How Do You Get Different Kinds Of Beer?

With all the Oktoberfest events going on, questions about beer and the general knowledge of craft beer is starting to rise... the old days of mass media educating people about light beer is beginning to fade and craft beer is making it's way into main street.



A question asked by a friend began this discussion on how are different kinds of beer made? She ordered a double chocolate ale and was wondering if they just added something like Hershey's chocolate syrup to beer... my god that would be disgusting... no...

So, it's very simple... beer is made with malted barley and if you take malted barley by itself you get a beer that's known as a blonde ale. That is if you use ale yeast. If you use lager yeast, you would basically get a pilsner or Kolsch style beer. In other words, this is what your light beers consist of.

Now, if you take that malted barley and you heat it or roast it, you begin to caramelize the sugars and begin to get different flavors which you can later mix and match to come up with different styles of beer.

If you only heat up malted barley a little bit, you get caramel flavored malts which range from toffee to burnt sugar or raisiny flavored malts. What brewers do is take regular malted barley and add a little bit of caramel malt to make beers like red ales or amber ales.

If you were to heat malted barley even more, the flavor you begin to get is chocolate flavored or roasted. So brewers will take regular malted barley and add chocolate flavored grains to make a beer such as the double chocolate ale she was drinking...

This is a big reason why many people are now learning how to make beer at home. It's almost like cooking and coming up with your own recipes, only you are making beer.

All these different flavored malts are known as specialty grains. By playing around with all the different flavors brewers can come up with different flavors and beer styles that can really rattle your taste buds. Often times these beers will feel heavier than your typical commercial brew, but it doesn't necessarily have more alcohol.

Reason for that is that regular malted barley is used to get most of the fermentable sugars in beer. As you heat up or kiln the grains, those sugars become less and less fermentable. This makes some of the dark beers sweeter beers, because they have more left over sugars.

The only exception is when you begin to use malts such as roasted or black patent malt, which is a completely burnt grain and can have a harsh bitterness to it instead of being sweet.

Changing the flavor of malts is only one factor that affects the style of beer. There are two different types of yeast used by brewers. One is known as ale yeast and the other is known as lager yeast. The main difference is that lager yeast eats a type of sugar that ale yeast doesn't which makes lager beers drier and gives them a different character.

So if you were to take regular malted barley and add a little bit of caramel malt and use ale yeast you would get a pale ale. If you were to use the same, but use Vienna malt or Munich malt (which is a German style caramel malt), and use lager yeast you would get the famous Oktoberfest beer known as Marzen beer.

The last thing that impacts the style of beer is the hops, which comes from a plant and give beer it's bitterness and aroma. This is specially true for India Pale Ales which are known to be heavily hopped because hops also act as natural preservatives and they used to use hops so the beer could last long sea voyages while being exported to countries like India.