Welcome to the best talk of the entire event, in my opinion, I think. And the reason I say that is because I have a really heavy bag here. And I have brought the good stuff.

I have ten minutes to talk. I have ten beers. There's going to be ten questions. And can I get one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. So how easy is it to win

a beer today? Can I get a volunteer? One volunteer. Yes, you. All right. When you win a beer, stand up. Grab one. You won a beer. That's how easy it is. So what I'm going to be doing today is talking about how to brew beer. Now, I think this is one of the only tech

conferences I've been to where I haven't spoken about a tech topic. So I'm really excited though because I love beer just about as much as I love programming and technology.

So who am I? I'm actually a solution architect for a company called SSW in Australia. But who has untapped? Any hands? Any hands? One at the back. Right at the back. You win a beer. Well done. I'm very proud of that number, 534. A lot of people I meet have

much higher numbers than that. But that for me is really exciting. And so I'm not really coming to you today from the sort of aspect of a programmer. I'm actually coming to you as the owner of the MashHacks channel. So I love beer. I love recording videos. I love talking about things. I love hearing my own voice on the

internet. And so check out the MashHacks YouTube channel if you want any further information about what I'm going to be talking about today. Because brewing beer is a really addictive hobby. You'll start out small and then you'll keep buying equipment and then all of a sudden you've spent thousands of dollars and you have an entire garage full of stainless steel pots and you have grain in the corner and you've got all sorts

of bits. So yeah. Look forward to that. Okay. So we have four ingredients in beer. Who can name one of them? At the back there. Hops. Yes. You win a beer. Well done. The first one is malted barley. This is the lifeblood of the beer. It gives

it its body. It's where all the sugar comes from that gets turned into alcohol. As this gentleman mentioned, we also have hops, which if you've never seen the hop plant before, this is the flower bud, essentially. It's a big hop vine. And hops give beer its bitterness.

So it would be very, very alcoholic and difficult to drink without hops. And hops are also acted as the main preservative for beer. So that's why in the old times it was better to drink beer because it had a natural preservative in it. The third ingredient is, of course, yeast. Now, that's a nice zoomed in picture there.

But yeast is what converts the sugars into alcohol. And in many of the Belgian beers that you're going to be trying today, that's where most of the flavor comes from as well. So not many people know that yeast actually gives off a lot of flavor. And there are many, many, many strains of brewer's yeast that brewers use to get their desired flavors.

Now, who knows the fourth ingredient? Yes, yes, it is water. You win a beer. Thank you very much. Water, of course, is the main ingredient, some might say, because beer is about 95% water. And so that is very important. So the greatest thing that ever existed,

in everyone's opinion, how do we brew it? How do we make beer? So the first thing we do is we start with that malt. And you want to mill it down. So essentially, malted barley is just full of starches. And we want to make that starch available to all the enzymes

that break that stuff down. So we need to crush it in a mill. And a lot of what I'm showing you today is the home brewing version of this. So it's not big breweries and stuff like that. This is stuff that you can do in your own house. So once you've crushed that grain, what you can do is throw it into a giant stainless steel pot, usually

about 40 liters or so at home, and you mix that with hot water. And what that is called is the mash. So what we're doing here is we are releasing or activating enzymes in that grain. So there's a particular enzyme that breaks down starch and turns

it into sugar. And what we're doing is at a certain temperature, usually about 66 degrees or so Celsius, that enzyme is activated, and it breaks down all the starch and all that grain, and it turns it into sugar. So what we end up with is very, very, very sugary water mixed with a lot of grains. So the next thing we need to do, and are

there any Germans in the audience? Yes. Have you got a beer yet? You can have one. I apologize for this next thing because most of the beer terms are German. And so there's lauter, voloff, and sparge. And that's how I would pronounce it, but I'm sure that's terrible. Essentially, lautering is the process of separating the grains from the

wort. So when you drain the liquid from that big mess of grain and water, you need to drain it slowly and recirculate it back into the pot. And what that'll do is it'll act as a natural filter, a natural filter bed, and eventually that liquid will become

clearer and clearer and clearer. And voloff is, actually that was probably voloff, and lautering is probably just the removal of that liquid. So the recirculation to make it clear is the first one, and then you want to drain that liquid away. And sparging is essentially rinsing that grain with water because we want to get absolutely all

