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I have put this simple brief beer guide together so that it will hopefully answer any questions you may have regarding the process of brewing beer.

Introduction
Barley Malts
Hops
Brewers Yeast
Brewing Water
Beer Adjuncts
Cleaning & Sanitation
Malt Milling
Mashing
Wort Separation
Wort Boiling
Wort Cooling
Beer Fermentation
Beer Conditioning
Beer Filtration
Beer Carbonation
Bottling
Kegging
Spoilage Organisms
Beer Styles

Brief history of beer.

Almost any sugar or starch-containing food can naturally undergo fermentation, and so it is likely that beer-like beverages were independently invented in cultures throughout the world. In Mesopotamia, the oldest evidence of beer is on a 6000-year old Sumerian tablet which shows people drinking a beverage through reed straws from a communal bowl. Beer is also mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and a 3900-year old Sumerian poem honoring the brewing goddess Ninkasi contains the oldest surviving beer recipe, describing the production of beer from barley via bread. Beer became vital to all the grain-growing civilizations of classical antiquity, especially in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi required that tavern-keepers who diluted or overcharged for beer should be put to death.

Beer was important to early Romans, but during Republican times wine displaced beer as the preferred alcoholic beverage, and beer became considered a beverage fit only for barbarians. Tacitus wrote disparagingly of the beer brewed by the Germanic peoples of his day.

In Slavic languages, beer is called "pivo", from the verb "piti" - to drink. So, "pivo" could be translated to English as "the drink".

The Kalevala, collected in written form in the 19th century but based on oral traditions many centuries old, contains more lines about the origin of brewing than are devoted to the origin of man.

Most beers until relatively recent times were what we would now call ales. Lagers were discovered by accident in the sixteenth century when beer was stored in cool caverns for long periods; they have since largely outpaced ales in volume. The use of Hops for bittering and preservation is a medieval addition. Hops were cultivated in France as early as the 800s. The oldest surviving written record of the use of hops in beer is in 1067 by Abbess Hildegard of Bingen: "If one intends to make beer from oats, it is prepared with hops." In 15th century England, an unhopped beer would have been known as an ale, while the use of hops would make it a beer. Hopped beer was imported to England (from the Netherlands) as early as 1400 in Winchester and hops were being planted on the island by 1428. The Brewers Company of London went so far as to state "no hops, herbs, or other like thing be put into any ale or liquore wherof ale shall be made--but only liquor (water), malt, and yeast." However, by the 16th century, "ale" had come to refer to any strong beer, and all ale and beer were hopped.

Content used with permission The Brewers’ Handbook