A man after some beers

Beer

Source is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text is licensed under the GFDL.

A typical mug of lager beer, showing the golden colour of the beer and the foamy head floating on top.Beer, generically, is any alcoholic beverage produced through the fermentation of sugar suspended in an aqueous medium, and which is not distilled after fermentation. The unfermented sugar solution, called wort, is obtained from steeping, or "mashing," malted grains, usually barley. Alcoholic beverages made from the fermentation of sugars derived from non-grain sources are generally not called "beer," despite being produced by the same yeast-based biochemical reaction. Fermented honey is called mead, fermented apple juice is called cider, fermented pear juice is called perry, and fermented grape juice is called wine.

The process of beer production is called brewing. Because the ingredients used to make beer differ from place to place, beer characteristics such as taste and color vary widely, and consequently its type or classification. One of the oldest beverages man has produced, dating back to at least the 5th millennium BC and recorded in the written history of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the character of beer has changed drastically over the millennia. The brewing industry is now a huge global business, and today consists mostly of conglomerates formed out of a multitude of smaller producers. While beer is generally an alcoholic beverage, some varieties exist, originating in the Western world, which undergo a process to remove most of the alcohol, producing what is called non-alcoholic beer.

A column of beer and taps in a bar in Brussels, Belgium.As almost any substance containing certain sugars can naturally undergo fermentation, it is likely that beer-like beverages were independently invented among various cultures throughout the world. Chemical tests of ancient pottery jars reveal that beer was (like Wine) produced about 7000 years ago in what is today Iran, and is one of the first known biological engineering tasks, where the biological process of fermentation is used in a process. The earliest evidence of wine dates to 5400 B.C., from Hajji Firuz Tepe in the Zagros Mountains of present-day Iran, near the city of Urmia.

In Mesopotamia, the oldest evidence of beer is believed to be a 6000-year-old Sumerian tablet depicting people drinking a beverage through reed straws from a communal vessel (bowl). Beer is also mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and a 3900-year-old Sumerian poem honoring the patron goddess of brewing, Ninkasi, contains the oldest surviving beer recipe, describing the production of beer from barley via bread. Beer became vital to all the grain-growing civilizations of classical Western antiquity, especially Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Beer was important to early Romans, but during Republican times wine displaced beer as the preferred alcoholic beverage. Beer became a beverage considered fit only for barbarians; Tacitus wrote disparagingly of the beer brewed by the Germanic peoples of his day.

Thracians were also known to consume beer made from rye, even since the 5th century BC, as Hellanicos of Lesbos says in operas. Their name for beer was brutos, or brytos.

The addition of hops to beer for bittering, preservation, and aroma is a relatively recent innovation: in the Middle Ages many other mixtures of herbs were often employed in beer prior to hops. These mixtures are often referred to as gruit. Hops were cultivated in France as early as the 800s; the oldest surviving written record of the use of hops in beer is in 1067 by well-known writer Abbess Hildegard of Bingen: "If one intends to make beer from oats, it is prepared with hops."

In Europe, beer largely remained a homemaker's activity, made in the home in medieval times. By the 14th and 15th centuries, beermaking was gradually changing from a family-oriented activity to an artisan one, with pubs and monasteries brewing their own beer for mass consumption.

In 15th century England, an unhopped beer would have been known as an ale, while the use of hops would make it a beer. Hopped beer was imported to England from the Netherlands as early as 1400 in Winchester, and hops were being planted on the island by 1428. The popularity of hops was at first mixed — the Brewers Company of London went so far as to state "no hops, herbs, or other like thing be put into any ale or liquore wherof ale shall be made — but only liquor (water), malt, and yeast." However, by the 16th century, "ale" had come to refer to any strong beer, and all ales and beers were hopped.

Achel trappist beer (Belgium) with glassIn 1516, William IV, Duke of Bavaria, adopted the Reinheitsgebot (purity law), perhaps the oldest food regulation still in use today. The Gebot ordered that the ingredients of beer be restricted to water, barley, and hops, with yeast added after Louis Pasteur's discovery in 1857. The Bavarian law was applied throughout Germany as part of the 1871 German unification as the German Empire under Otto von Bismarck, and has since been updated to reflect modern trends in beer brewing. To this day, the Gebot is considered a mark of purity in beers, although this is controversial.

Most beers until relatively recent times were what are now called ales. Lagers were discovered by accident in the 16th century after beer was stored in cool caverns for long periods; they have since largely outpaced ales in terms of volume.

With the invention of the steam engine in 1765, industrialization of beer became a reality. Further innovations in the brewing process came about with the introduction of the thermometer and hydrometer in the 19th century, which allowed brewmasters to increase efficiency and attenuation. Prior to the late 18th century, malt was primarily dried over fires made from wood, charcoal, or straw, and after 1600, from coke. In general, none of these early malts would have been well shielded from the smoke involved in the kilning process, and consequently, early beers would have had a smoky component to their flavors; evidence indicates that maltsters and brewers constantly tried to minimize the smokiness of the finished beer. The invention of the drum roaster in 1817 by Daniel Wheeler allowed for the creation of very dark, roasted malts, contributing to the flavour of porters and stouts. The discovery of yeast's role in fermentation in 1857 by Louis Pasteur gave brewmasters methods to prevent the souring of beer by undesirable microorganisms.

In 1953, New Zealander Morton W Coutts developed the technique of continuous fermentation. Morton patented his process which revolutionised the industry through reducing a typical four-month long brewing process to less than 24 hours. His process is still used by many of the world's major breweries today, including Guinness.