Many people are familiar with St. Patrick as the person responsible for driving the snakes out of Ireland. However, many people are unaware that he is not only the Patron Saint of Ireland, but also of Nigeria, Boston, engineers, and paralegals. You may also not know that St. Patrick is attributed with using the shamrock (the “three-leaf clover”) as an illustrated parable of Christian teaching of “three divine persons in the one God.” This is the reason why the shamrock became a symbol for St. Patrick’s Day, which is celebrated on the day of his death. What most people probably do not know, however, is that there is no historical or biblical indication of any connection between St Paddys Day and Green Beer.

That doesn’t seem to stop most people, though, from using the day as a reason to drink Irish whiskey and green beers, especially in the United States. No matter where you go, all over the country you will be able to find enumerable celebrations revolving around St Paddys Day and Green Beer and the festive day of March 17th. This is particularly true in areas of the country with rich Irish heritage, namely Boston. Of course, traditional Irish pubs all over the country do pretty well during this period of celebration.

Ok, now that this history is out of the way, you should know that on top of there being no relation between St Patrick and beer there is neither a relation between St Paddys Day and green beer because there really is no such thing as green beer. While there are certainly some beers that may be slightly red in color, the green beers that you may consume at your local Irish pub on the days surrounding March 17th, are probably hued with food coloring. Obviously, beers that are lighter in color will take on more of the color, so you will probably want to stick to things like pilsners or traditional lagers. Of course, this means that you can very easily enjoy green beers from the comfort of your own home as well.

Ironically, though, traditional Irish beers, and those more familiarly attributed to “St Paddys Day and Green Beer” are not green in color, but actually very dark. This is because they are stout beers. The famous of these is Guinness, whose dark, near-chocolate, malty flavor, and cascading action in the glass is common to many parts of the world. However, there are many brands of the come from the land of Erin.

• GUINNESS DRAUGHT: Very dark in appearance, the aroma is sweet like chocolate and coffee but tastes surprisingly light and thin. It is lower in alcohol content as well as substance.
• MURPHY’S IRISH STOUT: Black that fades to garnet (red) with a slightly off-white head, this beer is tradition at its finest. Very smooth (even smoother than Guinness) and creamy it easy to drink straight from the can or poured into a simple pint glass.
• O’HARA’s CELEBRATION STOUT: With a surprisingly dark head it smells like chocolate and a hint of smoke. The taste is similarly but finishes sweetly and is somewhat oaky, perhaps from the tannins.

Bavaria Beer was founded in 1719 by Laurentius Moorees in Lieshout, North Brabant in the Netherlands. At the time it was founded, the village brewery produced just shy of 90 barrels of beer. Of course, this is not very much beer. Two generations later, the great-grandson of the Moorees, Jan Swinkels was able to increase operations and distribution. By 1910 he constructed a malting plant and they were producing tens of thousands of liters of beer every year. Within the next fifteen years the operation had become so big that they had to vacate their small buildings and move into a larger brewery in Lieshout, a brewery that produced over 2,000 bottles of beer per hour, at the time.

The brewery

Bavaria beer, as a brewery, concentrated their efforts on the Dutch market for the majority of their existence. It was not until the 1970s that they expanded internationally, now servicing around 100 countries across the globe. They have even adapted their beverages to suit individual markets with sales subsidiaries in South Africa, America, Spain, France, Italy, England, and other smaller countries. An example of one of their adaptations is a non-alcoholic version, which they export to the Middle East.

The brewery now produces a wide range of standard and low alcohol pale lagers. This variety is bottled under several different names, which include “Bavaria” and “Hollandia.” Around the world, the best known brand of Bavaria beer is “Bavaria Premium Pils Lager.” They also make malts available in apple, caramel, lemon, and karkade flavors, as well as several different supermarket-owned-brand Dutch lagers in Europe. As you can see, they have greatly expanded their operations since their inception nearly 300 hundred years ago.

Different varieties

There are several kinds of specialty Bavaria beer varieties as well. In France, for example, they make two specialty brews called “Bavaria 8.6” and “Bavaria 8.6 Red.” They also make La Trappe and Moreeke, which is a tribute to Laurentius Moorees, the company’s founder. In Australia there is a chain of bottle shops (alcohol stores), called Liquorland, that distributes both Bavaria and Hollandia brands as “premium imported” Dutch beers. In Ireland you will find “Bavaria Crown,” and since the 1990’s you could also find many exported Bavaria brands in several Soviet Union countries.

