How our Irish beer is made

What is brewing?
Brewing is converting the starch source into a sugary liquid called wort and converting the wort into the alcoholic beverage known as beer in a fermentation process affected by yeast.

The brewing process:

Preparation of wort
Malted Barley is ground to grist. Hot water is then mixed with this grist, a process known as mashing. During the mashing process, which takes around 1 to 2 hours, the starches are converted to sugars, and then the sweet wort is drained off the grains. The grains are now washed allowing 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 water is called wort separation.

At set times, hop is also usually added to the mixture. Hops are generally added to wort in two parts: the bittering hops are boiled for around an hour to an hour and a half, and the finishing hops are added toward, or after, the end of the boil. They are added during boiling in order to extract bitterness, flavour and aroma from them. The longer the hops are boiled, the more bitterness they contribute, but less of the hop flavour and aroma remains in the beer.

At the end of the mashing, the hot wort is decanted or filtered, boiled, cooled, and the yeast is added to start the fermentation.

Fermentation
The fermentation proceeds by producing carbon dioxide, converting the hopped wort to young beer and increasing the biomass of yeast over a period of 3 to 4 days. At the end of this period the yeast produces a crop on the top or bottom of the Fermentation Vessel. This crop will be about 5 times the weight originally added to the Fermenter. A proportion of this yeast can be used for subsequent fermentations if you choose not to pitch with new yeast each time.

Final Stages
Once the yeast has been cropped from the Fermentation Vessel and the beer is at the desired alcohol and residual sugar content the fermentation is cooled. After a total of 7 days in the Fermentation Vessel the beer is ready to transfer into maturation tanks for further cold maturation and from there either directly or via filtration to fill into kegs or bottles for distribution to the point of sale.

2 row vs 6 row barley
Source: The Brewers Market Guide

It is widely believed that two-row barleys are the best barleys for malting and brewing. In fact, outside North America most of the world’s brewing nations exclusively use two-row barley for malt. Six-row barleys, if produced overseas at all, are largely used only for feed.

The situation in North America, however, is rather different and warrants closer examination. Modern American brewing practices have relied on six-row barleys, partly because they were better adapted to many regions. In addition, barley breeding efforts over the past 50 years have reduced, if not obscured, some of the differences between two- and six-row barleys and malts. Yet important distinctions remain in terms of kernel size, extract, protein, and enzyme levels.

The historical preference for two-row barley is based on the fact that two-row barley yields malts with 1-2% greater theoretical extract, meaning that brewers can brew more beer. Large-scale brewers, however, must balance the higher extract yield against the higher cost and lower diastatic power of two-row malt. Small-scale brewers with less focus on extract yield may find the differences between the two negligible.

More information can be found here.

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