Ingredients
Four ingredients and a great deal of technique. These pages cover what each one contributes and why substituting one for another changes the beer.
- Hops
Bitterness, aroma and preservation — and the varieties that define modern beer.
- Malt & grain
Colour, body, sweetness and every roasted flavour in beer.
- Yeast & fermentation
The organism that decides whether a beer tastes of banana, pepper or nothing at all.
Yeast and fermentation
BeerHQ models fermentation biology and behaviour rather than commercial strain catalogues. Supplier strain data changes without notice, and a half-maintained strain list becomes wrong faster than it becomes useful.
- Saccharomyces cerevisiae
The species behind all ale, and behind bread and wine — fermenting warm and generating the esters and phenols that give ale its fruit and spice.
- Saccharomyces pastorianus
The cold-fermenting hybrid species behind all lager, producing very little ester or phenol character and leaving malt and hops exposed.
- Brettanomyces
A wild yeast genus producing barnyard, leather and tropical-fruit character — a defect in most beer and the point of lambic.
- Lactobacillus
Lactic acid bacteria that produce clean sourness — essential to Berliner Weisse, gose and kettle souring, and ruinous elsewhere.
- Pediococcus
A hop-tolerant lactic bacterium central to lambic and Flemish sours, notorious for a slimy intermediate stage.
- English ale yeast
Highly flocculent, moderately attenuating ale strains that leave residual sweetness and produce soft stone-fruit esters.
- American ale yeast
Clean, neutral, well-attenuating ale strains that stay out of the way so hops and malt can lead.
- German lager yeast
Clean, sulphur-producing lager strains requiring cold fermentation and a diacetyl rest, giving exceptionally neutral beer.
- Czech lager yeast
Lower-attenuating lager strains that leave more malt body, and in which a trace of diacetyl is traditionally tolerated.
All 30 fermentation concepts · 9 water profiles · 15 adjuncts