Beer is one of the oldest and most widely consumed alcoholic drinks in the world. It is also the third most popular drink overall after water and tea. Beer is brewed from cereal grains—most commonly from malted barley, though wheat, maize (corn), and rice are also used. During the brewing process, fermentation of the starch sugars in the wort produces ethanol and carbonation in the resulting beer. Most modern beer is brewed with hops, which add bitterness and other flavours and act as a natural preservative and stabilizing agent. Other flavouring agents such as gruit, herbs, or fruits may be included or used instead of hops. In commercial brewing, the natural carbonation effect is often removed during processing and replaced with forced carbonation.
Brewing is the production of beer by steeping a starch source in water and fermenting the resulting sweet liquid with yeast. It may be done in a brewery by a commercial brewer, at home by a homebrewer, or by a variety of traditional methods such as communally by the indigenous peoples in Brazil when making cauim. Brewing has taken place since around the 6th millennium BC, and archaeological evidence suggests that emerging civilizations, including ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, brewed beer. Since the nineteenth century the brewing industry has been part of most western economies.
Hops are the flowers of the hop plant Humulus lupulus. They are used primarily as a bittering, flavouring, and stability agent in beer, to which, in addition to bitterness, they impart floral, fruity, or citrus flavours and aromas. Hops are also used for various purposes in other beverages and herbal medicine. The hop plant is a vigorous, climbing, herbaceous perennial, usually trained to grow up strings in a field called a hopfield, hop garden, or hop yard when grown commercially. Many different varieties of hops are grown by farmers around the world, with different types used for particular styles of beer.
A pub, or public house, is an establishment licensed to sell alcoholic drinks, which traditionally include beer and cider. It is a social drinking establishment and a prominent part of British, Irish, Breton, New Zealand, South African and Australian cultures. In many places, especially in villages, a pub is the focal point of the community. In his 17th-century diary, Samuel Pepys described the pub as "the heart of England".
Stout is a dark, top-fermented beer with a number of variations, including dry stout, Baltic porter, milk stout, and imperial stout.
Root beer is a sweet North American beverage traditionally made using the root bark of the sassafras tree Sassafras albidum or the vine of Smilax ornata (sarsaparilla) as the primary flavor. Root beer is typically but not exclusively non-alcoholic, caffeine-free, and carbonated. It usually has a thick and foamy head when poured. Modern, commercially produced root beer is generally sweet, foamy, carbonated, non-alcoholic, and flavored using artificial sassafras flavoring. Sassafras root is still used to flavor traditional root beer, but since sassafras was banned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration due to the carcinogenicity of its constituent safrole, most commercial recipes do not contain sassafras. Some commercial root beers do use a safrole-free sassafras extract. Major producers include A&W Root Beer, Barq's, Dad's Root Beer, Hires Root Beer, and Mug Root Beer.
Pale ale is a top-fermented beer made with predominantly pale malt.
Wheat beer is a beer, usually top-fermented, which is brewed with a large proportion of wheat relative to the amount of malted barley. The two main varieties are Weissbier, based on the German tradition, and Witbier, based on the Belgian tradition; minor types include Lambic, Berliner Weisse, and Gose.
Beer pong, also known as Beirut, is a drinking game in which players throw a ping pong ball across a table with the intent of landing the ball in a cup of beer on the other end. The game typically consists of opposing teams of two or more players per side with 6 or 10 cups set up in a triangle formation on each side. Each team then takes turns attempting to shoot ping pong balls into the opponent's cups. If a ball lands in a cup, the contents of that cup are consumed by the other team and the cup is removed from the table. The first team to eliminate all of the opponent's cups is the winner.
A craft brewery or microbrewery is a brewery that produces small amounts of beer, typically much smaller than large-scale corporate breweries, and is independently owned. Such breweries are generally characterized by their emphasis on quality, flavor and brewing technique.
Beer is a village and civil parish in the East Devon district of Devon, England. The village faces Lyme Bay and is a little over 1 mile (1.6 km) west of the town of Seaton. It is situated on Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site and its picturesque cliffs, including Beer Head, form part of the South West Coast Path.
India pale ale (IPA) is a hoppy beer style within the broader category of pale ale.
A&W Root Beer is a root beer brand primarily available in the United States and Canada. Founded in 1919 by Roy W. Allen, Allen partnered with Frank Wright in 1922. They combined their initials to create the brand "A&W" and inspired a restaurant chain, also founded in 1922. Originally, A&W root beer drinks sold for five cents.
Cask ale or cask-conditioned beer is unfiltered and unpasteurised beer which is conditioned and served from a cask without additional nitrogen or carbon dioxide pressure. Cask ale is also sometimes referred to as real ale in the United Kingdom, a term coined by the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), often now extended to cover bottle-conditioned beer as well.
Beer style is a term used to differentiate and categorise beers by factors such as colour, flavour, strength, ingredients, production method, recipe, history, or origin.
Beer is one of the oldest drinks humans have produced, dating back to at least the 5th millennium BC in Iran, and was recorded in the written history of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and spread throughout the world.
Oktoberfest is the world's largest Volksfest. Held annually in Munich, Bavaria, Germany, it is a 16- to 18-day folk festival running from mid or late September to the first Sunday in October, with more than six million people from around the world attending the event every year. Locally, it is often called the Wiesn, after the colloquial name for the fairgrounds, Theresa's meadows (Theresienwiese). The Oktoberfest is an important part of Bavarian culture, having been held since the year 1810. Other cities across the world also hold Oktoberfest celebrations that are modeled after the original Munich event.
Lager is a type of beer conditioned at low temperatures. Lagers can be pale, amber, or dark. Pale lager is the most widely consumed and commercially available style of beer. Well-known brands include Pilsner Urquell, Molson Canadian, Miller, Stella Artois, Beck's, Brahma, Budweiser Budvar, Corona, Snow, Tsingtao, Singha, Kirin, Quilmes, Heineken, Kingfisher, Carling, Foster's, Carlsberg, Birra Moretti and Tennents.
A brewery or brewing company is a business that makes and sells beer. The place at which beer is commercially made is either called a brewery or a beerhouse, where distinct sets of brewing equipment are called plant. The commercial brewing of beer has taken place since at least 2500 BC; in ancient Mesopotamia, brewers derived social sanction and divine protection from the goddess Ninkasi. Brewing was initially a cottage industry, with production taking place at home; by the ninth century monasteries and farms would produce beer on a larger scale, selling the excess; and by the eleventh and twelfth centuries larger, dedicated breweries with eight to ten workers were being built.
Ale is a type of beer brewed using a warm fermentation method, resulting in a sweet, full-bodied and fruity taste. Historically, the term referred to a drink brewed without hops.
