At its heart, brewing is a fairly simple process, which can be described as follows:

STEP #1:

Take malted grains, usually barley, and steep them in hot water in a big tank called a mash tun. This process is called mashing in and it extracts the sugars from the grains. Different types of malt will give the beer different characteristics, paler malts are used for lagers and golden beers, darker beers need darker malts such as crystal malt adding.

STEP #2:

Pump the resulting liquid (now called wort) into a further tank, called a copper but usually made of stainless steel (!) which has some form of heating - either a big kettle type element or a gas burner. Pour more hot water onto the grains to make sure that most of the sugars have been extracted and pump in the same way.

STEP #3:

Bring the liquid in the tank up to the boil and add hops. Hops make the beer more or less bitter, depending on how many and what variety are added. As well as extracting flavour from the hops, boiling makes sure that all bugs are killed.

STEP #4:

Boil for about an hour. More hops can be added near to the end of this and this will give the beer more of an aroma.

STEP #5:

Pass the beer through a heat exchanger to cool it down. This is a marvellous invention whereby hot beer and cold water pass each other in separate pipes and become cool beer and hot water as a result of the heat being exchanged through the pipework. The hot water is kept to be used in the next brew.

STEP #6:

This cools the wort enough to add the yeast. The yeast acts on the sugars in the wort and converts them into alcohol. In essence, the more sugars are in the beer, the stronger the beer will become.

STEP #7:

Leave it for a few days until the fermentation is over and then it can be pumped into casks (barrels) to go to the customer - usually a pub. However, the beer will be flat and lifeless unless a further fermentation is started at this stage (or gas is injected in the pub - this is what happens to lager). To make a beer sparkle naturally, either stop it fermenting before it has properly finished (by making it cold) and then start it again when it is casked by putting it somewhere warmer or add some more sugar when you put it in the warmer place.

STEP #8:

Either way, it is now ready to be delivered to the pub and enjoyed by the customers.

We were lucky during our first week of brewing that we had a work experience student to help us, Bob's son Jon. Nick took the pictures which help to demonstrate the processes that I have described.