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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, beer was well known in ancient Egypt. 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. The term ale, once used for a beer made without hops, is now applied in Great Britain to any light-colored beer. In the United States, ale is generally a light to dark amber, strongly hopped malt beverage. Most major American beers are stored for several weeks or months before marketing, hence the name lager [Ger., Lager=storage place]. Bock beer, said to take its name from Einbeck, Prussia, where it was first made, is a heavier, darker beer commonly drunk in the spring. Porter is a strong, dark ale brewed with the addition of roasted malt to give flavor and color. Stout, which is darker and maltier than porter, has a more pronounced hop aroma and may attain an alcoholic content of 6% to 7%. 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 the mid-1990s, there were 187 U.S. microbreweries.
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