Shout! Omaha

Barley & Hops: “The Five Staples”

When it comes to craft beers, I guess there are no absolutes, but in the case of most of them, there are five basic ingredients.

Of course, I have to inject some first-person thoughts – how many of you think you can name four of these five?

Let’s dig in. Way back when, in Germany, a standards board of sorts outlined the German Purity Law, which pertained to the beers of the day.  Reinheitsgebot was its title, and the original decree provided for the only ingredients which could be used to create the land’s ales. Three whole ingredients.

Water should be obvious, and while so many of our factory beers of today resemble this ingredient alone, its inclusion drives beer in a wonderfully regional direction. For many of us who brew, we use the local water supply provided to us in a very pure state. Sure, we make some modifications when it comes to chemical makeup, but by and large, the water we use works great for some styles of beers and not so much for others. Why is this? Well, believe it or not, all water is not the same. It kinda looks like it, but the differing levels of calcium, magnesium and many other minerals directly contribute to the flavors we ultimately experience within our beers. You know me by now – I can’t pass up an opportunity to poke fun at the big boys. Most of them will tell you this is the most important ingredient, and if you’re making water, I guess you’re right.

Malted barley is another of the original three. Most of us who love our beers also likely find this one fairly obvious. Grain is allowed to initially germinate; halting this germination through the application of heat and drying turns it into malted barley. Consider coffee for a moment – something that might be more intuitive. Roasted coffee beans, or differing beans in general, create a richness and diversity that can be very interesting and satisfying. There really isn’t much difference in beer when you consider the outcome. Complexity, color, taste and varying alcohol levels tend to originate here, but we have to remember that no one ingredient stands alone.

Which brings us to the last of the original three: hops. A vine that produces some really interesting little pine-coney-looking things that help the beer balance the sweetness from the malted barley and are a natural preservative, which gives us a little shelf life. When I mention that the hop plant is a relative of cannabis, I’m met with smiles and the all-too-common response,  “Dude, I knew there was something familiar in there but I couldn’t remember what.”

Hops contribute to both the bitterness in beer and the aroma as well. As brewers, we have a wealth of varieties and techniques to apply here.  American brewers for the most part tend to love their bitterness and when we exercise our creativity you’ll see big, bold and bitter-beer-face examples of our craft everywhere. We take great pride in converting our Busch Light brethren from their weekends-in-a-cardboard-carton into a moment of insight when they find their calling in a single pint.

So how the heck do we go from three basic ingredients to five? Well, in the way-back-when days, they really didn’t know much about microscopic level things and believed that brewing god-people or mythic things contributed to fermentation. But then somebody ran out and bought a microscope and said, “Wow – check this out, dude!”

Yeast. My personal favorite.Yeast, believe it or not, is an actual living, breathing microorganism that loves to eat sugar and finds great pleasure in breathing off carbon dioxide, making a bunch of heat, and peeing alcohol.  For the most part, we let the CO2 go, control the heat, and we tend to hang on to the alcohol.

Yeast is everywhere. In the air we breathe, on every surface around us and can do some really funky things to beer if we let it do what it wants.  Given this, we gravitate toward pure strains and since this can be a little confusing, think of it in terms of baseball – we only want players from the same team, and when you consider all teams from every sport all around the planet – I think you get the picture. This one little ingredient, in my opinion, contributes the greatest degree of influence on a beer. Consider what we’ve already talked about – flavor, aromas, alcohol levels, and we’ll add carbonation – there’s a lot going on here.

Number five is one that I’ll add. Passion.

You can actually make beer by accident – but when you take the art and the science and mix it with passion – a great craft beer is the result.