Beer 101: How It Works and How It Started

Sometimes sitting down while drinking beer will make you think what malt really is and you get
them. Then barleys will come into the scene, then hops, and yeasts. It’s simple because barley,
water, hops and yeast when combined will produce an amazing product called beer.

However it's not just a matter of mixing the right amount of each ingredient alone that you can
get a good beer. Craft Brewery Tours in Calgary shows that a complex series of biochemical
reactions must take place to convert barley to fermentable sugars, and to allow yeast to live and
multiply, converting those sugars to alcohol.

Commercial breweries use sophisticated equipment and processes to control hundreds of

variables so that each batch of beer will taste the same. These are the reasons why Alberta Craft
Brewery tours are becoming popular among beer drinkers. You can have a different experience
by drinking craft beer in Canada craft brewery tours.

How It All Started

People have been brewing beer for thousands of years. Beer especially became a staple in the
middle Ages, when people began to live in cities where close quarters and poor sanitation
made clean water difficult to find. The alcohol in beer made it safer to drink than water.

In the 1400s in Germany, a type of beer was made that was fermented in the winter with a
different type of yeast. This beer was called a lager, and, in part due to Prohibition, a variation of
this type of beer is dominant around the globe today.

For 13 years, starting in 1920, a constitutional amendment banned the production of alcoholic
beverages in the United States. Before Prohibition, America had thousands of breweries
producing many different types of beer. But Prohibition forced most breweries out of business.
By the time the laws were repealed in 1933, only the largest breweries had survived.

These breweries sought to brew a beer with universal appeal so that it could be sold everywhere
in the country. Then World War II came. With food in short supply and many of the men
overseas, breweries started brewing a lighter style of beer that is very common today. Since the
early 1990s, small regional breweries have made a comeback popping up all over the world, and
variety has increased.