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This beer trivia quiz has 193 free questions with answers and starts with the fundamentals every drinker should know: the four ingredients, mashing and wort, ale versus lager yeast, the 1516 Reinheitsgebot and where Pilsner comes from. It then moves into craft beer trivia: New Albion and Anchor, the 1978 law that legalised homebrewing, Sierra Nevada, Sam Adams, Dogfish Head, Fat Tire, Arrogant Bastard, the birth of the hazy IPA and the billion-dollar buyouts of the 2010s. Easy questions suit a pub round or brewery tour; the harder ones on definitions, dates and founders will test homebrewers and beer geeks. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 193 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What are the four basic ingredients of beer?
Water, Barley, Hops, Yeast
Water, Barley, Hops, Yeast: water makes up most of the drink, and its minerals matter so much that soft water suits pale lagers and hard water dark stouts, which is how regions came by their styles.
Q 02Which ancient civilisation left some of the earliest beer-brewing records, including a hymn to Ninkasi?
Sumerians
Sumerians: the Hymn to Ninkasi, written down around 1800 BC, praises the beer goddess step by step through the brewing and is often read as a recipe; brewing there was largely women's work.
Q 03Besides limiting beer's ingredients, Bavaria's 1516 Reinheitsgebot also capped what?
Beer prices
Beer prices: the decree opens by capping a measure of beer at one pfennig in winter and two in summer, and only afterwards turns to the ingredients rule it is famous for.
Q 04What sets a 'session' beer apart from other beers?
Lower alcohol
Lower alcohol: the idea is that you can enjoy a few over one long drinking session and still have your wits about you, a habit the name probably owes to British pubs.
Q 05In brewing, what is the sugary liquid run off the grain called, before it is boiled and fermented?
Wort
Wort is boiled, which sterilises it and stops the enzymes working, and then cooled so that yeast can be added to turn its sugars into alcohol.
Q 06Beer in clear or green bottles turns 'skunky' when exposed to what?
Light
Light: ultraviolet and blue light break down hop iso-alpha acids into 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol, a sulfur compound closely related to those in skunk spray; brown glass blocks most of it.
Q 07In malting, barley is soaked and then left to do what before it is dried?
Sprout
Sprout: malting tricks the grain into starting to grow, so it makes the enzymes a brewer will need, and drying then stops the growth before the seedling can go any further.
Q 08Which British pub drink is made by mixing beer with lemonade?
Shandy
Shandy: cutting the beer with an equal part of lemonade roughly halves its strength; the name is short for 'shandygaff', an older mix of beer and ginger beer.
Q 09The banana and clove notes in a Bavarian Hefeweizen come mainly from which ingredient?
The yeast strain
The yeast strain: clove-like 4-vinyl guaiacol and banana-like isoamyl acetate are by-products of the Bavarian weizen yeast's fermentation, not of the wheat malt, hops or water.
Q 10Top-fermented ales ferment in which temperature range?
15 to 25 °C
15 to 25 °C: ale ferments at about room temperature, while lager needs cold, which is why German brewers once packed their lager cellars with river ice and were barred from brewing in summer.
Q 11Which three ingredients did the 1516 Reinheitsgebot, the German Beer Purity Law, allow?
Water, Barley, Hops
Water, barley and hops: yeast went unmentioned, probably because brewers simply carried it over from one batch to the next, and wheat was left out partly to keep it for bakers.
Q 12Which American hop, bred in Oregon, gave American pale ales their signature grapefruit aroma?
Cascade
Cascade, named after the Cascade mountain range, made its name in 1975 in a San Francisco brewery's Liberty Ale, a pale ale that set the pattern for the American style.
Q 13Which British savoury spread is made from yeast left over from brewing beer?
Marmite
Q 21An American brewer still counts as a 'craft brewer' while making up to how many barrels a year?
6 million
6 million barrels: the Brewers Association calls that 'small', though it is about 3 percent of all US beer sales, and also requires that under a quarter of the brewer be owned by a big drinks company.
Q 22Which brewery, founded in 1976, served as the blueprint for America's small-scale craft breweries?
