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You can make beer without hops, you make beer without cultivated yeast, and you can make beer without water (oh yes). But you can’t make it without grain.

Grain was the key to the discovery of beer and, in fact, alcohol. A stone tablet chiseled in Sumeria (now Iraq) shows the world’s first hipsters enjoying a beer through straws from a single communal bowl. We think they’re using straws because their beer filtration techniques weren’t exactly up to scratch, so essentially they were sucking on old porridge.

Historians believe beer was discovered when these people were making bread and left the spent grain or leftover dough out in the rain. A few days later some hungry fellow decided to eat some, and suddenly he found that he could dance better and his self-esteem issues had gone away. I jest, but he would have certainly felt a little light-headed and rather good about himself. It must have been a feeling quite unlike any he had ever experienced – a feeling they put down to a gift from god – so it’s no wonder the Sumerians tried to replicate it.

Their grain recipe – or “malt bill” – was very simple: one kind of grain, crushed by hand. It’s hard to know which grain it was because any cereal with starch has the ability to be turned into alcohol, but archaeologists have found evidence from the time to suggest it was barley. This grain remains the most important in brewing.

The myriad reasons for this will make you marvel at the wonder of barley. There are two ways in which it is perfect. The first is that it has the best combination of enzymes and starch concentrations, which allows for greater utilisation and extract of sugars. To put that in English, barley has lots of sugars that are easy to turn into alcohol (we’ll talk more about that process later).

My favourite reason is that barley has a husk – a tough outer shell that protects it from damage. That makes it easy to handle, but more importantly it means that when you pour water through the crushed grain, it self-filters to allow clear sugary liquid to come through. It’s as if barley was born for brewing; it has literally shaped itself to be as helpful as possible for the process.

It would be remiss not to mention the other grains involved in brewing, so props to wheat for your sweet, full body; rye for your tangy bite; and buckwheat for letting coeliacs live a little for once. Oh, and screw you, maize. Stop ruining our lagers.

We’ll be making references to all these grains during this chapter, but before we do we need to explain why it’s called malt rather than grain because it’s fundamental to how beer is made and why it tastes like it does.

THE MALTING PROCESS

There are two main kinds of barley used for malting – two-row and six-row. This refers to the number of kernels growing adjacent to each other on the ear. Two-row is best because the proteins and starch are more evenly distributed, making it a more predictable grain to malt and brew with. Six-row is just cheaper, so a good brewer wouldn’t touch it and neither will we.