6 Pack Beer
Pricilla Igoe
Some of the earliest writings refer to the production and distribution of beer: the Code of Hammurabi included laws regulating it,[8] and "The Hymn to Ninkasi", a prayer to the Mesopotamian goddess of beer, a recipe for it.[9][10]
Beer is distributed in bottles and cans and is also commonly available on draught, particularly in pubs and bars. The brewing industry is a global business, consisting of several dominant multinational companies and many thousands of smaller producers ranging from brewpubs to regional breweries. The strength of modern beer is usually around 4% to 6% alcohol by volume (ABV).[11]
In early forms of English and in the Scandinavian languages, the usual word for beer was the word whose Modern English form is ale.[12] The modern word beer comes into present-day English from Old English bēor, itself from Common Germanic, it is found throughout the West Germanic and North Germanic dialects (modern Dutch and German bier, Old Norse bjrr). The earlier etymology of the word is debated: the three main theories are that the word originates in Proto-Germanic *beuzą (putatively from Proto-Indo-European *bʰeusm), meaning 'brewer's yeast, beer dregs'; that it is related to the word barley, or that it was somehow borrowed from Latin bibere 'to drink'.[13][14][12] It is speculated by Christine Fell in Leeds Studies in English (1975), that the Old English/Norse word bēor did not denote ale or beer, but a strong, sweet drink rather like mead or cider; however, in Europe, the meaning of bēor expanded to cover the meaning of ale. When hopped ale from Europe was imported into Britain in the late Middle Ages using the word beer it was originally used to denote hopped ale to differentiate from the British unhopped ale, though later it came to mean all forms of beer.[12]
Beer is recorded in the written history of ancient Egypt,[21][22] and archaeologists speculate that beer was instrumental in the formation of civilizations.[23] Approximately 5000 years ago, workers in the city of Uruk (modern day Iraq) were paid by their employers with volumes of beer.[24] During the building of the Great Pyramids in Giza, Egypt, each worker got a daily ration of four to five litres of beer, which served as both nutrition and refreshment and was crucial to the pyramids' construction.[25]
Some of the earliest Sumerian writings contain references to beer; examples include a prayer to the goddess Ninkasi, known as "The Hymn to Ninkasi",[26] which served as both a prayer and a method of remembering the recipe for beer in a culture with few literate people, and the ancient advice ("Fill your belly. Day and night make merry") to Gilgamesh, recorded in the Epic of Gilgamesh by the alewife Siduri, may, at least in part, have referred to the consumption of beer.[27] The Ebla tablets, discovered in 1974 in Ebla, Syria, show that beer was produced in the city in 2500 BC.[28] A fermented drink using rice and fruit was made in China around 7000 BC. Unlike sake, mould was not used to saccharify the rice (amylolytic fermentation); the rice was probably prepared for fermentation by chewing or malting.[29][30] During the Vedic period in Ancient India, there are records of the consumption of the beer-like sura.[31][32] Xenophon noted that during his travels, beer was being produced in Armenia.[33]
Almost any substance containing sugar can naturally undergo alcoholic fermentation and thus be utilised in the brewing of beer. It is likely that many cultures, on observing that a sweet liquid could be obtained from a source of starch, independently invented beer. Bread and beer increased prosperity to a level that allowed time for the development of other technologies and contributed to the building of civilizations.[34][35][36][37]
In 1516, William IV, Duke of Bavaria, adopted the Reinheitsgebot (purity law), perhaps the oldest food-quality regulation still in use in the 21st century, according to which the only allowed ingredients of beer are water, hops, and barley-malt.[40] Beer produced before the Industrial Revolution continued to be made and sold on a domestic scale, although by the 7th century AD, beer was also being produced and sold by European monasteries. During the Industrial Revolution, the production of beer moved from artisanal manufacture to industrial manufacture, and domestic manufacture ceased to be significant by the end of the 19th century.[41] The development of hydrometers and thermometers changed brewing by allowing the brewer more control of the process and greater knowledge of the results.
