This article is about the alcoholic drink. Beer is distributed in bottles and cans and is also commonly available on draught, particularly in pubs and bars. Beer forms part of the culture beer battered fish and chips many nations and is associated with social traditions such as beer festivals, as well as a rich pub culture involving activities like pub crawling, pub quizzes and pub games.

When beer is distilled, the resulting liquor is a form of whisky. In early forms of English, and in the Scandinavian languages, the usual word for beer was the word whose Modern English form is ale. In Old English and Old Norse, the beer-word did not denote a malted alcoholic drink like ale, but a sweet, potent drink made from honey and the juice of one or more fruits other than grapes, much less ubiquitous than ale, perhaps served in the kind of tiny drinking cups sometimes found in early medieval grave-goods: a drink more like mead or cider. Beer is one of the world’s oldest prepared alcoholic drinks. Almost any substance containing sugar can naturally undergo alcoholic fermentation, and can thus be utilized in the brewing of beer. It is likely that many cultures, on observing that a sweet liquid could be obtained from a source of starch, independently invented beer. Bread and beer increased prosperity to a level that allowed time for development of other technologies and contributed to the building of civilizations.

Beer was spread through Europe by Germanic and Celtic tribes as far back as 3000 BC, and it was mainly brewed on a domestic scale. The product that the early Europeans drank might not be recognised as beer by most people today. 21st century, according to which the only allowed ingredients of beer are water, hops, and barley-malt. In 1912, brown bottles began to be used by Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the United States.

This innovation has since been accepted worldwide and prevents harmful rays from destroying the quality and stability of beer. As of 2007, the brewing industry is a global business, consisting of several dominant multinational companies and many thousands of smaller producers ranging from brewpubs to regional breweries. A recent and widely publicized study suggests that sudden decreases in barley production due to extreme drought and heat could in the future cause substantial volatility in the availability and price of beer. The process of making beer is known as brewing. A dedicated building for the making of beer is called a brewery, though beer can be made in the home and has been for much of its history, in which case the brewing location is often called a brewhouse.

A company that makes beer is called either a brewery or a brewing company. Brewing beer has been subject to legislation and taxation for millennia, and from the late 19th century taxation largely restricted brewing to commercial operations only in the UK. The purpose of brewing is to convert the starch source into a sugary liquid called wort and to convert the wort into the alcoholic drink known as beer in a fermentation process effected by yeast. Most modern breweries use a continuous sparge, collecting the original wort and the sparge water together.

However, it is possible to collect a second or even third wash with the not quite spent grains as separate batches. Each run would produce a weaker wort and thus a weaker beer. Brewing with several runnings is called parti gyle brewing. After boiling, the hopped wort is cooled, ready for the yeast. During fermentation, the wort becomes beer in a process that requires a week to months depending on the type of yeast and strength of the beer.

During fermentation most of the carbon dioxide is allowed to escape through a trap and the beer is left with carbonation of only about one atmosphere of pressure. Fermentation is sometimes carried out in two stages, primary and secondary. Once most of the alcohol has been produced during primary fermentation, the beer is transferred to a new vessel and allowed a period of secondary fermentation. Secondary fermentation is used when the beer requires long storage before packaging or greater clarity. Though water itself is, ideally, flavorless, its level of dissolved minerals, specifically, bicarbonate ion, does influence beer’s finished taste. The starch source, termed as the “mash ingredients”, in a beer provides the fermentable material and is a key determinant of the strength and flavour of the beer. The most common starch source used in beer is malted grain.