My Brew is What?!

For the love of beer...many beer lovers have no clue what goes into their favorite beer and why there are so many different styles, or where their beer comes from before the brewery. The beer making process is not only a long physically enduring one, but also takes finding the perfect ingredients to make the perfect beer. Just as Jack Daniels only uses water from Cave Spring Hollow in Lynchburg, Tennessee even the source of the water for a brew can make a world of difference for its taste. Most beer drinkers know the four basics ingredients of beer: water, barley, yeast, and hops. Each of these ingredients will be worked through a process to turn into a brew.

WATER:

Generally speaking any water will work to brew beer, but some breweries pride themselves on only using a particular type of water or water from a specific source to brew their beer. If you are into science, there are a lot of scientific reason and ways to manipulate your water for a perfect brew. Coors is a company that takes a lot of pride in their water source, only in more northern areas can you find the water that makes Coors such a crisp and refreshing beer. JP Brewing Co. Uses water from the Chattahoochee River which is local to their Atlanta location.

BARLEY:

Next up we have barley. The type of barley effects the style of the brew. If it’s a lighter beer you would use a lighter roasted barley, if it's a darker beer you use a darker roasted barley for the batch. Barley can be purchased from online retailers or a local brewing specialty store. Breweries like JP Brewing Co. Will purchase their barley in bulk and crush it themselves at their Atlanta brewery. Crushing the barley is the most important part of this ingredient. If the barley is not crushed, then the brewers will not be able to turn the malt into sugars for the brew process.

YEAST:

Yeast is kind of the final step to turn a sugary, hoppy wort into actual beer. Yeast are tiny organisms that eat up the sugar that you produce from the barley and turns it into alcohol. The type of beer being made depends on the type of yeast that will be used. There is ale yeast and lager yeast. Ales are made from temperatures ranging from 65-75 degrees, and lagers are brewed at lower temperatures ranging from 40-50 degrees through different parts of the process. To be able to properly make lagers you have to have a brewery that can control the temperature with a lot of heavy equipment, like at JP Brewing Co.

HOPS:

The main component for flavor in the brewing process is the hops. There are two different types of hops that make a beer taste one of two ways. There are aroma hops which are less bitter and as the name describes adds more aroma, and there are bittering hops that combat the sugars from the barley and give a bitterness to the brew. Hops grown from different areas have different effects on a brew which means depending on the flavor a brewer is trying to achieve they will need a certain hop maybe even grown from a particular place. JP Brewing Co. has been experimenting in their brew lab with hops from all over the world to come up with the best brew that has perfect balance of aroma and bitterness.

JP Brewing Co. Gives tours to show this process, and the best part is trying the beer.