Hi, I'm Garrett Oliver, author of the brewmasters table and brewmaster of Brooklyn brewery.

But today I am here to answer your questions on twitter because this is beer support at dogs and baseball.

Love that.

Ask what are hops and no, I'm not googling it.

I just want someone to just tell me, it's like okay, I'm the guy to just tell you.

So these are hops.

The hop is a green pine cone shaped flower.

It grows on a vine in this country, largely in the pacific northwest and when that hop cone that little flower grows out, that is where you're going to develop all your flavors and aromas.

Now, here's an interesting fact, the hop is the nearest botanical relative to cannabis.

This hop flower, you have resins and those resins are giving you bitterness, they're giving you flavor, they're giving you aromas.

Hops are varietal like wine grapes.

There are about 100 varieties of hops available on the market right now some of them taste floral, some of them smell like citrus, some of them smell kind of dank.

There used to be a lot of spices used in beer, but the hot became often the only spice and beer because it also acts to retard the growth of bacteria and bacteria can spoil your beer and so people started to notice the more hops you add, the longer the beer was going to last.

And so hops became really the focal point for bitter beer flavors at James 24147374 asks how do you make beer without yeast?

Sorry, James, you can, you have to have yeast in there to ferment your sugar into alcohol and to make all the flavors that we associate with beer, you can use other things besides yeast, like bacterial strains, et cetera.

But you've got to have yeast to get the job done at Zerman asks, Is beer chemistry?

Hmm, Well beer is chemistry, beer is also biology.

Beer is also art.

Wine is easy, right?

You got some grapes, grapes have sugar, you stomp on them whatever else they might start fermenting by themselves and you have wine.

Beer is tougher.

We're starting with this, there's no sugar in barley malt.

You have to break down the starch in this into sugar.

It's what you do in a porridge called the mash, the natural enzymes that are in the malt.

Break the starches down to sugar.

Then you have a formulation, is it going to be dark?

Is it going to be red because it has fruit in, it is going to be kind of a caramel color like that.

And that's a bit more art.

And then you have biology because you're going to add yeast, which is then going to consume those sugars and give off carbon dioxide flavors and of course alcohol.

There's also a lot of cleaning, a lot of plumbing, so you have to be ready to wear a lot of hats, if you want to be a brewmaster.

So at yeah, Jackson asked, how do you become a brewmaster because I feel that's an awesome job.

Hashtag dream job.

The brewmaster is essentially the chef of the brewery.

There are two main ways you can learn to be a brewmaster.

One is you take classes sometimes for years or you can do it the old fashioned way, which is the apprenticeship, you basically attach yourself to another brewmaster, usually for years and you slowly learn on the job.

There are many, many jobs in each brewery, but in each brewery there's only one brewmaster the same way that there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen, but there's only one chef at the smarmy swami asks, does jamaican Viagra really equal Guinness plus peanuts mixed in a blender.

I don't think that would make me very frisky.

I prefer my Guinness and peanuts separately.

I don't know why you didn't put them in a blender, but Guinness does have a reputation in the caribbean and in africa for giving people extra potency.

I don't know if there's any truth to this.

I just think it tastes pretty good, but there is a thing, especially with a stronger versions.

The Guinness foreign extra stout at about 8%.

That's supposed to be really good for you.

They think that it's an aphrodisiac and it's going to give them special powers.

I'm not sure.

I just think it tastes good at biophilia asks.

And is home brewing illegal?

No, but it was so after prohibition, People were really worried that they were going to be all these people fermenting at home and they were not going to be paying taxes.

My grandfather was one of them during prohibition who was making his own beer at home In the 19 seventies.

President jimmy carter signed legislation making homebrewing legal in the United States.

You can brew your own beer at home and you can drink it and you can bring it to your friends.

The thing you can't do is sell it, you got to pay taxes, you need licenses, etcetera, etcetera.

So yes, you can brew legally at home.

But no, you can't sell it to all your pals at Susan Orlean asks, is there such a thing as box beer?

And if not, why not know?

And the why not?

Is because carbonation, you need to hold the pressure in your container and a box doesn't really hold pressure at sparkly june asked, How do you make your own beer?

Well, it's kind of like asking, how do you make your own pancakes, right, you can get a box mix.

Just add water.

Just add milk or you can make pancakes from scratch kind of the same thing with beer.

You can start off with a kit, but if you want to have more control, you're going to start here with the original grains, you're going to crush them, You mix them with hot water at very specific temperatures about 100 50 degrees.

Fahrenheit activate the enzymes, You're gonna break all those starches down into sugars.

You're gonna strain those sugars out.

Bring it to a boil.

Now you have a liquid called the wort W.

O.

R.

T.

You bring that to a boil, you add your hops, you cool the whole thing down and you add the yeast, the yeast, then it's going to eat the sugars, give off carbon dioxide, give off flavors and give off of course, alcohol.

Within a few days you've got beer, I was an amateur brewer for for years.

We're going way back, I am 400 years old.

I didn't like the offering a beer that we had in the mid eighties at that time.

So I started making my own beer at home and it turned out my beer was better at Reddit Beer asked, hey Reddit beer, what is the weirdest beer you've ever had?

I've had all kinds of beer is one of the greatest beer experiences I've had.

But the strangest in flavor was drinking the traditional South African beer combo tea out of a communally passed Sort of galvanized steel bucket outside of Cape Town, South Africa and it was sour, it was funky, it had all sorts of stuff going on.

It was made from Sorghum.

But this is a really traditional beer style beer was invented probably about 10,000 years ago by the time you got to ancient Egypt, they had everything, they had beer styles, they had names, they had advertising old Egyptian cities like Thebes were actually built on beer money.

