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The craze of craft beers is spreading like wildfire with each passing day. Witnessing the growing demand for craft beers, the market has seen offerings for quality variations subsequently. Even though India’s craft beer industry is in its budding stage, this industry is flourishing rapidly. This growth is driven by millennials who discover craft beer to be more bona fide and premium, compared to normal lagers.

The ingredients without which you can’t create a perfect beer are malts, hops, yeast, and water. These essential ingredients need to be blended in an utmost balance so that we get to experience the fresh and unique profile of the beer. The ratio in which these ingredients are added also plays an important role and therefore it could vary as per the style of beer one wants to create.

As far as hops are concerned, there is a belief in the western world that this ingredient is the major deciding factor between a typical commercial lager and a craft beer. Hops are basically here just for mankind’s beery satisfaction. Once the cone-shaped flowers of the plant are harvested and dried in the fall, they play a huge role in the beer brewing process. Every single beer on the market today contains hops. If they didn’t, they would be a “gruit” which is basically a beer that, instead of hops, uses witches-brew-sounding herbs like bog myrtle, yarrow, heather, or juniper.

Brewers adore these small vine-grown buds for a few reasons. To begin with, they taste great. Hops confer a vital bitterness to beer that may well be excessively sweet or out of balance without them. What’s more is that there are more than 80 varieties of hops and they leave behind an entire parcel of flavor within the shape of citrusy, tropical, spicy, pine-like, homegrown, and earthy aromatics.

In the craft industry, hops are now known for more than the purpose of preservation and bitterness for balancing the flavors. Hops are added at different stages of the brewing and fermentation process to bring out aromas in beer that no one could imagine. Moreover, hops offer assistance to keep up a beer’s foamy head and lend antibacterial qualities that help avoid deterioration. So definitely, hops are the supporting actors in this movie.

Craft beer involves a tremendous amount of science and the antimicrobial property plays a basic role in its making because it moderates down the speed of gram-positive bacteria but doesn’t obstruct the development of Gram-negative bacteria. The antibacterial activity plays a key role in providing the much required microbiological stability which in return helps in maintaining the beer’s physical properties for a longer period of time. When a beer contains a high percentage of Alcohol by Volume (ABV), there is a large number of malts to do so. To bring the balance between the sweetness of malts and the high sharpness of the amount of alcohol, hops can bring the two together for perfect harmony.

With the exceptional taste, high-quality ingredients, and impact on your local community, you have many reasons to be a proud craft beer drinker. So, when you grab a craft beer and wonder what makes your beer taste so bitter and smell different, then it’s mostly the hops 🙂