Popular Mechanics (South Africa)

Ingredient­s

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Water: You can’t make good beer with bad water. Access to a natural spring is really handy, but municipal water will work too. You may have to adjust the ph slightly, but that’s not difficult.

Malt: Barley is malted (dried, germinated and then dried again) to develop enzymes that convert starch to sugar. This malt is then boiled to extract sugar and flavour. Malts range from pale, through caramel and chocolate, to black, depending on how much they were roasted. Malt gives beer ‘brown’ flavours such as bread, caramel, chocolate, coffee and honey. It can also be bought as an extract.

Hops: Hops are the flowers of the hop plant, and act as a bittering agent, a flavourant and a preservati­ve. Added at various stages in the brewing process, hops give beer its bitterness and impart ‘green’ flavours such as grass, florals, fruit and herbs. Hops for brewing are typically in the form of compressed pellets.

Yeast: Yeasts are tiny single-celled fungi that eat sugar, and ‘poop’ CO2 and alcohol. As with malt and hops, many strains exist, all of which suit different styles and add their own flavours to the beer.

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