finished product. This process makes the beer appear bright and clean, rather than the cloudy appearance of ethnic and older styles such as wheat beers. Clarifying agents include isinglass, from the swimbladders of fish; Irish moss, a seaweed; kappa carrageenan, from the seaweed Kappaphycus cottonii; Polyclar ; and gelatin. Beer marked "suitable for vegans" is clarified either with seaweed or with artificial agents.
File:Cerveceria Quilmes en 1910 - 07.jpg|thumb|Quilmes' Brewery in the early 1900s, Argentina.