Up to this point, we've been making tea. Thick, grainy, sweet tea, but tea nonetheless. In order to make the final transformation to wort, we need to bring every piece of the brew day together for one last stage in our boil kettle.
Hops have only recently become the flavouring staple we're used to in this age of craft obsession; they were originally employed (and remain useful) as a natural sanitising agent due to their high concentrations of “alpha” acids.
Yeast makes beer; brewers make wort. Once this sugary substrate is sealed up inside our fermentation tanks, our brew day is done and we can wait for our microscopic friends to finish the job. So how do we get from bins full of crushed grains to sweet, delicious yeast food?
