HOW is BEER made? | The brewing process in 4 steps!

Now that you know WHAT beer is made from, it's time to learn HOW it's made! Join beer expert Natalya Watson for a whistle-stop tour of the brewing process.

As a quick reminder, beer is made from 4 ingredients: malt, water, yeast and hops.

Malt provides sugar, that yeast ferments into alcohol and carbon dioxide,
in a liquid environment provided by water and hops bring the bitterness to balance out malt’s sweetness.

In this video, we’ll talk through the 4 steps of the brewing process, when each ingredient is introduced to the brew and the flavour impact of each step.

0:45 - Malting
1:11 - Mashing
2:40 - Boiling
3:39 - Fermentation
4:37 - Fermentation methods
6:08 - Conditioning

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ABOUT NATALYA:
Natalya Watson is an award-winning beer educator, Beer Sommelier and Advanced Cicerone® passionate about sharing her knowledge of beer with others because she believes that beer is simply too delicious to remain undiscovered. She’s the founder of Virtual Beer School, host of the ‘Beer with Nat’ podcast, and author of Beer: Taste the Evolution in 50 Styles.

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Please drink responsibly. Beer is brewed with care to be consumed with care.

[michaeljames]

Allow me to help you out a little bit with brewing beer. The single temperature infusion method and high modified, malt are used in grain distillation. The method produces distillers beer, not ale and lager. The slang term for distillers beer is moonshiners beer. It is chemically and enzymatically impossible to produce ale and lager by soaking malt in water at one temperature. To produce ale and lager with the single temperature method malt would need to contain magical properties that would allow low temperature activated enzymes that make ale and lager to work at a single, high temperature without denaturing, which is impossible. The method produces chemically imbalanced, sugar imbalanced, unstable, extract and when yeast is added off flavors develop during fermentation and conditioning.
This is the way it works during mashing. We will start off with, starch doesn't convert to sugar, starch is a polysaccharide. Starch is the container that holds sugar and conversion has nothing to do with starch, anyway.
During mashing Alpha activates and begins to liquefy 1-4 links in simple starch, amylose, chain. When the link is liquefied, two chains form, one chain is called the reducing end and the other chain is the nonreducing end. The reducing end contains 1-4 links which Alpha continues to liquefy until all of the links are liquefied, and when that happens, sweet tasting, nonfermenting types of sugar remain. The nonreducing end is simple sugar, glucose. Glucose is responsible for primary fermentation and ABV. The only purpose of Alpha is to release glucose, one of three building blocks of life, from starch. When mash is rested at 66C Alpha releases the highest amount of glucose, as possible, within an hour. The more glucose, the more alcohol. A grain distiller uses 66C for that reason, and also, to denature Beta. The enzyme adds a week to two weeks onto their process and the complex types of sugar that Beta forms isn't needed for making whiskey.
Alpha is responsible for liquefaction, saccharification, dextrinization and gelatinization. Beta is responsible for conversion, 60C. Beta converts glucose released by Alpha during liquefaction, into complex types of sugar, maltose and maltotriose, which are the types of sugar that produces ale and lager. When conversion occurs, secondary fermentation takes place because yeast works on complex sugar differently than it works on glucose. An enzyme within yeast converts maltose back into glucose during secondary fermentation. Beer doesn't require priming with sugar or CO2 injection to carbonate when conversion occurs. Beer naturally carbonates during conditioning due to maltotriose. Natural carbonation is much finer than bubbles made from artificial means.
There is a type of heat resistant, complex starch in malt called amylopectin. Amylopectin makes up the tips of malt and it is the richest starch in malt. The starch contains A and B limit dextrin which are tasteless, nonfermenting types of sugar responsible for body and mouthfeel in beer. The temperatures used to produce distillers beer aren't high enough to cause the starch to burst before Alpha denatures and the richest starch in malt is thrown away with the spent mash. To take advantage of the rich starch mash is boiled. When Alpha liquefies amylopectin, dextrinization and gelatinization occur. The finest beer is produced from dextrinous extract, not from sweet sugar and glucose extract. The only time dextrinization occurs in the single temperature method happens when Amylose contains a 1-6 link, which is extremely, rare. A distiller cares less about amylopectin and sells it, maltodextrin is made from the starch.
Ale and lager are produced with under modified, low protein, malt and with an entirely different brewing method than the single infusion method. Under modified malt is much richer in enzyme content and lower in protein than high modified, malt. The lower the protein content, the more sugar in the malt. Weyermann floor malt and Gladfield's, American Malt are under modified. To take advantage of the rich malt, at the least, a step mashing method should be used. To take full advantage of the malt a decoction method is used.
Click on Gladfield's website and find American Malt, on the page is the spec sheet for the malt. Part way down on the sheet is Kolbach. The Kolbach number indicates level of modification. Malt with 40 Kolbach and lower is under modified. Protein content should be below 10 percent. High modified malt is 42 to 46 Kolbach and 12 to 16 percent protein. The higher the Kolbach number, the less suitable the malt is for producing ale and lager. A spec sheet comes with each bag of malt and it is used to determine the quality of malt before it is purchased.
To begin learning how ale and lager are made start with deClerks books, the books cost about 175 U.S.. The best books are Wulf's 1958 and 1959 journals, the books cost about 2000 U.S.. Abstracts from the IOB are free online. The IOB, EBC and MABC are testing agencies that perform tests on yeast, malt and fermentation. They provide the info found on a malt spec sheet. The IOB made malt, modern, in the 19th century. It appears that during the 20th century someone renamed distillers beer and Prohibition beer, ale?