Beer Expeditions

Beer is made from 4 major ingredients.
1 Water
2 Malt
3 Hops
4 Yeast

and 3 miner ingredients
1 Gypsum
2 Irish Moss
3 corn sugar

lets go over them one at a time
Ingredient 1 Water.
Water is a very important part of the beer. The reason is, it is the main ingredient. In other words if your water taste bad it will probably reflect in the beer. So you want to get a pure water source. If you want to use tap water it is recommend that you boil it since most tap water contains chlorine. I personally use Yosemite bottled water.
Ingredient 2 Malt.
Malt is what the yeast makes into alcohol.
There many types & varieties of malt. Traditionally malted barley is used in brewing.
Malt comes in 3 forms.
1 Whole Grain Malt
2 Liquid Malt extract
3 Dry Malt
Any one of these or any combination of these can be used to brew.
usually a beginner brewer will use a combination of grain & dry or liquid. Grain only is considered advanced, it takes longer and more equipment.
Ingredient 3 Hops.
Hops serve 3 purposes
1 it is a Preservative
2 it is a flavoring
3 it is an aromatic agent
you may also here about bittering hops in some recipes. we will go over that later.
There are many varieties of hops.
Hops also come in 3 forms
1 Loose or Whole Hops
2 Palletized or Powdered Hops
3 Hop Extract or Hop oil
for the most part in Home Brewing Palletized Hops are used.
Ingredient 4 Yeast
Yeast too comes in may varieties
there are only 2 forms o Yeast
1 Liquid
2 Dry
Liquid is fairly new to Home brewing, it is faster and easier to use than dry and I think delivers a much better result. Dry yeast has some advantages too it is cheaper and it seems to keep better.

Thats all of the major ingredients. Some recipes may call for other things like fruit, whet or oats etc those are specific to cretin recipes.

Miner ingredients

Miner Ingredient 1 Gypsum
This is to treat the water. Most recipes will call for between third of a table spoon and a table spoon for five gallons. five gallons is the avenge Home Brew batch.
Miner Ingredient 2 Irish Moss
this collects proteins so they do not float on the to making something called chill haze. Add about a table spoon during the last 10 or 15 minutes of the boil.
Miner Ingredient 3 corn sugar
This is added to the beer just before bottling to kick start the yeast.
Corn sugar is used instead of cane sugar, because it dose not the taste.
before brewing came to America they did not have have corn so they used other sweeteners like malt.

More to come