July 1998
Article
How Malt Extract is Made
Beer is made from four ingredients: barley, hops, water, and yeast. Oh, yes, and some goopy stuff that looks like molasses and comes in a can. Or powdery stuff that looks like Ovaltine and, frankly, tastes a lot better.
Article
6 Steps for Steeping Grains
“Malty.” Now just what could that mean? Beer tasters use the term all the time, but isn’t it a redundant term, like saying beer tastes beery? Barley malt provides the fuel for the yeast, but it also provides the heart of beer flavor. Weren’t you amazed at how great malt extract tasted when you first dipped your finger into it?
Article
From Russia, With Beer
Before arriving in Moscow, my husband and I had been warned that while imbibing alcohol was certainly a daily tradition in Russia, we should not expect to enjoy kicking back with a nice bottle of beer unless we were willing to shell out big bucks for an import at a Western-style restaurant. Always eager to test such truths, we purchased various local brands at kiosks, with varying degrees of success. Although production quality has come a long way since the Soviet era, beer remains remarkably inconsistent from batch to batch. In fact we were actually reduced to pouring several truly undrinkable beers down the drain, an action I would have previously considered unthinkable.
