The national beverage of Egypt. Beer is brewed in kettles using various combinations of malt and honey, stored in small barrels, and served at ceremonial tasting tables. Aside from being drunk to increase Beer Tasting skill, beer may be made into ambrosia for festivals, served at banquets, or distilled into spirits using an alembic.
Beers can possess a wide variety of characteristics, depending on the ingredients and yeasts used in their brewing:
Beer is stored in small barrels. A barrel of beer is very heavy, with weight 100 and bulk 1. There is no way to empty a full barrel of beer other than by using it (by unkegging it at a tasting table, or by distilling it or making it into ambrosia).
Spoilage: Unlike wine, beer will spoil over time, rendering it unfit for drinking. (Beer will only begin to go bad once it has been kegged; until then, you can leave it in the kettle indefinitely.) The more potent a beer, the longer it will last in the keg. A Very Potent beer will last over a week, while a non-potent beer lasts only one TeppyHour. You will not be told whether a beer has gone bad until you attempt to drink it. Beer will spoil in the tasting table if left long enough. Although spoiled beer may not be drunk, it may still be used to make ambrosia or distilled spirits.
Beer may be drunk at a ceremonial tasting table to gain Beer Tasting skill. A single keg of beer provides 21 drinks. The algorithm for how BT increases is not well understood; but as with wine, drinking a variety of beers is the best way to quickly improve skill. It is also possible to gain multiple BT points from a single beer -- some people have reported gaining as many as five points from multiple glasses of a single beer.
Beer Tasting skill, like Gastronomy and Winetasting, ranges from 0 to 256. At BT of 100, 200, and 250, Perception is permanently increased by 1.
Two festivals require ambrosia made with beer: the Festival of Osiris and the Festival of Hathor. Ambrosia is prepared at a kitchen using a barrel of beer and either 1 oil (for Osiris?) or 1 [cobra blood]? (for Hathor?).
The type of beer required by a particular festival will vary; e.g. Very Potent Barley, or Spicy Black Nutmeg. When a flavor is specified, the beer must contain a "hint of" that flavor or better. When a potency is specified, the beer must be of that potency exactly: you cannot use a Very Potent beer if the requirement is for Potent.
Extra flavors and properties in a beer are okay. For instance, a beer that is Potent Sweet Spicy Brown, Hint of Barley and Nutmeg, will suffice to make ambrosia that needs to be Potent Sweet Nutmeg, or Spicy Brown Barley, etc.
Beer ambrosia does not spoil.
Beer is made from malted barley and honey brewed in a kettle. You must have the Beer Brewing skill (available at the Universities of the Human Body in Seven Lakes and Sinai) to make beer.
It normally takes three hours to brew a barrel of beer. With the Quick Brewing skill, that time is cut to 1/3 (just one hour). Quick Brewing is available at a School of Body (tuition 500 raw barley), and may be learned by individuals with at least 125% total favor in the Test of Festivals.
It takes 60 wood and 25 water to start a kettle of beer. Once started, the beermaking process goes through two phases: brewing (in which malt and honey are added to the brew) and fermentation (in which the sugars in the brew are converted by yeast into alcohol).
The brewing phase lasts for 3600 seconds, or one hour (with Quick Brewing, 1200 seconds, or twenty minutes). At any time during this phase, you may add ingredients (honey and malt) to the kettle. The type and amount of these ingredients will determine some of the attributes of your beer. These attributes are further modified by the time at which the ingredient is added.
Note that Banana, Cherry, Date, Orange, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, and Nasty flavors are determined entirely by the yeast being used. They are not created by the ingredients.
| Ingredient | Glucose | Maltose | Color | Vitamins | Barley | Tannin | Grassy | Honey |
| Raw Malt | 1 | 5 | 1 | 13 | 12 | 6 | 12 | 0 |
| Light Roasted Malt | 2 | 10 | 1.5 | 10 | 6 | 3 | 1.5 | 0 |
| Medium Roasted Malt | 2 | 10 | 3 | 7 | 6 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Dark Roasted Malt | 2 | 10 | 6 | 5 | 6 | 1.5 | 0 | 0 |
| Burnt Malt | 0 | 2 | 12 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Honey | 10 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
The brew phase is divided into 100 "ticks", each 36 seconds long (12 seconds with Quick Brewing). The ingredient formulas are based on the nearest tick. In other words, you will get identical results from adding an ingredient with 15 seconds remaining as you will from adding with 10 remaining.
