Malt

Malt is the cereal grain ingredient (barley, wheat or rye) that provides the color, body and fermentable sugar for your beer. Your brewing experience at YOLO is referred to as "All Grain", meaning you will create your beer completely from whole grains. 


The aromatic flowers of the hop vine provide bitterness, flavor and aroma to your beer. Careful selection of variety, quantity and timing of the hops addition enables brewers to control these key flavor characteristics. Dry Hop: Adding hops directly to the beer after fermentation. This adds aroma, not bitterness.

Hops


IBU

IBU is an abbreviation for the International Bitterness Units scale, a gauge of beer's bitterness. What IBUs measure are the parts per million of isohumulone found in a beer. Isohumulone is the acid found in hops that gives beer its bitter bite.


ABV is an abbreviation for Alcohol By Volume, a standard measure of how much alcohol (ethanol) is contained in a given volume of beer expressed as a percentage of liquid volume.

ABV


Humans don't make beer, yeast do! These tiny single cell organisms convert fermentable sugars into alcohol, while also contributing to the flavor of your beer. While most lager & ale strains are selected for their neutral flavors & aromas, some specialty yeasts can provide distinctly spicy or fruity characteristics. 

Yeast


Mash

All of your grains will be placed in a large kettle and soaked in hot water for 60 to 90 minutes. This releases malt sugars. Sugars are converted into alcohol later down the line.


Sparge

Sparging is the trickling of water through the grain to extract sugars. Sparging is typically conducted in a mash or lauter tun.


BOIL

After mashing, the wort is boiled with hops (and any other additions) in a large tank known as a brew kettle. The boiling process is where chemical reactions take place, including sterilization of the wort to remove unwanted bacteria, releasing of hop flavors, bitterness and aroma compounds through isomerization, stopping of enzymatic processes, precipitation of proteins, and concentration of the wort. To be effective, the boil needs to be intense. Don’t get too close! Depending on the type of beer you are brewing, you will boil the wort for between 60 and 120 minutes.


Wort

Wort is the liquid extracted from the mashing process during the brewing of beer. Wort contains the sugars that will be fermented by the brewing yeast to produce alcohol.


GRAVITY

Using a hydrometer we can measure the sugar content of the wort. This will allow us to calculate the percentage of alcohol in the finished product.