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Grindstone Brews

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Ingredients

I want to brew a great beer. To brew a great beer, I need great ingredients. Back in 1516, Germany passed one of the oldest still-enforced food regulations, The Reinhetsgebot. Also known as the 'purity law', this states that beer shall only have four ingredients: water, barley, hops and yeast 1 . Beers have changes quite a bit in the last 600 years and today, commercial beers have many other ingredients but for our purposes, we are going to focus on these four main ones. For this week, I researched each of the ingredients and then went to my local homebrew shop to get advice and gathered everything that I needed to brew a great beer. Water Beer Connoisseur (2021) This ingredient is very obvious. Beer is mostly water so you need to add a lot of it to make beer. What Ididn't realize is that the water can turn a good beer into a great beer. Specific locations around the world are known for their beer mainly due to their water sources. The water in N...

Fermentation and Carbonation

It's time for SCIENCE!!!! At the end of last week's blog, I had just pitched the yeast into the wort. The yeast is the magical ingredient that turns what is essentially sugar water into the nectar of the gods...beer. Airlock ( Bob the Brewer ) Yeast is a single-cell organism (1). I like to think of them as tiny little bugs. These bugs' favourite food is sugar. It's how they live and die. These sugar bugs' entire life goal is to go around your beer and eat as much sugar as they can. However, just like humans, when you eat a lot, you get full. When you get full, you have to release some of that waste. Yeast releases two byproducts; carbon dioxide (CO2) and ethyl alcohol (1). The ethyl alcohol is what we are looking for. It's that intoxicating ingredients that make the nights fun and the morning painful. It makes the beer alcoholic. The carbon dioxide is just the yeast burping. We do want our beer to be all bubbly but at this stage, you can't control how much...