Humans are 60% water. The Earth is 71% water. Beer is 95% water.
Just like everything we know and love, beer is made up mostly of water, but it has other key ingredients that make it special. We’ve explored some of the individual components of beer in the past, including the four ingredients needed to make a “pure” beer (by Germany’s standards).
Today, let’s learn about the five main ingredients in beer.
What Are the Five Main Ingredients In Beer?
The five main ingredients in beer are water, hops, malt, yeast, and adjuncts (literally everything else). Water makes up the bulk of every beer. Hops add bitterness and aroma. Malt provides flavor and the sugars that become alcohol. Yeast drives fermentation. And adjuncts, like fruit, spices, oats, and more, give brewers creative freedom.
Water
Water is a pretty important component in beer. Aside from making up a huge portion of the brew, the water’s quality is going to significantly impact the beer’s quality. At the very least, water in beer should be clean and odorless, like water you would want to drink.
Low-quality water would show through in the final product. I’m sure you can already imagine this in your head, but I’ll use an example anyway: imagine using a super acidic, slimy water for coffee or tea. Now think about that, but in a beer.
So, while overlooked, the quality of water in beer is pretty important.
Hops
A lot of the flavor you get in beer comes from hops. These are the green, flowery-looking plants you see everywhere, including in my logo!
There isn’t much to say about hops that I haven’t covered in other articles, so I’ll hit the main points:
- Hops are added at different points throughout the brewing process to yield different hop flavors and aromas.
- Fresh hops are fresh off the vine, while dry hopping is a technique to add more hop flavor.
- Hops can make beers bitter, but bitter and hoppy don’t mean the same thing. Hops can also produce the juicy flavors you find in Hazy IPAs, along with other fun flavors.
- Beer scientists are creating new hops all the time, so the range of flavors and aromas continues to expand.
Malt
I like to imagine malt and hops as the sort of yin-yang of beer. Malts provide that rich, caramelly flavor you find in lagers and some ales. So, beers with lots of bitterness or juiciness are more hop-forward, whereas beers with a toasty flavor, like a Vienna Lager or a stout, are more malt-forward.
The term “malt” just means malted, as in malted barley, wheat, rice, or oats, though brewers could use another form of malt. Barley is the most common grain used for malt, but blending malts yields tasty results. For example, a rice lager will have malted barley and rice. A wheat lager like Blue Moon) will have malted wheat and barley.
Malts also provide sugars to the brewing process, and sugar yields alcohol through fermentation. This is a wonderful scientific interaction caused by yeast.
Yeast
To turn that malty, hoppy, water brew into something alcoholic, brewers add yeast. Yeast does pretty much everything from making bread to eating sugars and creating booze.
There are different types of yeasts used in brews depending on the brewer’s goals, but here’s one yeast tidbit to note:
- Top-fermenting yeast is used primarily for ales.
- Bottom-fermenting yeast is used primarily for lagers.
For hundreds of years, brewers didn’t know what yeast was or how it worked. This led to spontaneous fermentation, when naturally occurring yeasts floating through the air interact with brewing beer. This blend of yeasts usually makes beer sour, so beer was at least slightly sour up until the past 100 years or so.
Today, brewers use clean strains of yeast to intentionally get specific flavors. Some brewers still use spontaneous fermentation, but nowadays we have a pretty good idea of what yeasts are natural to the environment and will “spontaneously” end up in beer.
Adjuncts
The critical fifth ingredient in beer is…everything else! Anything else that brewers add to the brew to make their beer is known as an adjunct. This can be anything from spices to fruit purees to ground-up Samoa cookies.
Adjuncts are what give modern beers so much range. Fruited sours, lagers with salt and lime, and coffee stouts are just a few examples of how adjuncts can transform a traditional beer into something new and interesting.
Adding this Fifth Element makes the future of beer wildly unpredictable and enticing. It will be exciting to see what interesting creations brewers come up with!
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Always choose top-notch water, hops, malt, and yeast for a stellar brew, and don’t be afraid to play with the fifth ingredient 😁🍺