Guilds/Garden of Eden/beer intro

• Orrin: Can you give me a basic explanation? I can find plenty of guides to make specific beers, but nothing general
• Orrin: I looked at the T3 beer guide, the one for the VP dry black beer thing, but that just told me how to follow recipes
• Orrin: not what you actually need to work out the recipes
• Pascalito: well, it's a long explanation , i'll try to describe the general picture first, without tech details
• Pascalito: when the beer is fermenting and the kettle is not sealed yet, microorganisms enter till you seal
• Pascalito: Yeasts are good, rest is bad
• Pascalito: so we need a yeast as first entering organism
• Pascalito: 2 ways to go then : try to brew with open pot, which is often some trial and error and "feeling"
• Pascalito: or isolate the yeast and find out when to seal to only have the yeast in the kettle, with known *east data you can create recipes then with spreadsheet BeerCalc
• Orrin: hmmm
• Pascalito: now to the fermentation itself
• Orrin: so these other things that go in
• Orrin: can't have *any* of them before the yeast?
• Pascalito: i'll come to ingredients
• Orrin: all the bacteria etc
• Pascalito: well, maybe you could have one before the yeast but in general it is not worth the effort to even try
• Pascalito: the first one dominates the process, cause will put its mark on the brew fast
• Pascalito: ok, ingredients now
• Pascalito: you can add honey and malts
• Pascalito: they contain sugars (maltose and glucose)
• Pascalito: and vitamins
• Pascalito: they also give some flavor and/or bitterness
• Pascalito: but sugar and vitamins are the main stuff we'll talk about
• Pascalito: yeasts eat sugar and vitamins to produce alcohol
• Pascalito: when one of those goes under the minimum required amount for that specific yeast, the alc production stops
• Pascalito: those minima are called "floors"
• Pascalito: yeasts also kill themselves with the alc they produce
• Pascalito: this determines the max alcohol for that yeast
• Pascalito: then we come to the flavor department
• Pascalito: the fruit flavors, nutmeg and cinnamon can only be produced by the yeast
• Pascalito: honey and barley are good flavors too
• Pascalito: barley flavor comes from malts
• Pascalito: honey flavor from honey + the yeast
• Pascalito: there are also bad flavors : grassy and nasty
• Pascalito: if too much of those, the beer is undrinkable
• Pascalito: nasty is purely from yeast
• Pascalito: grassy from yeast and some malts
• Pascalito: back to ingredients
• Pascalito: the time you enter the ingredient influences how much vit and flavor it has left
• Pascalito: o, forgot bitterness
• Pascalito: is a combo of nutmeg, cinnamon and tannin
• Pascalito: nut and cin from yeast, tan from malts
• Pascalito: entering ingredient early makes them cook for long, which makes them lose vitamins and flavor basically
• Pascalito: best to look at spreadsheet BeerCalc to see what they produce dependent on entry time (link to the spreadsheet at bottom of page http://wiki.atitd.net/tale3/Guides/Beer/Spreadsheet)
• Pascalito: the art to brew drinkable beer is to have a good balance between bitterness and sweetness
• Pascalito: sweetness is determined by residual sugar
• Pascalito: i think i covered most aspects, time for questions (now or later after looking at BeerCalc)