New Albion
New Albion, founded in Sonoma by Jack McAuliffe and two partners, survived only six years, brewing its last batch in 1982, yet Sierra Nevada's founders credit it for their own start.
Q 23George Hodgson's Bow Brewery won fame shipping its hoppy pale ale to British drinkers in which country?
India
Marmite: a German chemist, Justus von Liebig, showed that brewers' leftover yeast could be concentrated, bottled and eaten, and the spread has been made from it since 1902.
Q 14What is the process of steeping milled grain in hot water so enzymes convert starches to sugars called?
Mashing
Mashing: the mix is held warm rather than boiled, in steps between about 45 and 78 °C, because each of the grain's starch-splitting enzymes works best at its own temperature.
Q 15Bavarian brewer Josef Groll made his famous clear, pale lager in 1842 in which Bohemian city?
Pilsen
Pilsen: townspeople fed up with local beer that kept spoiling built a new brewery and hired Groll, and his pale lager gave the world the word 'pilsner'.
Q 16Russian River Brewing's celebrated Double IPA is named after which Roman author?
Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Elder: brewer Vinnie Cilurzo, credited with making the first Double IPA in 1994, chose the Roman naturalist because he is thought to have left an early description of wild hops.
Q 17About how much beer did each worker building Egypt's Great Pyramids receive as a daily ration?
About 4.5 liters
About 4.5 liters: the four to five liters a day, handed out in three servings as part of the builders' pay, were as much food as drink.
Q 18Which yeast species, also the one used to bake bread, is the top-fermenting 'ale yeast'?
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
Saccharomyces cerevisiae clumps and rises to the surface as it works, which is why brewers once skimmed it off the top to seed the next batch.
Q 19How does a German Kristallweizen differ from a Hefeweizen?
It is filtered
It is filtered: Kristallweizen, 'crystal wheat', has had the yeast and wheat proteins that cloud a Hefeweizen strained out, so it pours as bright as a pale lager.
Q 20What do brewers call the unmalted grains and sugars used alongside malted barley?
Adjuncts
Adjuncts lighten a beer's body, which suits pale lagers; German brewers in America first turned to them to thin out the protein-heavy six-row barley they found there.
India: Hodgson's brewery stood two miles up the River Lea from where the East India Company's ships loaded, and he gave their captains 18 months' credit, so his was the ale they carried.
Q 24Sierra Nevada Brewing was founded by two homebrewers in which California city?
Chico
Chico: Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi pieced the brewhouse together there from discarded dairy equipment and scrapyard metal, and Grossman named it for the mountains he loved to hike.
Q 25Which heir to a family fortune bought San Francisco's failing Anchor Brewing in 1965?
Fritz Maytag
Fritz Maytag, of the washing-machine family, heard the brewery was about to shut, bought 51% of it for a few thousand dollars and made reviving it his mission.
Q 26Which US president signed the 1978 bill legalising homebrewing?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter signed H.R. 1337 in October 1978, exempting home-brewed beer from federal excise tax from February 1979; within months Charlie Papazian founded the American Homebrewers Association.
Q 27Which company, founded by Jim Koch in 1984, brews Samuel Adams?
Boston Beer
Boston Beer's first Samuel Adams lager was adapted from a family recipe that Jim Koch's father dug out of a trunk in the attic, the lager his great-great-grandfather Louis Koch had brewed in St. Louis.
Q 28Dogfish Head's 60 Minute IPA takes its name from what?
The time hops are added during the boil
The time hops are added during the boil: founder Sam Calagione rigged a vibrating tabletop football game over the kettle to shake hops in at a steady rate, the trick behind continual hopping.
Q 29The American ale Fat Tire is named after a brewery co-founder's bicycle trip through which country?
Belgium
Belgium: co-founder Jeff Lebesch pedalled from brewery to brewery there, then went home to Fort Collins, Colorado, and started New Belgium Brewing with Kim Jordan in 1991.
Q 30Which San Diego County brewery launched Arrogant Bastard Ale in 1997 with the label taunt 'You're not worthy'?
Stone Brewing
Stone Brewing says the recipe began as a mistake by co-founder Steve Wagner, one the founders loved but thought too aggressive to sell until the brewery was 17 months old.