Beer
Beer is an alcoholic beverage produced by the brewing and fermentation of starches from cereal grain—most commonly malted barley, although wheat, maize (corn), rice, and oats are also used.
Most modern beer is brewed with hops, which add bitterness and other flavours and act as a natural preservative and stabilising agent.
The brewing industry is a global business, consisting of several dominant multinational companies and many thousands of smaller producers ranging from brewpubs to regional breweries.
[2][1] Christine Fell, in Leeds Studies in English (1975), suggests that the Old English/Norse word bēor did not originally denote ale or beer, but a strong, sweet drink rather like mead or cider.
[6] The earliest clear chemical evidence of beer produced from barley dates to about 3500–3100 BC, from the site of Godin Tepe in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran.
[11] Approximately 5000 years ago, workers in the city of Uruk (modern day Iraq) were paid by their employers with volumes of beer.
[21] Beer was spread through Europe by Germanic and Celtic tribes as far back as 3000 BC, and it was mainly brewed on a domestic scale.
Alongside the basic starch source, the early European beers may have contained fruits, honey, numerous types of plants, spices, and other substances such as narcotic herbs.
[22] In 1516, William IV, Duke of Bavaria adopted the Reinheitsgebot (purity law), perhaps the oldest food-quality regulation still in use in the 21st century, according to which the only allowed ingredients of beer are water, hops, and barley-malt.
[27] The brewing industry is a global business, consisting of several dominant multinational companies and many thousands of smaller producers, ranging from brewpubs to regional breweries.
[30] A widely publicised study in 2018 suggested that sudden decreases in barley production due to extreme drought and heat could in the future cause substantial volatility in the availability and price of beer.
[37] The basic ingredients of beer are water; a starch source, usually malted barley; a brewer's yeast to produce the fermentation; and a flavouring such as hops.
[39] Less widely used starch sources include millet, sorghum, and cassava root in Africa; potato in Brazil; and agave in Mexico.
Some brewers have produced gluten-free beer, made with sorghum, for those who cannot consume gluten-containing grains like wheat, barley, and rye.
[66] As of 2020[update], according to the market research firm Technavio, AB InBev was the largest brewing company in the world, with Heineken second, CR Snow third, Carlsberg fourth, and Molson Coors fifth.
At these temperatures, yeast produces significant amounts of esters and other secondary flavour and aroma products, and the result is often a beer with slightly "fruity" compounds resembling apple, pear, pineapple, banana, plum, or prune, among others.
[84] With improved modern yeast strains, most lager breweries use only short periods of cold storage, typically no more than 2 weeks.
[90] The Andes in South America has Chicha, made from germinated maize (corn); while the indigenous peoples in Brazil have Cauim, a traditional drink made since pre-Columbian times by chewing manioc so that an enzyme (amylase) present in human saliva can break down the starch into fermentable sugars;[91] this is similar to Masato in Peru.
[92] Beers made from bread, among the earliest forms of the drink, are Sahti in Finland, Kvass in Russia and Ukraine, and Bouza in Sudan.
Food waste activists got inspired by these ancient recipes and use leftover bread to replace a third of the malted barley that would otherwise be used for brewing their craft ale.
[98][99] In terms of sales volume, most of today's beer is based on the pale lager brewed in 1842 in the city of Plzeň in the present-day Czech Republic.
[131] In the 1980s, Guinness introduced the beer widget, a nitrogen-pressurised ball inside a can which creates a moderately dense, tight head.
When a cask arrives in a pub, it is placed horizontally on a "stillage" frame, designed to hold it steady and at the right angle, and then allowed to cool to cellar temperature (typically between 11–13 °C or 52–55 °F),[133] before being tapped and vented—a tap is driven through a rubber bung at the bottom of one end, and a hard spile is used to open a hole in the uppermost side of the cask.
[143] Cans protect the beer from light (thereby preventing spoilage) and have a seal less prone to leaking over time than bottles.
[147] Drinking chilled beer began with the development of artificial refrigeration and by the 1870s, was spread in those countries that concentrated on brewing pale lager.
[153] Breweries offer branded glassware intended only for their own beers as a marketing promotion, as this increases sales of their product.
Alkaline hydrolysis experiments show that most of the phenolic acids are present as bound forms and only a small portion can be detected as free compounds.
[176] A 2013 study found that the flavour of beer alone could provoke dopamine activity in the brain of the male participants, who wanted to drink more as a result.
The 49 men in the study were subject to positron emission tomography scans, while a computer-controlled device sprayed minute amounts of beer, water and a sports drink onto their tongues.
Test results indicated that the flavour of the beer triggered a dopamine release, even though alcohol content in the spray was insufficient for the purpose of becoming intoxicated.