the sugar we can out of this grain bed, essentially. Now what we see there is a professional setup. That's a big stainless steel pot with a big fancy sort of sparge arm. You've got nice little water jets there. But in reality, most of the time you're sitting here doing something like this. All right, the next thing. So what we get from that grain is

a bunch of sweet, and who can guess how that's pronounced? Anyone? Yell it out. You can have a beer, but you're wrong. It's pronounced wert. And again, a lot of this stuff is German, and so

that is the reason for that. So anyway, this sweet wert is essentially all of that sugary liquid that we've just extracted from our grain bed. And the next thing we need to do is add the bitterness to this. So this is pre-beer, essentially, but what we want to do is boil it up. And as soon as you start boiling it up, you're gonna

hear all this funky, it's like boiling spaghetti, and you get all that big foam and stuff on top. And so that'll happen, and it'll boil over if you're not careful. It'll go everywhere, so you make sure you keep an eye on it. But you boil the liquid, and this is another reason why beer was safer to drink than water back in the day, because they boiled

it, which killed off anything. And what you do is you add your hops, which we saw earlier, and you add that into the boiling liquid. You add hops early on, usually boil for about an hour. You add hops early on to make it bitter. You add hops later on to get your hop tastes in those beers. Who's a fan of IPAs? Yes? Have you had a beer yet? Did

you get a beer yet? You can grab a beer. Well done. I'm also a fan of IPAs. IPAs are essentially really hoppy beers, and they get all that hops in there really late. So way late in the boil, they'll just pack in as much hops as they can and extract all that great aroma and great flavor. Anyway, the next step, what we do after we've boiled

all that liquid is we need to chill it down. Now, you can use fancy plate-chilling apparatus to make sure you get your wort down to a pitchable temperature. So we're going to put yeast into this thing, and of course, yeast is a living organism. We don't want

to put it into boiling water. It will fry it. And so what we do is we chill it down. Again, this is fancy. What you usually end up doing is just throwing a stainless-steel pot in the kitchen sink with a bunch of ice and you sit there and you stir it. Now, once you've chilled it down, who knows what vessel it gets put into next. Can anyone

take a stab? Sorry? No. But you can have a beer if you haven't already had one. Brilliant. Pump it into a fermenter. Okay. So if you've ever been to one of those fancy craft breweries or brew pubs or something like that, you'll usually see these big stainless-steel

vessels behind the bar or anything like this. These are their fermenters. It's where the beer sits. It's where you add the yeast and you let the beer ferment away. Now, again, you're not going to be putting it into big fancy ones like that. You're going to be putting it into a bucket, essentially. Australian ones look like this. The U.S.

guys usually like using clear carboys, they're called. But essentially, you just put that sweet, hopped-up liquid in there. Again, it's super sugary at this point. And so what you do is you add yeast. So there's a bit of a liquid yeast starter there. Usually, you'll get it in small little packets. But essentially, you throw yeast into the

bucket and it's going to start fermenting. And you get this wonderful, gross-looking foam slash yeast, it's called the Krausen, that sits on top of your fermenter. And that takes, you know, usually between 10 and, I don't know, between one and three weeks, let's say, to ferment out, depending on the beer. But essentially, you let it

sit away like that, it'll ferment out, and then it's time to bottle. So once we have let it ferment out, essentially, all you need to do is plunk it into a bottle. So there's usually a spigot on your bucket, on your fermenter bucket. Whack it straight

in a bottle, add some sugar into that bottle as well, because the sugar is going to kick off fermentation again. And that's what causes the carbonation. So a little tiny bit of sugar left in the bottle. The yeast gobble that up. Put your cap on with this annoying apparatus here. It's a little hand capper like that. Wait a couple of weeks. Takes about two weeks or so for the beer

to carbonate once you've bottled it. And then you enjoy. And that's pretty much it. So what you can do is, if you're interested in any of the beer brewing process, head over to my YouTube channel. This particular video, The Simplest

All-Grain Brew Day, is probably the best way to get a good understanding of what goes on, what goes into beer, and essentially how to brew it. It'll give you all your required equipment and everything you need to know. If you have any questions, feel free to come up and talk to me afterwards. I can talk your ears off about beers. You can catch me on Twitter

with the wonderful Twitter handle of, Ben who likes beer. Who else likes beer? Down the back there. You win a beer. Well done. And that is my very quick presentation on how to brew beer. Thank you very much. Cheers, guys.

Do you have any questions?