(upbeat music)
- Currently we're at the
sixth floor of our Brew House
where every single day at 3:00
our Brewmasters are going to gather,
and they are going to taste test
our beer from our local breweries
to ensure that the quality and consistency
is what's needed to go
out to our consumers.
And who better to talk about that
then our Senior Brewmaster, Travis Moore.
- Hey everybody, this is Travis Moore.
I'm the Senior Brewmaster
for the St. Louis Brewery,
and I'm really excited to talk
to you a little bit today about brewing.
One of the really important
things about brewing great beer
is having really high quality ingredients.
And that's something I wanna
talk to you about today
is the different ingredients
we use to brew beer.
To brew a great beer, you
need four main ingredients,
barley malt, hops, yeast, and water.
Understanding the roles
each ingredient plays
and how they interact will
help you better understand
where the flavors and aromas
in your beer are coming from.
Barley is the most commonly
used grain to brew beer,
and here at Anheuser-Busch and Labatt,
barley is considered the soul of our beer.
We use mainly two to three
different types of malted barley.
We inspect every single
batch, every single load,
of barley that comes into the brewery.
We look at it visually to make sure
there's no defects with the kernels.
We actually taste and chew
the kernels to make sure
that they have a nice,
sweet kind of bready flavor
because ultimately that's
what we're gonna get
from this barley is the sugar content.
The other important ingredients are hops.
Hops are the spice of beer,
so hops are a very important
part of the brewing process
in that they balance out
that sweetness and fullness
that you're going to get from
the malt with a bitterness.
So hops provide bitterness in the flavor,
and they also provide an aroma,
which is a really important
part of beer as well.
We like to take these
and smash them together
and make sure you get a good
aroma from the hop cone.
And it just lets you know that it's mature
and that it has the right
lupulin quality to it,
which is the bittering
component of the hop.
And then when you add that
into the beer during the boiling process,
that's where you're gonna get that aroma
and that awesome bitterness from the hops.
Our third ingredient,
we like to call our secret
ingredient, is yeast.
So yeast is extremely
important part of brewing beer.
Yeast is what we use to ferment the wort
that we've made from our
brew house ingredients here.
And having a certain type of yeast
is really what's important.
So most people understand
that yeast produces alcohol and CO2
and that's what goes into beer,
but most importantly,
yeast produces flavor.
And so the type of yeast that
you use is really important
to align with the style
and the flavor of the beer
that you're gonna brew.
For us here at Anheuser-Busch,
we've been using the same type of yeast
since we began brewing 'cause
it contributes the flavor
that we're looking for for the
American lagers that we brew.
And so yeast is a strong player,
and it's a sometimes forgotten ingredient,
but it's very important.
Our fourth ingredient, and
arguably the most important,
is water.
Depending on the style and brand,
water makes up anywhere
between 90 to 95% of your beer.
It's really important to have
a good, clean water source.
It's important to have that
be nice and pure and clean
and taste the way that it's suppose to
which is not to have any off flavors.
The majority of any style
of beer, any type of beer,
the number one ingredient
is gonna be the water.
In some brews you'll
find a fifth ingredient,
which is an adjunct grain such as rice,
which we use in Budweiser.
And what's important about the rice
is that it helps give really
nice, crisp, clean finish.
So that's the breakdown
of our brewing ingredients
and how we go to great lengths to ensure
that our ingredients are high quality
and we only use the best
quality ingredients.
(upbeat music)
