Welcome to this blog :)

Introduction/a talk about beer

This first post is most likely going to be boring because I'm tried and drunk. Just to clear things up, you don't matter.

Alcohol; because no good story starts with someone eating a salad - Unknown

This blog will be run by a group of students for an assignment. We've chosen to write about alcohol because well...we're uni students so what else do we really talk about. We'll be covering a brief overview over the history of different types of alcoholic beverages as well as their effects and we may even throw in a few stories here and there.

So this first one will be about beer, who doesn't like to knock back a couple of cold ones.
Beer has four ingredients that include grains (most often barely), water, yeast and hops. Beer may date as far back as 9500 BC but the first known records were between 3500-3100 BC in western Iran. As you can see people have been getting drunk for a while now and honestly we're getting pretty good at it.

The first step is malting, this involves harvesting the grain, heating it to dry it out and then cracking. This is done in order to ready the enzymes for brewing.

The next step is mashing which involves soaking the grains in hot water in order to activate the enzymes and release the sugars. After about an hour the water is drained leaving a liquid called wort.

The step after that is boiling where the wort is boiled with the hops and any other spices that the brewer wishes to add to the mix. This is then drained and ready for fermentation.

The last steps are fermentation and aging. After the boiled wort is cooled it is fermented with the use of yeast. After this it is then bottled and the carbon dioxide produced by the yeast naturally carbonates the beer.

All in all who really cares about how it is made as long as it gets you drunk enough so a 3 turns into a 7. As long as one of your sober mates, we call them boring, isn't there to tell you what a horrible thing you've done it's all good. But hey in the end, using the wise words of The Lonely Island..."doesn't matter, had sex". Thank you alcohol.

Drinking beer doesn't make you fat, It makes you lean...against bars, tables, chairs, and poles  - Unknown

Just look how happy this little guy is. This could be you!

- Bassam

References:
Info from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer
Picture from http://www.clipartbest.com/beer-keg-pictures