The Process - ABOUT MASH BEER

from Grain to Glass          

Well fellow beer lovers this is where it all begins – the brewing process, where we turn all the raw ingredients into what we know and love – BEER!

You can’t make great beer without great raw materials and when brewing at Mash, we use a fantastic range of fresh, quality raw materials from Australia and around the world. It all starts with barley. Barley is grown all over the globe for a myriad of agricultural purposes – of course in our opinion the most useful being malting barley for the production of beer. Over the years, selected strains of barley have been found most applicable for malting barley due to a variety of reasons – usually yield, resistance to disease and overall performance in the maltings. Farmers, maltsters and brewers have established a close relationship so that now only the most suitable and best performing varieties of malting barley are now produced.

In Western Australia we are blessed with an excellent environment in which to cultivate top quality barley and we grow huge amounts both for local use and for export. From the fields, the barley is transported to the maltings, where it is put through careful and meticulous processes to change it from field barley to malting barley ready for brewing. At the maltings the aim is to convert the insoluble starch within the barley into a useable, soluble form ready to be mashed. The barley is cleaned and graded, then soaked in water and allowed to germinate before being kilned in ovens to halt the modification process at a desired point. The time and heat in the kiln will go a long way in determining the final colour and flavour of the finished product. The barley has now been successfully transformed into malted barley – or malt and it is great malt that leads to great beer. At Mash, we use a large range of both Australian and imported malts of the highest quality ranging from the lightest pale malts to very dark specialty grains. Each malt used adds different flavours to the finished beer, for example in Mash Black – the complex flavours of chocolate, coffee and roasted grain all come from different malts used in the mash which follow through to the end beer.

 The next stage of the brewing process after malting is to mill the malt after it has arrived at the brewery. First of course desired quantities of each different malt are picked out according to each beer recipe. This is surely one of the most interesting and rewarding parts of the brewing process – selecting each different malt depending on the style of beer to be brewed. It is now that we try to visualise the end product – what we want the beer to taste like and to try and balance the proportions of each malt to suit our perfect end beer. The selected malt is put through a mill which cracks open the grain . We do this because we need the water in the mash to be able to get right into the starch inside the malt to be able to effectively carry out the next process – mashing.

This is the part of the brewing process from where we borrow our name – Mash. The Mash is the mixture of the milled malt and water at a selected temperature for a desired time. During mashing, many complex processes take place but our aim is to convert the starch in the malt to usable, fermentable sugars which will be used up later by the yeast during fermentation. Like all parts of the brewing process, we can adjust the mash to suit the style of beer being brewed so critical parameters are monitored closely to ensure the correct mashing regime is followed.

After mashing, we need to drain of the liquid from the grains. This is called lautering and can be done in a separate vessel or if the mash turn is equipped with a false bottom in the original mash vessel itself. The liquid at this stage is called wort (pronounced wert) and is sweet and grainy tasting as it contains all the natural sugars that have been brought out during mashing. The wort is drained off the grains and transferred to the kettle ready to be boiled. Also at this stage the grains are rinsed through with water to extract all available remaining sugars – this process is known as sparging.

So when all of the wort has been collected in the kettle, it is bought to the boil and it is now time to add the hops. Hops are a green climbing flowering vine and are an absolute essential ingredient when making beer. It is the hops that give beer its bitterness which balances out the sweetness from the malt and moreover – besides its bittering properties, hops are a natural preservative and also add fantastic flavour and aroma to the finished beer. Hops are grown all over the world – they prefer a cool climate and there are literally hundreds and hundreds of different varieties – each imparting their own flavours, aromas and bittering levels to the beer.

At Mash we use different hop varieties from Australia and overseas – each picked to add its own character to our beer. Their flavours range from grassy to spicy to fruity to florally and everything in between. At the start of the boil we add hops for bittering and at during the latter stages of the boil we add them to give more flavour and aroma.

At the end of the boil in the kettle, the wort can now be cooled down to the correct temperature and transferred to the fermenter. At this stage we one of the most important raw ingredients – yeast. During fermentation it is the yeast that converts the available sugars into fermentation products, the most important being carbon dioxide and alcohol. It is during fermentation that the beer develops a lot of its flavours that will shine through upon tasting. Fermentation is carried out at very specific temperatures depending on the beer style. For example – lagers need to be fermented at around 8-12 degrees Celsius while ales need to be fermented at around 18-20 degrees Celsius.

After fermentation the beer is cold conditioned and lagered. This means that the temperature is dropped slowly down to around 0 degrees Celsius.  This leads to a smoother and cleaner flavour for the finished beer. The beer may then be filtered and given extra carbonation if needed and is then ready to be served – either straight from a large serving tank or from kegs. At Mash we have the capacity to serve straight from large serving tanks so you are drinking the beer in its freshest state – straight from the tanks to the tap.