Cool Stuff - Beer facts

Think you know all there is to know about beer? Think again. Have fun and brush up on your beer knowledge!

Specialty Definition: Beer

A beer is any of a variety of alcoholic beverages produced by the fermentation of starchy material derived from grains or other plant sources. The production of beer and some other alcoholic beverages is often called brewing.

Ingredients

Typically, beers are made from water, malted barley, hops, and yeast. The addition of other flavorings or sources of sugar is not uncommon.

Because beer is composed mainly of water, the source of the water and its characteristics have an important effect on the character of the beer. Many beer styles were influenced or even determined by the characteristics of the water in the region.

Among malts, barley malt is the most often and widely used owing to its high enzyme content but other malted and unmalted grains are widely used, including wheat, rice, maize, oats, and rye.

Hops are a relatively recent addition to beer, having been introduced only a few hundred years ago. They contribute a bitterness that balances the sweetness of the malt and have a mild antibiotic effect that favors the activity of brewer's yeast over less desirable organisms. Dozens of strains of natural or cultured yeasts are used by brewers, roughly sorted into three kinds: ale or top-fermenting, lager or bottom fermenting, and wild yeasts. Yeast metabolize the sugars extracted from the grains, producing many compounds including alcohol and carbon dioxide.

A pint (or half litre) of beer typically contains about two unitss of alcohol, although alcohol content can vary significantly with style and brewer.

History

Almost any sugar or starch-containing food can naturally undergo fermentation, and so it is likely that beer-like beverages were independently invented in cultures throughout the world. In the West, the oldest evidence of beer is on a 6000-year old Sumerian tablet which shows people drinking a beverage through reed straws from a communal bowl. Beer is also mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and a 3900-year old Sumerian poem honoring the brewing goddess 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 antiquity, especially in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi required that tavern-keepers who diluted or overcharged for beer should be put to death.

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

The Kalevala, collected in written form in the nineteenth century but based on oral traditions many centuries old, contains more lines about the origin of brewing than are devoted to the origin of man.

Most beers until relatively recent times were what we would now call ales. Lagers were discovered by accident in the sixteenth century when beer was stored in cool caverns underground for long periods; it has since largely outpaced ale in volume. (See below for the distinction.) Hops, used for bittering and preservation, is a medieval addition. Hops was cultivated in France as early as the 800s. The oldest surviving written record of the use of hops in beer is in 1067 by Abbess Hildegarde of St. Ruprechtsberg: "If one intends to make beer from oats, it is prepared with hops." 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 at 1400 in Winchester and hops were being planted on the island by 1428. 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, malt, and yeast." However, by the 16th century, "ale" had come to refer to any strong beer, and all ale and beer were hopped.

Lager

Lagers are probably the most common type of beer consumed. They are aged beers of German origin, taking their name from the German lagern ("to store"). Bottom-fermented, they are stored at a low temperature for weeks or months, clearing, acquiring mellowness, and becoming charged with carbon dioxide. Although many styles of lager exist, most of the lager produced is light in colour, high in carbonation with a mild hop flavour and an alcohol content of 3-6% by volume. Styles of lager include:

Ale

Top-fermented beers, particularly popular in Great Britain and Ireland, include mild, bitter, pale ale, porter, and stout. Top-fermented beers tend to be more flavorsome, including a variety of grain flavors and fermentation flavors; they are also uncarbonated and ideally served at a higher temperature than lager. Stylistic differences among top-fermented beers are decidedly more varied than those found among bottom-fermented beers and many beer styles are difficult to categorize. California Common beer, for example, is produced using a lager yeast at ale temperatures. Wheat beers are often produced using an ale yeast and then lagered, sometimes with a lager yeast). Lambics employ wild yeasts, naturally-occurring in the Payottenland region of Belgium. Other examples of ale include stock ale and old ale. Real ale is a term for beers produced using traditional methods, and without pasteurization.

