Category:Beer ingredients

Beer at its most basic is made from grain, water, hops, and yeast. However, despite the cachet of the Reinheitsgebot and "all-malt" beers, many common beer styles from around the world require other ingredients as well, from sugars to flavorings to additives that make the brewer's life easier.

The four basic ingredients

Beer is defined by the four basic ingredients: grain, water, hops, and yeast.

Water

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Not only does it cover three quarters of the earth's surface, water it is also the largest ingredient in beer by weight and volume. All water is not the same; the water used to brew can have a profound effect on the final beer.

Grain

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Most of the fermentable materials in beer come from grain. Most of the grain used in brewing consist of malted grains, usually barley. However, unmalted grains and grains other than barley, such as wheat and rye, also play a role in brewing.

Hops

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Hops are used to impart bitterness, flavor and aroma to beer. Many varieties of hops are available, each with its own unique character depending on the genetic makeup of the plant and the conditions in which it was grown.

Some brewers also brew grain-based fermented beverages without hops, usually as historical recreations of beers from times or places where hops were not commonly used. While they do not contain hops, these are often considered styles of beer as well.

Yeast

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Yeast is the organism that actually performs the fermentation, converting the sugars contributed by other ingredients into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

Other ingredients

While it takes some combination of the ingredients above to make a beer, other ingredients are also used by many brewers. Despite the Reinheitsgebot, good beer can and is made with these other ingredients.

Fermentable adjuncts

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Some people refer to any ingredient other than the four listed above as an adjunct, as well as grains other than barley (and sometimes wheat). However, the term is more commonly used to refer specifically to those added ingredients that contain fermentable sugars, such as table sugar or sugar syrups.

Flavoring agents

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Other ingredients that lack any significant fermentable sugars, such as spices, are often added to beer as well. In addition, some adjuncts, such as fruit, contribute both fermentables and flavor.

Brewing additives

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Finally, there is a class of ingredients that are added to and may affect the finished beer, but whose primary purpose is not to affect the beer's flavor or fermentability directly. These include water-modifying salts, clarifying agents, and elements intended to affect the pH of the mash or fermentation.

Known Commercial Ingredients

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See the Commercial Beers page for information on the ingredients used by commercial breweries, where known, including grains, hop varieties, yeast strains, and known gravity, color and bitterness data.