The
ART the Brew of
-Angie Johnson-Schmit
Beer has been around for thousands of years, with the earliest known recipe found inscribed on clay tablets in Mesopotamia. Those 3,900-year-old tablets contained a poem to the Sumerian goddess of beer, Ninkasi, as well as the basic instructions for how they brewed beer. That Sumerian beer was essentially made by soaking sugar-rich bread in water, allowing it to ferment, and then straining the mixture and drinking the resulting beer.
B
rewing beer has come a long way since then, with technology playing a role in those improvements. Beer is currently more popular than wine or whiskey, trailing only water and tea in terms of consumption. While most people recognize the basic ingredients – malt, water, hops, yeast – many have no idea how the delicious carbonated alcoholic drink is made.
“The process starts with malt,” said Smith. Like most breweries, LazyG buys their malt for beer making. While malt is typically barley, it can be just about any grain. After wetting the malt, it is allowed to germinate. During germination, the seeds “form all these enzymes and release all these nutrients...where before, it’s all locked up in a protein matrix and it’s not very accessible,” he said.
Fortunately, LazyG Brewhouse’s brewmaster Travis Smith broke down the steps for us.
Once the malt sprouts, it’s dried out and ground up, “not like a flour, but more like a coarse ground coffee for a French press,”
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