Cheers and Beers

6th August 2021 is International Beer Day! It's always celebrated on the first Friday in August, by drinking beer of course. I don't typically consume a lot of beer myself, however, every once in a rare while, I have enjoyed a unique craft beer with fruity flavour notes.

As I was recently looking through my travel albums, I found some beer-related photos to share. Here's one of the Heineken Brewery from Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

And here I am sitting inside the handle of the world's tallest pewter beer mug at the Royal Selangor in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

THE SCIENCE OF BEER

Brewing beer involves both microbiology and chemistry. The ingredients are usually water, malted barley as the starch and hops for the flavour.

The Steps:

MALTING & MILLING - Barley grains are partially germinated in water. Then kiln-dried and crushed.
MASHING, SPARGING & LAUTERING - Starch is converted to wort, a sugar-rich liquid containing maltose.
BOILING - Wort is boiled with hops in a copper kettle to establish the beer flavour. Hops also acts as an antibiotic preservative.
FERMENTING - Yeasts ferment the mixture, leading to the formation of alcohol and carbon dioxide.
CONDITIONING, FILTERING & CASKING - Beer is clarified to remove any remaining suspended solids and then aged to perfection.

MORE ABOUT FERMENTATION

Fermentation with yeasts is what makes beer alcoholic. Depending on the strain of yeast and the temperature of fermentation, you can get different varieties of beer. Two of the most common types are ales and lagers.

If the yeast is Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a top-fermenting yeast, that ferments quickly at warm temperatures (between 15 to 20°C), you get an ale.

If the yeast is Saccharomyces pastorianus, a bottom-fermenting yeast, that ferments slower at cool temperatures (around 10°C), you get a lager.

WHAT CHEMICALS ARE IN A BEER?

There is a myriad of molecules in a beer and you can see some of them on the new Pint of Beer Tea Towel I designed this year. For me, designing something new is my favourite part of the process of creating products. It's just SO exciting!

Beer Science Tea Towel

Some of the flavour-imparting molecules in beer come from hops. They include alpha-acids and beta-acids and you can see a close up of what these large molecules look like on these fun beer-themed cards.