Quote:
Originally Posted by namada
Beer, these days, is usually assumed to contain Barley/Hops/Water/Yeast & sometimes other ingredients, but historically, any fermented grain is beer.
|
There's an important subtlety here BTW. The reason you use barley is that it contains *lots* of the enzymes that will convert starch into sugar. This is something you *must* do before yeast can ferment your grain (or other starch crop). There are ways to do this other than using barley enzymes (Japanese rice fermentation uses a mold (koji, Aspergillus oryzae) which is allowed to grow in the polished rice for a while, and any grain will convert *some* of the starch to sugar as the seeds sprout - that's what the starch is there for in the first place, to store sugar for the sprouting plant to grow) but it's not like fruit juice where you can get noticeable amounts of alcohol out if it just by letting it stand (the sugars are already available and there are yeasts (though not the "right" ones) growing naturally on fruit skins).