So You Want To Brew Your Own Beer
Fervour for home beer brewing can be as extensive as any other hobby but rarely as enjoyable. Brewing your own beer is a great hobby enjoyed by many and you can very easily get involved with simply a small smattering of equipment. But, before you take up beer making, you should really get to know the amazing collections of beers that are accessible to the beer lover and home beer maker and brewmaster. Follow along as we give you a brief journey of the beer varieties you could choose from.
Beer is not just simply beer. Most beers are either Ales or Lagers. But even even those two categories can be filtered down into a wide variety of drink from Wheat beers to India pale ales, pilsners, dark lager, American Lights, Bitters, Hefeweizen beers, Lambic beers, Weizenbier, Vegetable Beer, Spice Beer, Oktoberfest, Helles, Barley Wine, Scottish Ale, Porter, Dortmunder Adambier, wood aged beer, Australian Sparkling Ale, Breakfast Stout, Low-Carbohydrate Beer and on and on. Amazing isn’t it? There’s probably a beer to suit every pallet and taste in the world.
Ales were the first beers to be produced since they never needed the refrigeration techniques or simple ices caves that Lagers need to be produced. Ales are also categorized as a top fermenting beer while Lagers are categorized as bottom fermenting. Yeasts used for Ales generally rise to the top of the batch during the fermentation process, creating a very thick, rich yeast head while the larger yeasts used to make Lagers have a tendency to settle out to the bottom of the fermenter as fermentation nears completion. That is the main difference between Lagers and Ales in very simple terms. Ales also tend to have more personality and flavour than Lager styles do.
Within ales there is a large variety to suit every taste. Cream ale is a pale golden, slightly sweet, light-bodied drink. Stouts and porters are dark colored beers that can be broken down even more into various varieties enjoyed in the United Kingdom for hundreds of years. The famous India Pale Ale is light amber to copper in color and became popular among East India Company traders in the 1700’s. In fact, the Samuel Allsopp & Sons brewery even developed a special strongly hopped pale ale just for exportation to India because it was so very popular in that part of the world.
After hundreds of years of producing Ales, brew masters created Lagers, the name derived from the German word lagern, meaning to store, because they were stored in literal ice caves. The process to make a Lager had to be finished at 32–39 °F, known as the lagering phase, before Lagers could be drunk and so brew masters used the ice caves. Lagers became more widespread as mechanical refrigeration became more common. Lager beers taste drier than ales and they are generally less alcoholic and less complex in nature.
Like Ales, Lagers can cover a wide range of varieties. American Lager is the most popular beer in the United States today while the Pilsner style of Lager beer is the world’s most popular style of beer. But you can find an amazing variety of Lager beer produced around the world. In Germany we find Schwarzbier, which is a strong tasting, bitter-chocolate lager. Oktoberfest is a deep amber beer originally brewed in March. Chilli beer, like the hot Crazy Ed’s Cave Creek Chilli Beer of Phoenix, Arizona, has a whole chilli pod in each bottle. You can find Dunkel lager in Germany, Faro, a weak Belgian lambic beer sweetened with sugar or Stiegl from Salzburg. There is no end to the wide varieties of beer available world wide.
Just as there is a wide variety of beer available to the beer lover, there is also an equally wide variety of choice for the home beer brewer. Take your time to go through the other amazing varieties beyond what we’ve mentioned in this short article and sample for yourself the various types of beers that are available through your local brewery or local beer and alcohol store. You’ll find yourself surprised and delighted at the wide variety of smell, taste and color available to you.
We have a wide variety of beer brewing supplies for anyone into home beer brewing.