beer, alcoholic beverage made by brewing and fermenting cereals, especially malted barley, usually with the addition of hops as a flavoring agent and stabilizer. One of the oldest of alcoholic beverages (there is archaeological evidence dating to c.3000 B.C.), beer was well known in ancient Egypt, where it may have been made from bread. At first brewed chiefly in the household and monastery, it became in late medieval times a commercial product and is now made by large-scale manufacture in almost every industrialized country, especially Great Britain, Germany, the Czech Republic, and the United States.

Although British, European, and American beers can differ markedly in flavor and content, brewing processes are similar. A mash, prepared from crushed malt (usually barley), water, and, often, cereal adjuncts such as rice and corn, is heated and rotated in the mash tun to dissolve the solids and permit the malt enzymes to convert the starch into sugar. The solution, called wort, is drained into a copper vessel, where it is boiled with the hops (which provide beer with its bitter flavor), then run off for cooling and settling. After cooling, it is transferred to fermenting vessels where yeast is added, converting the sugar into alcohol. Modern beers, typically lighter than ancient, contain about 3% to 6% alcohol.

Beers fall into two broad categories. Ales are made with yeast that ferments more quickly at warmer temperatures and tends to rise to the surface. Lagers use yeast that ferments more slowly at cooler temperatures and tends to settle, and they are aged at cold temperatures for weeks or months, hence the name [Ger., Lager=storage place]. Most major American beers are lagers; many are Bohemian Pilsners, a golden-hued lager. Bock beer, said to take its name from Einbeck, Prussia, where it was first made, is a heavier, usually darker lager. Pale ale is generally a light to dark amber, strongly hopped beer. Porter is a strong, dark ale brewed with the addition of roasted malt to give flavor and color. Stout, an ale which is darker and maltier than porter, has a more pronounced hop aroma and may attain an alcoholic content of 6% to 7%. Light, or low-calorie, beer is lower in alcohol content. Ice beer is a higher-alcohol beer produced by chilling below 32°F; (0°C;) and filtering out the ice crystals that form.

In the 1980s, consumer dissatisfaction with the taste and choice offered by major breweries led to the growth of microbreweries—firms that produce fewer than 15,000 barrels annually—especially in the United States. By 2000 there were more than 400 U.S. microbreweries and more than 1,000 brewpubs (a microbrewery that sells mainly through its own restaurant or bar).

Beer-lahai-roi: see Lahai-roi.

Beer, Thomas, 1889-1940, American author, b. Council Bluffs, Iowa, grad. Yale, 1911, and studied law at Columbia, 1911-13. He is best remembered for his biographies of Stephen Crane (1923) and Marcus (Mark) Hanna (1929) and his witty study of American manners in the 1890s, The Mauve Decade (1926). Some of his realistic short stories were collected by Wilson Follett in Mrs. Egg and Other Barbarians (1947).

Beer, George Louis, 1872-1920, American historian, b. Staten Island, N.Y. He was a tobacco importer for 10 years but also lectured on European history at Columbia from 1893 to 1897. After 1903 he devoted himself to continuing his economic historical studies of British colonial policy. His works revolutionized history-writing about the American colonies. These were, notably, The Commercial Policy of England toward the American Colonies (1893, repr. 1948), British Colonial Policy, 1754-1765 (1907), Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578-1660 (1908, repr. 1959), and The Old Colonial System, Part I (1912). He was one of the corps of U.S. experts at the Paris Peace Conference and was a member of the League of Nations mandates commission.

Beer, in the Bible. 1 Unidentified place, to which Gideon's son Jotham fled. 2 Unidentified place, E of the Dead Sea between the Arnon and the Jordan, where Israel camped and dug a well. The little song quoted is one of the oldest poetic pieces in the Bible.

Alcoholic beverage made usually from malted barley, flavoured with hops, and brewed by slow fermentation. Known from ancient times, beer was especially common in northern climates not conducive to grape cultivation for wine. It is produced by employing either a bottom-fermenting yeast, which falls to the bottom of the container when fermentation is completed, or a top-fermenting yeast, which rises to the surface. Lager beers (from lagern, “to store”), of German origin, are bottom-fermented and stored at a low temperature for several months; most are light in colour, with high carbonation, medium hop flavor, and alcohol content of 3–5percnt by volume. Top-fermented beers, popular in Britain, include ale, stout, and porter; they are characterized by a prominent head of released carbon dioxide, a sharper and more strongly hopped flavour than lagers, and an alcohol content of 4–6.5percnt by volume. Seealso malt.

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