When You Make Your Own Beer This is What Happens During Fermentation

If you are relatively new to home beer brewing I ambreaks down the sugars found in the malt into
guessing that, at one time or another, you've pauseddifferent chemical compounds. These compounds are
to wonder what exactly is happening during theethanol and carbon dioxide. Once this process has
fermentation process. After all, this all happensbegun and is in process the mixture can properly be
without much input from you but is absolutely criticalcalled "beer" for the first time.
to the whole process. If the fermentation processFor us home brewers it's a good idea to do all that
doesn't happen like you want it to, all your otherwe can to get rid of the free floating yeast and
efforts are wasted. Even more importantly, withoutbacteria that is all around us but some brewpubs that
the fermentation process there is no beer!make a show of their equipment use open
For there to be fermentation there must first befermentation tanks as do some European brewers in
yeast. Yeasts are living micro-organisms that sciencethe belief that the local wild yeast makes for a
classifies as fungus. There are around 1,500 speciesbetter beer.
of yeast that have been described and that isRegardless of how the yeast is introduced to the
estimated to be just 1% of the total. The specificmalt, once it has metabolized the available sugars into
species used in fermenting beer and wine iscarbon dioxide and ethanol, the fermentation process
"Saccharomyces cerevisiae". It is not surprising thatslows down remarkably and the yeast begins to
this is the most well researched of all the currentlysettle to the bottom of the fermentation tank.
described species.Although this usually occurs in 3 to 5 days, it's a good
While there are other types of fermentationidea to leave the beer in the fermentation tank for
processes, the one that we are interested in is calledanother week before beginning the bottling process.
Ethanol Fermentation. In this process the yeast