Beers

Beer is made with 4 main ingredients: a cereal grain, usually barley, water, hops and yeast. You can also add various spices, macerated fruits or eau-de-vie to flavour it.

The production of beer goes through several stages: malting, the harvested barley is germinated and then dried; during brewing, water is added to the reduced flour malt to form a paste which will be brought to a boil; fermentation, which takes place by adding the yeasts at a defined temperature; cellaring, the beer is matured then filtered, and finally the packaging, the beer is bottled or put in keg.

Beer is the oldest known and most consumed alcoholic drink in the world. We find the first written traces 4000 years BC with the first cereal crops, and therefore barley, of the Sumerian civilization. The barley was then simply boiled and dried in the sun.

We tend to think that the darker a beer, the stronger it is, but this is a misconception. The colour of the beer is not linked to its level of bitterness or degree of alcohol, but comes from the malt, which is more or less roasted during the kilning step, depending on the desired aromas.

The colour of the beer changes depending on the temperature at which the malt is roasted. The higher the temperature, the darker the malt : it goes the same way for the colour of the beer which is first blonde, then amber, then brown. It will also influence the flavours of the beer.

Blond beer is produced from malted barley, it is its light roasting that gives it this colour. As far as white beer is concerned, it is not a question of degree of roasting but of its main ingredient, wheat.

An IPA, which stands for Indian Pale Ale, is a heavily hopped English-origin ale that was originally designed to withstand the boat trip from England to India. Today, you can also find Irish Pale Ale and American Pale Ale.

To cook fish or raw vegetables, you may opt for a white beer or a blonde that also goes very well with white meats. An amber is perfect for a marinade with grilled meats. And the brown will go perfectly with red meats.

Beer should be stored away from light and heat, avoiding sudden changes in temperature. Beers in bottles and cans with caps are preferably stored upright while beers with corks are lying down.

Upon contact with light, beer produces a molecule that will give it a bad smell. This is why it is packaged in tinted glass bottles or in a can. It will therefore not taste better in cans than in a bottle, provided it is poured into a beer glass, but will keep better.

These beers are higher in alcohol, these adjectives don't come from the number of fermentations they have undergone as we may think. A double is often a dark beer with a grading of around 6° while a triple can be a blonde, amber or dark beer grading between 7 and 9°.

The term guard beer is mostly used in the North of France and refers to a lager, amber or dark beer that undergoes prolonged maturation after fermentation, often in casks before being bottled in bottles with a muzzled cork stopper.