Wort is not pronounced like it is written. We definitely don’t want to associate the main flavor of our homemade beer with something thats found on a witches nose. According to Wikipedia, wort is pronounced ” wert “. Your wort is basically the backbone of your beer, it is generally made by boiling all of the home beer brewing ingredients in a stainless steel brewing kettle.

There Are Generally Two Kinds Of Wort In The Home Beer Making Process

Sweet Wort is the first version, you will have this once you boiled all of the primary home beer brewing ingredients. The major ingredient in the sweet wort is usually malt. Malt is a liquid derived from sprouted barley, it contains the sugar that the yeast will convert into alcohol. The process of creating malt from sprouted barley can be lengthy and tedious. Which is why most amateur home beer brewing enthusiasts will choose to use ” malt extract “. Malt extract is pre-made malt that is boiled down so it is a condensed version of the malt you would make. You can still produce a great tasting beer using a malt extract, and it will save you time and money when you are first starting out. Using a malt extract will slightly limit your control of the taste of the beer but hardly noticeable when you are first starting out.

The second type of wort is called Hopped Wort. Just like the name sounds this wort is produced when you add hops to the sweet wort. Hops is a type of plant that adds a bitter flavor to the beer. There are many variatons to hops, and almost every home beer brewing recipe I have seen calls for some sort of hops. There are many different ways to add the hops to the wort and there are over thirty varietals of Hops Plants which could lead to hundreds if not thousands of different tasting homemade beer.

It Is Very Important In The Home Beer Making Process To Know What You Want Your Final Product To Taste Like Before Making Your Wort

Your wort is essentially your beer. It should be created by following a home beer brewing recipe to the letter ( unless you want to experiment ). To much sugar and the wrong yeast will produce a homemade beer with high alcohol percentage. Adding the hops at a time that isn’t specified in the recipe, or even using the wrong hops would most likely result in a flavor that you were not expecting. Although it is not necisarilly a bad thing to create your own derivatives of the recipe, I would only suggest doing that for someone that has already made a couple of batches of homemade beer. If this is your first home beer brewing experiment and you change the wort recipe and you get a bad batch, you could be discouraged from making beer at home.