Other

Modern Translation: Beer

Language Translations for "beer
Afrikaans bier (ale).
Albanian birrë (ale, malt, table-beer, tap, wallop).
Arabic  ‏جعة (malt, stout), ‏المزر شراب نوع من الجعة (ale), ‏شراب من الشعير, ‏بيرة (porter, suds).
Asturian cerveza.
Basque garagardo.
Bavarian bia (ale).
Bemba ubwalwa.
Blackfoot áísaakotsii.
Breton bier.
Bulgarian  глава (attic, bulb, chief, chump, compartment, conk, crumpet, head, knob, loaf, nob, noddle, noggin, nut, onion, pate, poll, sconce, topknot), бира (ale, malt liquor, wallop), пиво (ale, malt liquor).
Catalan cervesa.
Cebuano bir.
Chamorro setbesa.
Chinese  啤酒 .
Cornish coref.
Croatian piva.
Czech pivo (ale, jar), piva.
Danish øl (ale).
Dutch bier (ale).
Ecuadorian Quechua cibada yacu.
Esperanto biero (ale).
Estonian õlut.
Faeroese øl (ale).
Farsi  ابجونوشیدن , ابجو (ale, Gill, Porter).
Finnish olut (ale, lager).
Flemish bier.
French bière.
French Canadian bière.
Frisian bier.
Galician cervexa.
German bier (ale, wallop).
Greek  μπύρα (ale).
Haitian Creole byè.
Hawaiian birrë (ale).
Hebrew בירה (capital, citadel).
Hungarian sör (ale, hops, John Barleycorn, malt liquor, slosh).
Icelandic bjór , öl (ale).
Indonesian bir.
Irish beoir (ale).
Italian birra (ale, bitter, lager, wallop).
Japanese Kanji 麦酒 , ビー玉 (beer-garden, beginner, biennale, bigalopolis, bikini, bishop, business, business assessment, business automation, business class, business college, business consultant, business game, business girl, business school, business survey, business wear, bustier, busy, marble, Pieta, victor, Victoria, victory, vicuna, viola, visa, visiting team, visitor, visitor fee), ヒンディー語 (beach, beach coat, beach house, beach parasol, beach umbrella, beach volleyball, beach wear, beacon, beads, beagle, beaker, beam, beam antenna, beam rider, beast, beat, beat generation, Beatles, beaver, bee, beef, beefalo, beefsteak, beep, beet, Hindi, Hindustan, hint, Venus, virus, viva).
Japanese Katakana  ビール , ビア , びいる , ばくしゅ.
Kongo mbamvu.
Korean  맥주.
Lombard Birra (ale).
Macedonian pivo.
Manx lhune (ale), jough cheyl, beer.
Maori pia.
Mohawk onen'takeri , katsi'tsyakeras.
Norwegian øl (ale).
Occitan cervesa.
Papago sil-wihsa.
Papiamen serbes (ale).
Pig Latin eerbay.
Polish piwo (ale).
Portuguese cerveja (ale, tap).
Portuguese Brazilian cerveja.
Provencal cervesa.
Romanian bere (ale, small drink, stout).
Romansch biera.
Romany bìra.
Russian  пиво (ale, malt).
Samoan pia.
Scottish beóir , beòir (ale), leann (ale, liquor).
Sepedi bjalwa.
Serbo-Croatian pivo (ale).
Shona hwahwa (African beer).
Slovene piva.
Somali biirka.
Spanish cerveza (ale, malt liquor, pint, suds, tap).
Sranan biri (ale).
Swahili pombe (ale), bia (ale).
Swazi tjwâlá.
Swedish öl (ale, beers, malt, wallop).
Tagalog serbesa (ale).
Tahitian pia.
Thai เบียร์ (drafty, slosh).
Turkish bira (ale, hop, suds).
Turkmen  piwa (r).
Ukrainian слабкий алкогольний напій , пиво ( ale , tiff , wallop ).
Vietnamese  rượu bia ngà ngà say những cái thú vị , những trò giải trí vui chơi.
Welsh bi+r , tablen (ale), cwrw (ale).
Yucatec seerbeesa (ale), cheba (ale).)
Zulu utshwala (ale), ubhiya (ale).