You may have overheard the term ‘micro brewed’ being tossed around by beer snobs at bars. It does not mean looking at beer at a smaller scale and changing the smallest elements of it. It is rather the size of the production that a brewery brews.

 

You mostly have 4 types of brewers brewing beer:

Home brewers – those that brew at home for themselves or friends

Nano-breweries – breweries that brew less than180,000 gallons a year (DEVOLUTION, Liquid Laundry, your most local brewery)

Micro-breweries – breweries that brew up to 460,000 gallons a year (Boxing Cat, Great Leap, Sixpoint, 3 Floyds, Green Flash, Russian River).

Macro-breweries – The big boys, these breweries brew more (usually much more) than 460,000 gallons a year (Budweiser, Cass, Tsingtao, Sapporo) (FYI Anheuser Busch brews 3.8 BILLION gallons a year)

 

There are essentially 2 categories or kinds of beers: Ales and Lagers. They are named this because of the way they are brewed and what kinds of yeast are used. Each yeast creates a unique flavor based on the way that the yeast eats sugar.

 

LAGERS: The slow yeast. The turtle of the yeast world. Slow and steady wins the race to the lager yeast, which is probably why lagers are the most popular beers in the world.

 

I call it the slow yeast because lager yeast likes cold temperatures and eating wort from the bottom up. Since they take their sweet ass time, they are efficient eaters that really take up a lot of the flavors in the wort. Therefore, the beer takes much more time to brew, but creates a very mild, smooth, consistent, and refreshing flavor.

 

ALES: If lagers are a turtle, ales would be the hare, jumping all over the place and losing track of things. They start their buffet on sugar nearly as soon as they’re introduced to the wort. Eating from the top down, they have a much wider temperature range and can handle higher temperatures than lagers. This makes the flavor they produce rather eclectic; they can be fruity, dank, sour, earthy, basically anything you want it to taste like.

 

Because of their eclectic nature, a majority of DIFFERENT kinds of beers are ales.

 

From here, what varies are the variation of the yeast (taste/mouthfeel), the types of hops (aroma/taste), the grain bill (color/aroma)

 

Ales include:

Stouts, Pale Ales, IPAs, Sours, Belgian Quad, Belgian Triple, Belgian Double, Belgian Blonde, Porters

 

Lagers include

Schwartzbier, Black Lagers, Pilsners, Dunkels