Beer Basics, IV

The barley-starch tea—wort—is full of bits of grain and husks which are removed by a filtering process called lautering.  The result is just pure wort—barley-sweetened water without the larger solid leftovers of the grain.  There are still some particulates suspended in the liquid, but the bigger stuff is gone.

The wort is then brought to a rigorous boil for anywhere from 60 to 120 minutes.  During the boil, hops are added to the wort, providing flavor, aroma and bitterness.  There are hundreds of different hops varieties, each having a different flavor, aroma and bitterness profile.

Some ales are brewed using a single kind of hops—so-called “one-hop wonders”—while others combine multiple hops varieties.  The original recipe for Port Brewing’s popular Hop-15 IPA involved 15 different hops. 

At the end of the boil, the wort might be whirlpooled to remove remaining grain particulates.  This can also be accomplished through use of a hopback—basically a filter made of hop flowers. 

The sweet, hoppy wort is then cooled rapidly to bring it to fermentation temperature.

There's been no magic yet.  The sweet barley tea has been bittered and flavored with hops. The stage has been set.

Turning lead into gold was the Holy Grail of Medieval alchemy.  Alchemists theorized the existence of the “philosopher’s stone”—the missing element essential to the process.  What was actually needed was the shedding of three protons from lead—a transmutation requiring far more energy than the result would be worth.  Fortunately, turning wort into beer is significantly easier than turning lead into gold, simply requiring the conversion of the wort’s sugar into alcohol.  The philosopher’s stone for this process is yeast.

Yeast is a micro-organism that fuels its existence and growth by ingesting sugar, and the two by-products of the process—carbon dioxide (CO2) and alcohol—are two things we are typically looking for in our beer.  The CO2 gives the beer its carbonation, its fizz and those beautiful bubbles, and the alcohol gives it, well, its alcohol!

With fermentation underway, the wort can now be called beer for the first time.  The magical transformation has begun!