>>With only four main ingredients: malted barley, hops, yeast, and water, it's surprising
how many styles and variations there are of beer in the world. It's also hotly contested
how many styles or how to divide them, but there's one thing that everybody can agree
on, and that is that beers are really separated by the yeast type into two categories: ales
and lagers. Ales are the longer, older component of beer. Ales have been around for thousands
and thousands of years, and was the focus of most of the development of beer up until
the last 200 years. Ales use a top fermenting yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae--beer. The
other type, lagers, are a bottom fermenting yeast, Saccharomyces pastorianus. Turns out
that there's several names for this used, and sometimes that gets confusing. But what
we do know about lager yeast is it's a bottom fermenting yeast, and really did not come
around until the last 200 years, mainly because bottom fermenting yeast, the lager yeast,
used lower temperatures. So therefore the lower temperature was only available during
the winters or in caves until modern refrigeration. If we look at these two types of beer, we
can compare them to wine, red wine and white wine. Ales are more like red wines. They're
going to have a more complex flavor palate, and they also will be things that are less
crisp but that have a lot of body. Like white wines, lagers are crisp and refreshing, but
they won't have as complex of a taste profile.
Now making ales can be done anytime of the year, and we're really looking at temperatures
in the 65 Fahrenheit to 75 Fahrenheit range. With lagers we're really looking on the colder
range, 40 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Lagers have become very popular over the last two
hundred years. If we think about the types of beers that are consumed the most in America,
lager styles are the types that Americans are known for drinking. But it's also where
the manufacture of lagers really took off, where the manufacturing and industrial base
allowed for both refrigeration to help in the fermentation process but also refrigeration
to stabilize those lagers so they could be transported and consumed in large regions.
It turns out that this is very region. So if we think about wine, we have regions of
wines. We have descriptions of wines in France that are very regional-based. We can use the
same type of regional base to describe beers. Therefore, you often will see styles of beers
broken into the different regions. You will see the same terminology used for different
regions. You can have a English Pale Ale, an American Pale Ale, a German Pale Ale. Just
like with the wine regions, there's slight variations of these, but they're all pale
ales. The other things that we can use for different styles is color, bitterness, the
gravity, which often gives us the alcohol content, and the aroma. For this coursework,
we're going to use a very simplistic view of the styles of ales and lagers. Again, if
there's one type of style that you really like, please expand upon that and learn as
much as you can around that style. For our ales, we have pale ales, Indian pale ales,
Brown ales, Porters, stouts, barley wine, and wheat beer. For lagers, we have pale lagers,
often referred to as Pilsner, Bocks, Dunkels, and Oktoberfest or Märzen beers, March Beer.
As I said, we're going to use this basic list of styles for this course, but they diverge
greatly. Just like with wine where the winemaker can take different styles of grapes but also
processes, in beer there's small variations that can be made with the malted barley—how
it's kilned, what temperature it's kilned at, how we do the mashing process, what temperature
we're doing our mashing at, how we bring in our different types of hops, when the hops
is brought into the process. Although there's two main types of yeast, ale and lager yeast,
there are multiple variations of these yeast, often closely held secrets within a brewery
that can make a very specific flavor palate. And then finally how we finish that beer.
All of this goes into make the rich variety of beers we have in the world.