The following formulas give the values for the various attributes as a function of the base value B (given in the table above) and the time added T, where T goes from 1 at the very start to 0 at the very end.
barley = B * (1 + 5T) / 6 color = B * (1 + 5T) / 6 tannin = B * (1 + 5T) / 6 grassy = B * (1 + 5T) / 6 honey = B / (0.05 + T) vitamins = B / (0.2 + T)
Notice that when ingredients are added right at the start, honey flavor and vitamins will actually be slightly under their base values.
The fermentation phase begins as soon as the brewing phase ends. Fermentation lasts for 7200 seconds, or two hours (with Quick Brewing, 2400 seconds, or forty minutes). During this phase, microorganisms such as yeast will begin to work on your brew. The kettle is open at the start of fermentation, and may be sealed at any point.
There are 100 different microorganisms found throughout Egypt, of which 51 are yeasts and the remainder are mold, acetobacteria, and lactobacteria. Each microbe is identified by number; e.g. Yeast-42, Mold-7. The specific microbes that will appear in your brew, and the time during fermentation when they appear, depend on where your kettle has been placed. One of the early challenges in brewing is to find a kettle location where you can "catch" a good yeast.
No detailed study has been done on molds, acetobacteria, and lactobacteria. These microbes all produce undesirable flavors which will ruin the beer if too strong. It is never desirable to have anything except yeasts in your kettle. In the fermentation phase, your job is to seal your kettle at the proper time to keep out the "bad" microbes and allow only the yeasts.
Yeast creates beer by converting the sugars in your brew (glucose and maltose) into alcohol. As a byproduct, the yeast also generates flavors such as Cherry, Orange and Nutmeg -- usually in insignificant quantities. The yeast consumes the vitamins in your brew as it works.
Yeast converts sugar into alcohol on a 1:1 basis. Yeast always converts the glucose first, then the maltose. A yeast will always leave a minimum amount of glucose and maltose unconverted; these amounts are called the "glucose floor" and "maltose floor" and are different for each yeast.
In addition, each yeast has a different "alcohol ceiling" -- a maximum # of sugar which it can convert into alcohol.
Example: Yeast-17 has a glucose floor of 13, maltose floor of 37, and alcohol ceiling of 992. A brewer is using Y-17 to make a beer, using 50 honey and 50 medium malt. Total sugars in the brew: 600 glucose, 500 maltose. During fermentation, Y-17 will first convert 587 glucose into 587 alcohol (leaving 13 glucose). It will then work on the maltose, converting 405 maltose into 405 alcohol (leaving 95 maltose), where it stops because it has now created 992 alcohol.
Finally, a yeast consumes vitamins as it works. If the vitamin level reaches a certain floor (which, again, varies by yeast), the yeast will stop converting sugar into alcohol, no matter how much sugar it has to work with.
To summarize, each yeast has the following attributes:
A sealed kettle which contains a single yeast may be modelled as follows:
In other words, the yeast will produce alcohol until one of three things happens: It runs out of sugars, it runs out of vitamins, or it produces as much alcohol as its alcohol ceiling. Yeasts will always convert glucose in preference to maltose.
Kettles which contain multiple microbes are not fully understood. The output of such a kettle is based on a combination of all active microbes in the kettle, and appears to be a function of the entry times of the individual microbes. If all beers are brewed to always hit the alcohol ceiling, a compound yeast can be approximated to behave like a single yeast. (i.e. you can determine the attributes listed above and use them to craft beers).
You can collect your finished brew anytime after the end of the fermentation phase. You must be carrying a small barrel to do this. When you keg your brew, you will receive data on its attributes -- you will never know for sure how your brew turned out until you try to keg it. If your brew is undrinkable for some reason, it will automatically be thrown out. If your beer was successful, it will be stored in the barrel and you will have the option to name your beer.
