Beer is one of the oldest types of alcoholic drinks in the world, and the most widely consumed. It is the third most popular drink overall after potable water and tea. It is produced by the brewing and fermentation of starches, mainly derived from cereal grains—most commonly malted barley, though wheat, maize (corn), rice, and oats 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 stabilising 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.
Bock (or bok is a strong beer in Germany, usually a dark lager. Several substyles exist, including:
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 communally. Brewing has taken place since around the 6th millennium BC, and archaeological evidence suggests that emerging civilizations, including ancient Egypt, China, and Mesopotamia, brewed beer. Since the nineteenth century the brewing industry has been part of most western economies.
Pilsner is a type of pale lager. It takes its name from the Bohemian city of Plzeň, where the world's first pale lager was produced in 1842 by Pilsner Urquell Brewery.
Wheat beer is a top-fermented beer which is brewed with a large proportion of wheat relative to the amount of malted barley. The two main varieties are German Weizenbier and Belgian witbier; other types include Lambic, Berliner Weisse, and Gose.
The Reinheitsgebot is a series of regulations limiting the ingredients in beer in Germany and the states of the former Holy Roman Empire. The best known version of the law was adopted in Bavaria in 1516, but similar regulations predate the Bavarian order, and modern regulations also significantly differ from the 1516 Bavarian version. Although today, the Reinheitsgebot is mentioned in various texts about the history of beer, historically it was only applied in the duchy of Bavaria and from 1906 in Germany as a whole, and it had little or no effect in other countries or regions.
Pale lager is a very pale-to-golden-colored lager beer with a well-attenuated body and a varying degree of noble hop bitterness.
Smoked beer is a type of beer with a distinctive smoke flavour imparted by using malted barley dried over an open flame.
Creemore Springs is a brewery in Creemore, Ontario, Canada, which first opened in 1987. It was founded by John Wiggins, and its flagship brew was a premium amber lager brewed with specialty malts, fire brewed in a copper kettle. In 2005, it was acquired by Molson, a subsidiary of the seventh largest brewery corporation in the world, Molson Coors Brewing Company.
Altbier is a style of beer brewed in the Rhineland, especially around the city of Düsseldorf, Germany. It is a copper coloured beer whose name comes from it being top-fermented, an older method than the bottom fermentation of lagers.
Beer has been brewed in England for thousands of years. As a beer brewing country, it is known for top fermented cask beer which finishes maturing in the cellar of the pub rather than at the brewery and is served with only natural carbonation.
Beer is a major part of German culture. German beer is brewed according to the Reinheitsgebot, which permits only water, hops, and malt as ingredients; and stipulates that beers not exclusively using barley-malt, such as wheat beer, must be top-fermented.
Beer in Norway has a long history, stretching back more than a millennium. Until some 200 years ago, most farms where it was possible to grow grain south of the Arctic Circle, brewed their own beer. From the early 20th century brewing was industrialized and home brewing was restricted. Significant consolidation in the brewing sector reduced the number of major breweries to just a handful. With the exception of the farmhouse ales, most beer styles brewed in Norway trace their ancestry to central Europe.
Brewing in Ireland has a long history. Production currently stands at over 8 million hectolitres, and approximately half the alcohol consumed is beer.
Beer, called maekju in Korean, was first introduced to Korea in the early 20th century. Seoul's first brewery opened in 1908. Two current major breweries date back to the 1930s. The third brewery established in Korea, Jinro Coors Brewery, was founded in the 1990s. It was later acquired by Oriental Breweries (OB). Hite Breweries's former name was Chosun Breweries, which was established in 1933. The company changed its name to Hite Breweries in 1998. OB Breweries established as Showa Kirin Breweries in 1933. The company changed its name to OB Breweries in 1995.
Beer styles differentiate and categorise beers by colour, flavour, strength, ingredients, production method, recipe, history, or origin.
Beer is one of the oldest human-produced drinks. The first chemically confirmed barley-beer – from the area of Mesopotamia, part of modern-day Iraq – dates back to the 5th millennium BCE. The written history of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia records the use of beer, and the drink has spread throughout the world; a 3,900-year-old Sumerian poem honouring Ninkasi, the patron goddess of brewing, contains the oldest surviving beer-recipe, describing the production of beer from barley bread, and in China, residue on pottery dating from around 5,000 years ago shows that beer was brewed using barley and other grains.
Mash ingredients, mash bill, mashbill, or grain bill are the materials that brewers use to produce the wort that they then ferment into alcohol. Mashing is the act of creating and extracting fermentable and non-fermentable sugars and flavor components from grain by steeping it in hot water, and then letting it rest at specific temperature ranges to activate naturally occurring enzymes in the grain that convert starches to sugars. The sugars separate from the mash ingredients, and then yeast in the brewing process converts them to alcohol and other fermentation products.
Lager is a type of beer which has been brewed and conditioned at low temperature. Lagers can be pale, amber, or dark. Pale lager is the most widely consumed and commercially available style of beer. The term "lager" comes from the German word for "storage", as the beer was stored before drinking, traditionally in the same cool caves in which it was fermented.
American lager or North American lager is pale lager that is produced in the United States. The pale lager-style beer originated in Europe in the mid-19th century, and moved to the US with German immigrants. As a general trend outside of Bavaria and the Czech Republic where the beers may be firmly hopped, pale lager developed as a modestly hopped beer, and sometimes used adjuncts such as rice or corn – and this was also true in the US.
