There was a time, not too long ago, when a Beer was just a finger and a nod to the bartender.
Today, however, beer has become the art/science it deserves to be.
In general beer is just 4 things; water, barley, yeast and hops. But with these four ingredients you can make an enormous amount of variations, as today’s many variations and categories of beer indicate. As a brewer will (enthusiastically) tell you, you can make 50 different kinds of beer, just by changing the temperature within 2 degrees celsius during the process.
Historically, beer and wine are the oldest forms of alcohol known to be consumed by humans.
Wine, slightly easier to make, could have been the first, but it is fairly safe to assume that beer came not long after domestication of grain, and the start of agriculture. Beer has been made by man for thousands of year, pottery jars found in what is today Iran, have been scientifically tested to show that they contained beer around 3500 BC.
In general if you can make bread, then you can make beer.
Beer is the most consumed alcoholic beverage in the world and is said to be the 3rd most consumed beverage in the world behind water and tea.
Today, almost every country in the world has laws that define what beer is, and regulates its production, sales, distribution and consumption.
The (normally) four ingredients
Grain (Malt)
Generally beer is made from malted barley (just like scotch whisky). The same as the whisky process barley is soaked in water, which encourages the grain to “germinate” or grow. This helps to start breaking down the starch in the grain. To stop the germination of the grain it is then heated, or roasted, in a kiln. The level the the malted grain is roasted has a huge influence on the flavour of the beer. Dark roasted malt result in a dark beer, typically with coffee and chocolate flavours, whereas a light roasted malt will result in a more “fresh” beer with more citrus flavours.