When you keg a beer, you will be shown the levels of the various attributes as well as the final flavor. The attributes are:
A beer may have the following qualities:
Each flavor in the beer (cherry, nutmeg, etc.) may be "bold", "noticeable", or just a "hint". A flavor that is very strong can drown out a weaker flavor; if you have 1000 honey flavor and 200 barley flavor, the barley will not appear. A flavor is drowned out if it is less than a certain percentage of the most powerful flavor in the beer; the exact percentage is unknown.
If three or more flavors can be detected in a beer, it will have "muddled flavor", and none of the flavors will apply. Muddled flavours may also occur for flavour levels that are "too close", even if some or all of them are undetectable individually. A third flavor being 55% of the level of the 2nd highest flavor was enough to make muddled.
Unsuccessful Brews: Not all brews become drinkable beer. There are many situations which will cause a brew to fail:
Forthcoming.
Here is a brief guide for those who are new to beer brewing:
--Petri Dish Testing
Beer requires yeast, and the yeasts found in an area are entirely location-based. Therefore, if you are a first-time brewer, your first step is to find a kettle location where one or more useful yeasts predominate. This is done by performing a test brew using no ingredients (other than water), and then checking the microorganism list when you go to keg it. This method is sometimes called "petri-dishing".
To check microorganisms in a spot, you need only a kettle, a small barrel, 25 jugs of water, and 60 wood. No malt or honey is used, since you're not actually trying to brew a successful beer at this stage. To save time, there is a useful kettle option -- "Yeast Test" -- which is designed specifically for petri-dishing; it is simply the standard beermaking recipe with the brewing phase skipped. Simply start the process and come back in two hours (or 40 minutes if you have Quick Brewing).
When you check the result, you will naturally be told that your all-water "brew" is nothing but Nonalcoholic Soup, but all you are interested in is the microorganism list at the bottom, which will look something like this:
Yeast-80 Mold-7 Yeast-41 Yeast-16 Yeast-18 Lactobacillus-69 Yeast-27
The important factor here is the microbe that is listed first, because that is the dominant microbe in this particular spot. If the first microbe on the list is a yeast (as in the example above), congratulations! If the first microbe is a Lactobacillus, Acetobacillus, or Mold, this spot is no good for brewing -- pick up the kettle and do a yeast test at another site.
(Obviously, since yeast testing takes time, it's very efficient to test many kettles simultaneously. Space out your kettles over 20 coords or so in a line or grid pattern.)
Isolating yeast: Once you have tracked down a kettle spot where yeast is listed first, your next task is to determine when the yeast enters the kettle, so that you can seal your kettle to allow only that yeast. (It's perfectly OK, and often useful, to have multiple yeasts in a brew. If the first two or three microbes listed are all yeasts, you can choose to seal at a time to allow them all in. The important thing is to keep out the three types of "bad" microbe.)
Each microbe enters your kettle at a particular time during fermentation; they are listed in the order in which they appear. Sealing your kettle keeps out any microbes that have a later "entry time". Thus, your goal is to perform more yeast tests (again, using nothing but water) to discover a kettle-sealing time that permits only the yeasts you want.
This may take several tries, and you will have to use trial and error. In some locations, the first yeast enters the kettle very early (with as many as 6400 seconds to go in the fermentation phase); in others, the first yeast enters much later (with as few as 2800 seconds, perhaps). Try sealing at 3600 seconds (or 1200 with Quick Brewing), and work from there. If your microbe list is still too long, seal earlier next time. If you get "No Microorganisms", you sealed too early; try a later time. Eventually you'll hit the right time.
The good news is that microbe distribution and entry times are fixed, and do not change over time. Once you find a yeast site and have worked out the proper seal time, it will always work for that particular kettle location.
Having isolated your yeast, you can now begin brewing with ingredients to create actual beer. It is important to know which yeasts will produce good flavor and drinkable beer, as each one has very different behavior and will make various amounts of alcohol and different flavors. For a complete list of yeasts see here. Some useful flavored yeasts are listed below:
For more info, please see Huldo's excellent beer page: http://www.frmug.org/~archer/atitd/beer.html
And Shakey's Beer Calculator is a very useful tool: http://www.so-sad.com/atitd/beerCalc.php
Tamutnefret also has a beer spreadsheet in testing stage: http://atitd.little-possums.net/beer-calc.xls
(See also: Beer Recipes, Beer Spots, Yeasts)