The Craft Beer Manufacturing Process: A Summary

The Process of Making Craft Beers

Beer is the most consumed alcoholic beverage in the world, and third most popular beverage after water and tea. In the United States, 50 billion pints of beer are consumed annually and $196 million is made in revenue each year (Pattinson, 2010). Today craft breweries make up about 4% of the total beer sales in the United States, selling an estimated 11,498,152 barrels of beer in 2011. The craft beer industry grew in 2011 by 13% in volume and 15% in revenue and has been resilient to the economic recession (Berman 2012).

The brewing process can be broken into four main parts: milling/mashing, lautering, boiling, and fermenting. The first thing a brewer needs to do before getting to work making beer is to ensure that their brewing grain is ready to go. In the milling process, malts (germinated and dried grains) are mixed with some flavorings and liquor (pure water) and heated to allow to break down starch into sugars. If it is too course, inadequate starch will be converted into fermentable sugars. If the crush is too fine, the filter bed for the brew will be destroyed, and the brew will become gummy. Once the grain has been milled, it is added to a large vessel called the tun and mixed with hot water to form the mash. Brewers monitor the mash temperatures extremely close. By raising and lowering the temperature of the mash, brewers can control what types of sugars are produced by the enzymes. At lower temperatures, highly fermentable sugars are created which give a result of dry in beers. At higher temperatures, the sugars are not as easily digested by the yeast. That has result a beer with some sugars left unfermented, and thus a sweeter, more full-bodied product. The process of converting from starch to sugars is usually done in about one hour.

The next step in the brewing process is the take the mash, and separate out the spent grain from the sugary liquid known as wort. This process is called lautering. To begin the lautering process, the mash is transferred to a tun. Water is also added during lautering to extract even more of the fermentable sugars from the grains. This process is known as sparging. Once the mash is sparged, the resultant wort is sent to hops boiler where hops are added for flavor and boiled according to a recipe hops. Sparging has to be done very gradually, and not disrupt the grain bed that acts as a natural filter for the wort. Brewers typically add sparge water at the same rate as the wort is being drained below. Brewers must be careful not the sparge for too long, because if the sparge process is too long, it will cause the bitter tannins from the grain.

Once the sweet wort has been separated from the grains, it is brought to a strong, prolonged boil for one to two hours. This boiling process is critical for many reasons. One of the reason is to sterilize the beer. While water is boiling, hops that are introduced to boiling water, will begin to break down, or isomerize, and molecularly altering the composition of the acids within the hops and releasing bitterness into the beer. The longer the hops are boiled, the more of their alpha acids will be isomerized in order to lend bitterness to the brew. At lower temperatures, hops will release these oils, lend aromatics, and flavor to the beer. To extract flavor, brewers typically add hops about 10-15 minutes before the end of the boil. For aroma, hops are added even later, no more than 2 minutes before the end of the boil. Often aromatic hop additions even occur just after the boil ends. Once the boil is completed it is sent to a whirlpool to collect any hop matter and coagulated proteins that have accumulated. Then it is immediately cooled. Cooling the beer quickly is important, because the beer will begin to oxidize and produce off flavors almost immediately at these temperatures.

After everything has cooled down, it is moved into a fermenter – a large stainless steel or oak vat. Next step is adding the yeast. Similarly, with the wine making process, yeast is added, and it gets to work to eat the sugars that were created during the mashing process. As the yeast consumes the sugar, the yeast adds carbon dioxide and alcohol, as well as a variety of flavor compounds that vary greatly depending on several variables. Fermentation time depends on the product that you are willing to produce, whether the brewer decides whether they will be brewing an ale or a lager. It ranges from a few days for a simple ale, to over a month for lagers. This decision is a made by choosing lager yeast or ale yeast. If the brewers choose to brew an ale, the brewer will pitch ale yeast and let the temperature of the fermenting beer rise to a toasty 65-76 degrees, which is perfect for ale yeast. If they decide to brew a lager, the brewer must keep the beer much cooler, between 45 and 55 degrees. At these temperatures, the lager yeasts work slowly and efficiently towards producing a clean tasting beer with little flavors given from the yeast itself. Once fermentation is over, and the yeast has worked, it becomes dormant and begins to settle to the bottom of the fermentation vessel. At this point, the brewer can easily remove the yeast, leaving only bright, clear beer. When doing this process, a large number of brewer filter the beer mechanically, or by adding filtering agents to collect the yeast, and then fall out of suspension at a faster rate.

The final step in the brewing a craft beer process is packaging the beer. Packaging is the process of putting the finished beer into vessels for mass consumption. Typically, beer is packing into bottles, cans, and kegs. Without allowing the CO2 to escape, the tanks could potentially rupture from the pressure build-up. Finally, after the long process, we can enjoy our beers. I also saw that you could brew your own beer at home, if you do have the equipment and ingredients that you need. However, costly, it is not really effective, and if you do not do it right, you will messing up the flavor, and you will end up wasting your money.