Richard Feynman once said that all life is fermentation which means all the things that keep us alive and give us energy or do some very unique chemistry. Over the past couple hundred years we've learned a lot about how that chemistry works, but we're still billions of years behind Earth's original fermenters, bacteria and yeast.
But luckily we've put their evolutionary experience to work making this magical liquid. If only they could tell us how they do it.
Most of you know pretty much how beer is made, but let's run over the basics. So we're all on the same page
Generally speaking, beer is any alcoholic beverage made from fermented cereal grains usually preserved and flavored with hops. Grains like barley or wheat are malted and then soaked in hot water to release their sugars creating a liquid called wort.
Flavorings are added, the wort is cooled and then yeast to begin the conversion of sugar to ethanol and co2. After most or all the sugars consumed fresh yeast and sugar added to carbonate the final product in a sealed container. by altering the type of grains used, how they're processed, which hop varieties are added and win, or by including any of the hosts of flavor additives from chocolate to Chili Peppers, beer can grow up to be just about anything.
Luckily, I'm here at jester King brewery in Austin Texas today with Eric Swanson. You think you can show us how it's done?
I think it probably could give you some insight into all that Let's take a little brewing science story.
So what's different about the kind of beer you may hear that compared to sort of the typical mass-produced beers that people might be used to? Basic idea is that we are a farmhouse brewery.
We're trying to create a product that has a sense of place. A reflection of this time and space and the people making it.
We like to think that if you were to take the exact same ingredients in the exact same recipe and try to replicate our product somewhere else, it would taste completely different. What are you trying to make your final product?