Of late, however, you might recognize the Bavaria beer brand because of its placement in international news headlines. In 2006, for example, they ran a promotion where they gave away 1,000 Leeuwenhosen (orange overalls) with their logo on them to the Dutch national football team fans who bought associated Bavaria Brewery products. Unfortunately, this was viewed as ambush marketing by FIFA. Similarly, in 2007, the Bavaria was also in the news for price-fixing, as determined by the European commission. Bavaria was one of three breweries (the other two were Heineken and Grolsch) charged and fined for participating and operating the price fixing cartel in the Netherlands. Along with the InBev corporation, the four brewers controlled 95% of the Dutch market, but InBev was not assessed a penalty because they were able to show “decisive information” regarding their operations.

. Beer can be made using almost any cereal and undergo the fermentation process, making this popular beverage the first alcoholic beverage in the world. The process has changed throughout the years, as has the taste, but without the evolution, we could never be enjoying a draft beer at our favorite pub.

Around the World

Every country has its own history about beer that has helped put beer on the map. Egyptians used beer as far back as historians can trace for a beverage but also as a healing remedy. Five thousand years ago, the Chinese were busy brewing beer that they called kui. As Christianity grew across the globe, so did the production of beer as monks were responsible for brewing it in many cases.

The Packaging Process

The way in which beer was packaged has also evolved over the years. The ancients used the same container batch after batch for the fermentation process and often stored it in ceramic pots. Brewers would often travel with the fermenting containers so they could brew wherever they go. The history of beer packaging has evolved even more since being stored in a ceramic pot.

The ways in which we store beer now is in a keg, a can, or in a bottle. The beer bottle is older than the other packaging. Beer was bottled in Hertfordshire first, sometime towards the end of the 16^th century. The first keg as we know it was patented in 1910 and bought by the Milwaukee Brewing Company. In 1935, the Kreuger beer company marketed their beer in a can as a result of prohibition ending and the American Can Company producing a test batch of 2000 cans.

The Microbrewery

Beer and the microbrewery are often thought of as something recent because that’s what we’re hearing about lately. Every time we turn around, we hear of a new microbrewery that’s opened up, boasting some new unique combination of flavors. However, a microbrewery is much older than we typically think. In the 1980s, microbreweries started serving local communities and becoming more important than what the larger breweries expected them to be.

Today, there are over 1600 microbreweries in the US alone. The history about beer reveals the interest in beer across the globe and now microbreweries are popping up everywhere from Thailand to Scotland, Germany to Russia. Microbreweries are becoming a force to be reckoned with and are offering more unique flavors than the larger breweries can.

The history about beer can be found within almost every country in the world. Many have had their history of producing a beer of one sort or another and adds to the lists that you see at bars that list over a hundred or two hundred beers to choose from. Beer is no longer just a beer, it is being considered just as fancy as wine. Many restaurants now offer beer pairings, too, showing that beer is still evolving.

, though the rough concept has been the same. It requires a grain and a fermentation process and different flavors can be added in. Many different fermenting barrels and machinery can also simplify the process.

Choosing the Yeast

A beer company or home brewer will need to select what kind of yeast that they’ll use. The choices are top fermenting and bottom fermenting. Once this decision is made, they will have decided whether they will make ale or lager.

The Basic Process

The process for how beer is made is actually much simpler than one would imagine. You get a bottle of beer in a restaurant and never give it a second thought as you drink it down, however it’s only comprised of four ingredients: water, hops, malted barley, and yeast go into beer and actually 95% of the beer is water. Each beer will be a slight variation but will still only use the 4 ingredients.

A brewer will need to break down the barley with hot water to release all of the fermentable sugar. The product is mashed and formed into a grist or porridge. The result is a sweet liquid called wort. Once the wort is produced, it will be clarified through another process called lautering. The result is a clear liquid that is full of all of the extracted sugar. The wort is then boiled and the hops are added. The hops will vary slightly depending upon the beer and they may be added early into the process or towards the end of the boil. At this point, the wort can be tasted too.

The next step for how beer is made is the addition of the yeast. The hops will be removed and the yeast will be added once the wort is cool. The fermentation process happens fairly rapidly and the foaming will start to die down after the first few days. Depending upon the flavors that are being developed in the beer, the remaining process will take up to four weeks.

Bottling

The bottling process can be more complicated than the actual beer making. Once you’ve discovered how beer is made, the bottling is a whole new experience. If it’s for a large beer company, they will have machines and conveyor belts that move the bottles along a path while the beer is dispensed into each bottle. If it’s a home brewer, they can purchase bottles to bottle up their beer or sanitize and dispense it into several other containers as well.

How beer is made is a simple process, though it can be just like any other recipe. There are variations that will depend upon what kind of ingredients a brewing company adds to make it unique. Once the beer is made and the fermentation process is done, it can then be bottled into glass bottles, cans, or kegs to be shared and enjoyed by many.