In 1912, brown bottles began to be used by the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the United States. This innovation has since been accepted worldwide as it prevents light rays from degrading the quality and stability of beer.[42]
The brewing industry is now a global business, consisting of several dominant multinational companies and many thousands of smaller producers, ranging from brewpubs to regional breweries.[43] As of 2006, more than 133 billion litres (35 billion US gallons), the equivalent of a cube 510 metres on a side, of beer are sold per year, producing total global revenues of US$294.5 billion. In 2010, China's beer consumption hit 450 million hectolitres (45 billion litres), or nearly twice that of the United States, but only 5 per cent sold were premium beers, compared with 50 per cent in France and Germany.[44]
A widely publicised study in 2018 suggested that sudden decreases in barley production due to extreme drought and heat could in the future cause substantial volatility in the availability and price of beer.[45]
The process of making beer is known as brewing. A dedicated building for the making of beer is called a brewery, though beer can be made at home and has been for much of its history, in which case the brewing location is often called a brewhouse. A company that makes beer is called either a brewery or a brewing company. Beer made on a domestic scale for non-commercial reasons is today usually classified as homebrewing, regardless of where it is made, though most homebrewed beer is made at home. Historically, domestic beer was what's called farmhouse ale.
Brewing beer has been subject to legislation and taxation for millennia, and from the late 19th century on, taxation largely restricted brewing to commercial operations only in the UK. However, the UK government relaxed legislation in 1963, followed by Australia in 1972 and the US in 1978,[46] though individual states were allowed to pass their own laws limiting production,[47] allowing homebrewing to become a popular hobby.
The first step, where the wort is prepared by mixing the starch source (normally malted barley) with hot water, is known as "mashing". Hot water (known as "liquor" in brewing terms) is mixed with crushed malt or malts (known as "grist") in a mash tun.[48] The mashing process takes around 1 to 2 hours,[49] during which the starches are converted to sugars, and then the sweet wort is drained off the grains. The grains are then washed in a process known as "sparging". This washing allows the brewer to gather as much of the fermentable liquid from the grains as possible. The process of filtering the spent grain from the wort and sparge water is called wort separation. The traditional process for wort separation is lautering, in which the grain bed itself serves as the filter medium. Some modern breweries prefer the use of filter frames, which allow for a more finely ground grist.[50]
Most modern breweries use a continuous sparge, collecting the original wort and the sparge water together. However, it is possible to collect a second or even third wash with the not quite spent grains as separate batches. Each run would produce a weaker wort and thus, a weaker beer. This process is known as the second (and third) runnings. Brewing with several runnings is called parti gyle brewing.[51]
The sweet wort collected from sparging is put into a kettle, or "copper" (so-called because these vessels were traditionally made from copper),[52] and boiled, usually for about one hour. During boiling, the water in the wort evaporates, but the sugars and other components of the wort remain; this allows more efficient use of the starch sources in the beer. Boiling also destroys any remaining enzymes left over from the mashing stage. Hops are added during boiling as a source of bitterness, flavour, and aroma. Hops may be added at more than one point during the boil. The longer the hops are boiled, the more bitterness they contribute, but the less hop flavour and aroma remain in the beer.[53]
After boiling, the hopped wort is cooled and ready for the yeast. In some breweries, the hopped wort may pass through a hopback, which is a small vat filled with hops, to add aromatic hop flavouring and to act as a filter, but usually the hopped wort is simply cooled for the fermenter, where the yeast is added. During fermentation, the wort becomes beer in a process that takes a week to several months, depending on the type of yeast and strength of the beer. In addition to producing ethanol, fine particulate matter suspended in the wort settles during fermentation. Once fermentation is complete, the yeast also settles, leaving the beer clear.[54]
During fermentation, most of the carbon dioxide is allowed to escape through a trap, and the beer is left with carbonation of only about one atmosphere of pressure. The carbonation is often increased either by transferring the beer to a pressure vessel such as a keg and introducing pressurised carbon dioxide or by transferring it before the fermentation is finished so that carbon dioxide pressure builds up inside the container as the fermentation finishes. Sometimes the beer is put unfiltered (so it still contains yeast) into bottles with some added sugar, which then produces the desired amount of carbon dioxide inside the bottle.[7]
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