Brewing beer - step by step, part 2: Ingredients

There are a few ingredients that are absolutely essential for brewing beer!!!

Malt is the most important ingredient, otherwise it would not be a beer! There are many different malts available in a plethora of colors ranging from very pale to the darkest chocolate malts:

As a very rough guide you will only need a base malt like pale ale malt (2-4kg or 4-8 lbs) and caramel malt (250g or ½ lbs) to produce a Pale ale beer. If you want an Amber ale instead just add 250g or ½ lbs of dark caramel malt to the Pale ale recipe. For a Brown ale, add chocolate malt instead of the dark caramel malt. A Porter is made by adding 250g or ½ lbs of chocolate malt to the Amber ale recipe and you will get a Stout if you add 250g or ½ lbs of roasted barley to the Porter recipe!

Hops is an almost as essential ingredient as malt for making beer, it is used for adding both taste and aroma to the finished beer. It can be added before, under or after the boiling of the wort. There are many different varieties of hops, each with a special taste, aroma and intended use. Some hops are used for bittering of the beer and others are used for their taste and/or aroma and there are hops that can be used for bittering, aroma and taste as well!

Yeast is last, while not absolutely necessary (you can let the wort ferment spontaneously but the result is very unpredictable!!) it is recommended to use a brewer's yeast designed for the desired beer style. There are so many different yeasts available to the home brewer today that it might be hard to choose one for your brew! But there are some classics like the Nottingham yeast by Danstar that will produce a drinkable beer out of most wort. If you want a more specialized character in your beer, you can find almost any style of yeast today.

Stay tuned for the next post in the series tomorrow: How to create a recipe!

Images credit: #1 Peter Schill, #2 Briess, #3 The Daily Beer and #4 Myself ;-)