Just what is beer?

[mmead]

I was reading an article that stated...

"There’s something conspiratorial about the pumpkin phenomenon, as if the style were invented by a marketing guru instead of booze-starved colonial Americans, who made beer from the indigenous fruits and brown sugar when barley was scarce."
I would say fruit and brown sugar would make WINE right? Doesn't it have to contain barley to be beer?

 

[Halbrust]

Not barley, grain.

 

[Subsailor]

Barley + Hops + Water + Yeast = Beer!

 

[tom_gamer]

Malt to specific.

 

[jeepinjeepin]

Apple juice makes cider. Pear juice makes perry. Any other juice makes wine or does it have to be grapes? Honey makes mead. Mixtures of Grain, honey, and juice make cysers, braggots, and others...

 

[tjpfeister]

Beer is technically any fermented beverage made with cereal grains (sake, what?) So yes, one could form an argument that without cereal grains, the pilgrims made wine. But, unfortunately for the pilgrims, Merriam Webster had yet to publish his dictionary quite yet.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beer

 

[jeepinjeepin]

Beer is technically any fermented beverage made with cereal grains (sake, what?) So yes, one could form an argument that without cereal grains, the pilgrims made wine. But, unfortunately for the pilgrims, Merriam Webster had yet to publish his dictionary quite yet.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beer

You left out the "flavored by hops" part.

 

[gestyr]

Beer is the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.

 

[Zamial]

Specifically it is yeast piss.

 

[kroach01]

It is delicious, to be precise.

 

[ACbrewer]

It also depends on who and when the question is asked. According the the TTB (aka BAFTE) Alcohol is loosly grouped into 3 catagories: Beer, wine and distilled - this is for tax purposes. Beer is a fermented beverage with grains. Wine is a fermented beverage without ANY grains (as near as I can figure) and distilled is well distilled.

This means for the TTB, a braggot is a beer, not a wine, but most mead is wine, not beer. It also means that hard cider or a perry is also wine.

OTOH, for most home makers, if the majority of the sugars come from a source or another, that is how we classify it, so a honey beer is something like say 80% malt and 20% honey, but a braggot has atleast 50% of the fermentable bill from honey and less than 50% from malt.

Which means that the early settlers using pumpkin were making a wine, although their process probably included mashing so it is more like a beer (confused yet).

While the German beer laws state hops, a beer can be made without it (certianly were in ancient Egypt), so hops while nice are not a requirement.

DISCLAIMER: while I attempt here to show what the TTB/BAFTE says about alcohol, that should not be construed as legal advice, and it should be taken it as a lay man's interpretation of the available web information.