Can beer brewing use other raw materials instead of barley? Why use barley as the raw material for fermentation?

Barley first set foot in Spain in 5000 BC, and du came to the beautiful and rich China in 3000 BC. The most stringent German beer dao brewing method "Purity Law" promulgated in 1516 in Germany uses only four natural raw materials of barley, hops, yeast, and water without any additives. The brewer's craft beer is using this brewing method. In addition to ensuring the taste of beer, it also retains the nutrients in beer to the utmost extent. Barley is easy to germinate and is a non-staple crop. It is grown all over the country. Its chemical composition is suitable for brewing beer, and the price is low, so beer brewers have always used it.

Reasons for choosing barley:

To brew high-quality beer, you must have high-quality barley to produce high-quality malt.The standard for special high-quality beer barley requires high purity, large thousand grains, thin hull, light and shiny color, moderate protein content, high leaching rate and high germination rate, but also requires amino nitrogen content and high saccharification power, β- Special quality requirements such as low dextran content.

Main reference parameters for brewing barley:

For beginners, you can make a preliminary quality evaluation of barley malt according to the following table:

After the barley is harvested, it needs to be germinated into barley before it can be used in beer brewing. I think many people have seen the production process of bean sprouts. The same principle is used when barley is made into barley. Simply put, it is soaked in water. It sprouts at the temperature. This process involves a more complicated biochemical process, so I won’t say more about it, but one thing to say is that the process of making barley into barley malt will increase the raw material cost by 50% or more.

Then some people will ask why malt is necessary, but barley is not available. To explain this problem, let's talk about an important part of beer brewing-maltification. Maltification is to crush the malt and soak it in hot water. The enzymes in the malt will hydrolyze the starch into maltose, so that the yeast can eat it, or the yeast does not eat it. So the important point is-enzymes.

In the process of malt saccharification, we rely on two enzymes the most-α-amylase and β-amylase. These two enzymes can hydrolyze the amylose in malt into maltose. The working process of these two enzymes is more complicated. I believe No one wants to see it. Let me give you the most intuitive example. For example, amylose is a long rope, and α-amylase cuts this long rope from the middle and then cut it from the middle. Cut the two ropes in the middle, and so on, until there is no more to cut; the work of β-amylase is to cut from both ends of the rope in turn, cutting out one maltose at a time until there is no more to cut. So it’s clear to everyone that these two enzymes can work at the same time to make saccharification more thorough.

If you accidentally say it wrong, let’s get back to the subject. Enzymes are an important factor in malt saccharification. The original barley contains little or almost no alpha-amylase. As for the beta-amylase in the original barley. , But not much. However, during the germination process, after a series of complex biochemical reactions, I won't introduce them here. In short, α-amylase and β-amylase are produced.

Different temperatures produce different colors of barley malt

Many people have asked how the color of beer comes from. Some people even said when they first drank stout if they added color or something. In fact, the color of beer comes from malt.