Man is a clever animal. At the dawn of agriculture, we laid claim to our environment and became masters of our food supply. No longer were we slaves to the hunter and gatherer lifestyle, overcoming the uncertainty of living nutritional paycheck to paycheck. Shortly thereafter, and perhaps by accident, we learned to produce a magical potion of sorts that has colored countless nights (and sometimes days) with lowered inhibitions, slurred speech, pained mornings, and some truly horrible, arrhythmic dancing.
Man created beer... and it was good.
Tim Allen, UW-Madison professor of Botany and Ecology, said the first documented accounts of beer brewing occurred about five thousand years ago with the Egyptians. \Making beer,"" he said, ""is one of the simplest, most straight-forward, and easiest-to-discover-accidentally processes.""
Once civilized man began to grind grain in an effort to make it palatable to humans, beer's development inadvertently began. The first would-be bakers softened up barley grain by putting it in warm water, allowing fermentation to occur, creating everybody's favorite social lubricant: alcohol. The sour porridge that results is called gruel. ""At this point, if you add water, you've got beer, and if you remove water and bake it, you'll end up with bread,"" said Allen.
So brewing may have originated as a happy accident on the road to proper breadmaking some seven to eight thousand years ago. Beer bong technology would not arrive until much later.
The brewing process has been refined since the days of gruel, with the main ingredients expanded to water, barley (usually), hops, and yeast. The procedure was explained by Jason Mills, a UW-Madison Ph.D in Botany and experienced home brewer.
In the home brewing environment, one typically grinds up barley, dumping the contents into some hot water. In a process called ""mashing,"" the complex sugar molecules present in the grain will be broken down by enzymes, which can be thought of as chemical reaction accelerators. These enzymes, which come from the barley's seed germination, are brokeninto less complex sugars that can be used by yeast.
Next comes ""lautering"", where the malt extract created in mashing is moved a filtering system. This system need not be complex. ""Basically, it's a big bucket with holes in the bottom,"" according to Mills. Adding slightly hotter water than the mash water, the sugars are drawn out of the mashed grains. This leaves you with ""wort"", beer's precursor before fermentation.
Next comes boiling, where the brewmaster removes water from the wort to concentrate the desired sugars. Next, hops can be added, which provide favorable bitterness to the sweetness of the malt, pleasing aromas, and help to retain the foamy head of a beer.
After cooling the resulting liquid and moving it to a big jug, preferably with an exaggerated ""XXX"" painted on its side, air is allowed to enter the vessel. After aerating the jug, yeast are introduced to their new home, which is promptly sealed shut.
The yeast multiply like it's going out of style, breaking down sugars and using up oxygen in the process. The party doesn't last, though; once the oxygen is used up, the yeast go into ""anaerobic respiration"", or fermentation, where they break down the available simple sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, which forms the foamy head of the beer.
At this point, after filtering out the yeast (or not), the desired concoction is ready for consumption.
Alterations to the general brewing process yield different styles of beer. ""The temperature at which you roast the grains and the extent to which you boil the wort,"" according to Allen, ""makes it dark beer."" On the other side of the spectrum, light beer is made with a bacteria that continues the malting process, leaving no complex sugar un-simplified, which increases the final alcohol yield.
According to Allen, ""[the light beer brewing process] takes away a lot of the flavor, it takes away a lot of the calories... because it's high alcohol, you can then water it down to a workable alcohol [level]. That's why [light beers] taste watery, because that's what is in them.""
A large amount of sugars remain complex, making them unusable to both humans and yeast, in homebrews and finer beers. Since the bacteria in your gut cannot use these complicated sugars, Allen explained, flatulence results. It's a small, gassy price to pay to enjoy Madison's vast world of home and micro brewed beer.
So, on a final, lowbrow note, if you happen to catch a whiff of a bar mate's inappropriate emissions; don't get offended. Instead, salute the drinker for his fine taste.
