Only a few ingredients are common to all beers, and generally speaking all of them are natural. While some breweries add artificial flavorings or specially process the standard beer ingredients, the basic recipe for beer has remained the same for hundreds of years, and most beer is still made using all-natural ingredients. Add this to my Recipe Box.
Water
Water is the most basic and fundamental ingredient in all beer, accounting for the vast majority of the beer's overall volume. While for the most part water is simply the base ingredient into which the others are added, the presence of trace minerals such as gypsum or iron will have a potentially drastic effect on the final flavor of the beer. Trace minerals in small amounts are also important yeast nutrients, and water lacking these (such as distilled water) causes fermentation problems when used in brewing.
Grain
Grains provide the primary flavor, the body and the color of beer, as well as the sugars to be fermented into alcohol. The most common grain used in beer is barley, which is first malted (allowed to begin sprouting so as to make the grain's sugars available), and then dried and toasted to varying degrees. Brewers then steep these dried grains in hot water to extract the sugars and flavors as the first step in making beer. Other grains besides barley are also sometimes used, including rice, wheat, oats and sorghum.
Hops
Hops are the female flowers, or cones, of the hop plant (humulus lupulus), and provide beer with its bitter flavor and much of its aroma. Hops are steeped in water much like tea in brewing in order to allow the resins in the flowers to dissolve. A great many varieties of hop plants exist, each providing a different flavor and scent to beer. In addition to its flavoring and aroma characteristics, hops are slightly antiseptic and act as a natural preservative. Because of this, even beers with no discernible hop flavor or aroma contain some hops.
Yeast
Yeast is a type of single-celled fungus that occurs naturally all over the globe. Many different species of yeasts exist, only a few of which are safe and useful for making beer. The function of yeast in beer is to ferment the sugars from grain into alcohol, as well as to carbonate the beer (although many breweries now carbonate their beers with high-pressure carbon dioxide rather than letting the yeast do it, as natural carbonation leaves sediment in beer bottles). The yeast also provides some flavoring to the beer, and different varieties of yeast have been cultivated by brewers to provide different flavors.
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