A key ingredient.  It’s a vine-like plant and the female flowers are the bit we need! Hops are what makes beer bitter and are closely related to marijuana. Hops are responsible for the bitterness in beer and there are over 100 varieties.  It is also a preservative and was the reason India Pale Ale came about as more hops was added to beer sent from [..]

The other combatant in the keg vs. cask debate. An 11 gallon metal barrel that contains your beer.  Keg beer is pasteurized so doesn’t develop after it leaves the brewery and therefore does not need to settle making it easier for a pub to handle.

Anything in a beer that isn’t hops, water, yeast or from the grain. They are added to the beer enhance one of the original 4 ingredients i.e. honey or fruit to change the taste, smell or colour.  They are very common in mass produced lager-style beers as it’s an easy way to change the end product.

Yay! A by-product of fermentation. It is produced when the yeast consumes the sugars in the chosen grain.

(Alcohol by Volume) – The percentage of the total volume of the beer that is pure alcohol

A type of beer made with top fermenting yeast.

A style of German beer brewed near Dusseldorf.  It’s darker than a standard lager and is top fermented before being cold conditioned i.e. lagered.  Altbier literally means Old Beer.

Hops added at the end of beer production to give it a final hoppy boost.

If you take two measures of a beer–hoppy at one side and malty at the other–a well-balanced beer would be bang in the middle with tastes of both.

A grain used to make beer.