Talk:Beer

"Because beer is composed mainly of water, the source of the water and its characteristics have an important effect on the character of the beer." - the first clause of this sentence is somwhat misleading. The reason that water has a major effect on the taste of beer is that the mineral content of the water affects the chemistry of the mash tun. If you were to mash and boil, and then split the wort into two gyles, one of which was topped up with hard water and one with soft water, then the resulting beers would be pretty similar. If however, the two batches were mashed and boiled separately, one with hard water and one with soft water, then there would be a much more noticeable difference in taste. MattF 08:49 Feb 19, 2003

User:Rethunk correctly pointed out that Hefeweizen is only a variant of wheat beer, so we may consider making it a subentry. The other subentry would be what we call in German "Kristallweizen". Not sure about the correct English term, tho.

BTW, I also don't quite understand why the distinction betw Lager and Ale is so fundamental. Maybe we should add "wheat beer" as another fundamental category? This way, we wouldn't have to go three levels deep.

Part of the ale vs lager problem is that there are really two issues involved -- yeast strain and fermentation temperature/duration. (See table below) "Lager" is German for "store", and the name literally refers to a (cool) slow-fermented beer. (The higher the temperature, the faster the fermentation completes, so duration and temperature are closely related.) However, modern usage is that beer innoculated with S. cerevisiae is an "ale" while beer innoculated with S. uvarum is considered a "lager". Ales that are slow-fermented (the tricky case in the table below) can be considered lagers, but in my experience they are usually classified as ales.

-- Jrv 06:11 Mar 20, 2003 (UTC)

Sebastian 07:56 Jan 23, 2003 (UTC)

Sebastian - Gruess Dich.

There is no commonly accepted translation for "Kristallweizen" (crystal wheat) in English; I'm not aware of any breweries outside of Germany who brew it. If Kristallweizen were brewed in the USA, it would probably be called by its German name since it is popular for American wheat beers to be called "Weizen" and "Hefeweizen".

According to the site I added at the bottom of the page, wheat beer can be considered either a lager or an ale. Steam beer, which is brewed only in San Franciso by the Anchor brewery, is similar in that it belongs to neither of the two major categories: if I remember correctly, Anchor Steam is brewed using bottom-fermenting (untergaerige), lager-style yeast in a top-fermenting (obergaerige), ale-style process. Perhaps a wheat beer could be called wheat ale or wheat lager to be more specific.

Lambics and some other beers don't fit very well into the categorization of lager/ale, but statistically speaking most beers will fall into one category or the other (based on what I've read, anyway). Most wheat beers I've drunk were lager-style Weizens in which wheat was used in addition to barley, but the brewing process was otherwise the same as for lagers. A Roggen (rye beer) would probably fit in the same category.--Rethunk

I see! Sorry, I overlooked your description. BTW, there is a nice graph on http://kss.virtualave.net/Bier/BIERSORTENKARTE.htm, but the owner of the site doesn't remember where he stole it from, so we can't copy it. Sebastian 03:24 Jan 24, 2003 (UTC)