Yet the liquids in our glasses were, to crib from an old jazz album title, pure monk: Potent infusions of herbs, roots, barks, peels, flowers and spices, commonly lumped into the category of bitters, that owe their existence to medieval monks who brewed them for medicinal purposes.
This appreciation depends on a learned, imaginative association: the smell brings to mind its cause, the brewing coffee, and its purpose, the consumption of the coffee.
The purpose of brewing is to convert the starch source into a sugary liquid called wort and to convert the wort into the alcoholic beverage known as beer in a fermentation process effected by yeast.
Then there are vessels designed for specific purposes, like a hefty 20th-century Luo brewing vessel, from Kenya.
The easiest method is to tie the hops into cheesecloth bags; many brewing supply stores sell "hop bags" designed specifically for this purpose.
Amid all the trial and error, ancient brewing history is repeating, spreading around the nation one foamy, infected-on-purpose barrel at a time: to Billings, Montana Athens, Ohio Tampapa; L.A.; Brooklyn (of course).
While this was the first mention of the brewing process, it is believed that hops were grown in the region for the purposes of beer production as early as the first century.
This chapter presents that the purpose of the brew house is to receive the main ingredients of beer, being malted barley, cereal or sugar adjuncts, hops and water, and to process these materials to produce a hopped cold wort ready for fermenting.