The pyramids were built on beer money.

So beer goes way, way back, starting in Africa and then spreading all over the world at Greg mercy exile.

Ask question for beer twitter.

Why do Belgian german and french brewers predominantly use glass, but in the UK, most craft and microbreweries use cans.

Is it a case of cost versus tradition in the old days, the only people who could afford a canning machine were the big brewers.

So if you wanted to buy a canner, it cost over a million dollars.

As the craft beer movement started to take off, people making canning technology said we should make some stuff for for these guys too.

And they started to make canners smaller and mechanic technology got better.

It didn't affect beer flavor.

The way that it used to the beer can eventually became from a technological point of view equal to the glass bottle.

A lot of people feel that the can is more ecologically friendly.

It goes more places that might not allow glass like say a stadium.

The Belgians don't use many cans, but in the UK and the United States, the can is really taking over if we're using bottles, we put beer in a brown bottle.

Why?

Because a brown bottle is going to block a lot of the light coming in, but it can't block all of it.

A can however can block all the light.

And that is one way in which a can is actually superior to our bottle these days when run properly.

Both packages are pretty much equally good, even though I kind of feel better about a bottle in a certain way, but that's because I'm 400 years old.

You know, I'm a traditionalist at lamb asks, how do you make beer from pumpkins?

Do you cook the pumpkins?

You mash them up, You mix them together with the grain in your mash the enzymes from the grain breakdown that starts with the pumpkins into sugars and you ferment the whole thing together.

Often people add some pumpkin spice because people like pumpkin spice.

But pumpkin beer is actually hundreds of years old at Hedvig Gray milk says remember last year when the republicans were crying that if biden won, he'd make them drink plant based beer.

Well, you know, my beer was always plant based.

So that's one of those weird things like gluten free vodka, like vodka doesn't have any gluten in it.

At Del Boy 1978 UK asks, how do beer makers keep their yeast going?

How do you grow yeast?

Yeast is one of the most important elements in beer.

It is the agent that actually takes the sweet liquid called wort and transforms it almost magically into beer and there are various types of yeast.

The main one that we're using in beer is called Saqqara misses and Saqqara missy means the sugar yeast or the sugar fungus.

It consumes sugar gives off alcohol and that's the thing that it does, it does it everywhere in the natural world, including in our beer.

But when you add the yeast, it starts to reproduce and it reproduces by budding.

So you have like one yeast cell here and another one starts to grow out of it and this happens over and over again until you have a full population of yeast.

Now when the fermentation is finished usually will cool the tank down and the yeast will drop to the bottom.

At that point you can remove the yeast and store it for later use.

You can't store it forever, but you can easily store it for a week or more and you got to keep them healthy because basically when you're a brewer that yeast is your partner, we like to joke that we're just basically here working for the yeast is the yeast that are actually doing all the work they make the beer, we make the work.

And together we get it all done at dad man walking, ask what's the better coffee for sunday morning, a stout or a wheat beer.

The best coffee for sunday morning is coffee.

However, wheat beer is gonna be better with breakfast at Rambo cowboy asked any good seafood and beer pairings.

My first book, the brewmasters table was about beer and food pairings and I can tell you there are lots of good beer and seafood pairings.

My favorite though probably is Belgian style wheat beer and a really nice salmon in like a lemon butter sauce.

I have memories of sitting on canals in Amsterdam drinking that beer and eating that food and I was just so spectacular.

But seafood and beer Absolutely.

At Ty Gwyn asks, how do beer people taste?

The difference in I.

P.

A.

S.

I had a mango and an orange and I couldn't taste anything different.

I.

P.

A means India pale ale.

India pale ale was the most rigidly defined beer style virtually of all times.

This was a type of beer that was brewed in England and sent to colonists in India.

Beer was not an entertainment.

It was a staple food product.

Many people drank it from the time they got up in the morning until they went to bed.

Water could kill you.

But beer was always safe.

And these days it doesn't mean that much.

It usually means that the beer at least has some real hop aroma and it has some at least reasonable bitterness.

Somebody can put mango or orange in the beer to that happens, but you want to check the label because you never know drink.

My social asks pale ale.

I.

P.

A.

What's the difference between an I.

P.

A.

And a pale ale.

Short version intensity.

So you're talking about pale ales, usually 5 to 6%.

Traditionally I.

P.

A.

Was stronger, more bitter drier and more aromatic with hops but really you can almost think of I.

P.

A.

As an intensified version of pale ale at game quotes app asked ale or mead, wonder boy in Monster Land arcade.

It's gonna have to be ales for me.

There are two main kinds of beers, ales and lagers, ales are warm, fermented lagers are cold fermented, there are two different species of yeast.

They have slightly different flavors.

Ales tend to be more fruity and more complex.

Need is fermented honey, you add some water, you ferment it with yeast and you end up with mead.

First time I ever actually got a buzz in my whole life right after high school, it was legal back then to drink right after high school meet at a renaissance fair.

I admit it both those things happened, I drank mead at a renaissance festival and I'm wearing this jacket.

I'm not ashamed at Los Tacos 3 14 as what makes an I.

P.

A new England style basically.

Hayes, Hayes and a big fruity tropical flavor is something that really came out of New England about 10 years ago at or burrows asks shopping for beer, how many different ways can you mix wheat and hops?

Wtf, here's the thing, there's not just wheat and barley and hops and spelt and emmer and all the other grains that you could use.

You can also roast them very lightly roast them until they are dark like coffee beans, you can caramelize them, you can flavor them in different ways.

You can then decide you're going to add spices.