How to Home Brew Beer

Brewing beer has been an American tradition since colonial times. Making your own beer isn't hard. In fact, it can be economical and enjoyable. It also lets you stretch both your taste buds and creative muscles.

Part I: The Brewing Process

In this section we will explore the actual brewing process - the mixing and cooking of ingredients.

To brew beer, you'll need a large covered brewing or stock pot. You'll want something large enough to hold three gallons of boiling water without boiling over. Stainless steel pots are great, but pretty much any material will do.

For novice brewers, it's best to start with a beer ingredient kit, which contains all the raw ingredients you'll need to brew your beer. As you get more experience and get more comfortable with the brewing process, you can start experimenting more. Experienced brewers either start with a kit and add their own special ingredients, or work from recipes and collect individual ingredients. Recipes can be found in books, online, or from fellow home brewers. Your local brew store should be able to set you up with the ingredients you need, either in the form of a kit or loose grains. If you don't have a brew store nearby, there are several online outlets for buying brew supplies.

The supplies for brewing beer vary, and often a "starter kit" can be purchased through your local brew supply store. Once you have the equipment, the ingredients to brew a batch of beer will cost you between thirty and fifty dollars, depending on what you're making and where you're buying it. A batch of beer is five gallons, or roughly two cases of 12 ounce bottles.

Beer comes in countless different varieties, most of which you can make at home. Ingredient types and amounts will differ from beer to beer, but all beers are made up of the same three basic ingredients.

Malt comes in either a syrupy extract form, or in a grain or powder form. Whether you use a liquid or powdered malt will depend on you recipe and your personal preference. Malt provides flavor to the beer and is one of the carbohydrates that makes fermentation possible.

Hops, another grain, give beer a distinct bitter flavor. There are several varieties of hops, all of which provide slightly different flavors. For a mild beer, like a wheat beer, only a small amount of hops are used. For something bitterer, like an IPA, a larger variety and quantity of hops are used.

The final ingredient is Yeast. Yeast is not added until the fermentation step, but it has an important job. The yeast consumes sugar - in our beer, provided by the malt and hops. This process has two byproducts - carbon dioxide and alcohol.

To brew your beer, you'll also need some spring water; about six gallons should do it. Use of spring water is highly recommended, as tap water often contains traces of minerals and chemicals that can affect the flavor of your beer.

The specific steps for brewing beer will be found in your kit instructions or recipe. I recently brewed a wheat beer, and will describe the process here. Keep in mind that your beer may have slightly different ingredients, cooking times, or procedures.

If you are using a liquid malt extract, peel the label off the cans, wash them, and soak the cans in hot water, either in a sink or in a pot on the stove. This will soften the extract and make it easier to pour.

Add two gallons of spring water to your brewing pot and bring it to a boil. Turn off the heat. Slowly add the malt extract, stirring until it is completely dissolved. Next, pour in your hops, again stirring until all ingredients are completely dissolved.

Return the mixture to a boil. If it begins to foam, lower the temperature and stir until the foaming subsides. Boil the mixture for twenty to thirty minutes.

The mixture is now unfermented beer, called "wort". You are now ready for the next step, fermentation.

Part II Fermentation

In his section, we'll learn how to guide your homebrew through the process in which it becomes beer, fermentation.

For this step of the beer making process, you will need a five-gallon brewing container, either a glass carboy or a plastic brewing bucket. These and all the other materials we'll use today can be purchased at your local home brew shop. You will also need: a stopper and airlock setup to fit your bucket or carboy, a disinfectant such as bleach or, preferably, a food safe disinfectant, and four gallons of spring water. If you're using a glass carboy, a carboy brush and funnel. You'll also need the wort you made in part one.

The key to this step of the brewing process is cleanliness. You want everything you work with to be sterile, so that no outside contaminants get a chance to affect the taste of your beer. Beer brewed with less than stellar cleanliness has a distinct taste, and it's not a good one. To avoid this sad end to your beer brewing, be diligent about sterilizing everything you use.

First sterilize the inside of your brewing bucket or carboy with water and a little bit of disinfectant. Make sure to rinse thoroughly to remove any residual disinfectant. Sterilize your other equipment in a sink full of hot water and a bit of disinfectant. This will include your funnel, stopper, and airlock.

Using an empty gallon jug, fill your carboy or bucket with 5 gallons of tap water as part of your final rinse. With a piece of tape or a marker, mark the five-gallon line. Discard the tap water before moving on to the next step. This will allow us to brew exactly five gallons of beer, what most recipes call for.

Add three gallons of spring water to your carboy or brewing bucket. Use of spring water is highly recommended, as most tap water has trace amounts of chemicals and minerals that can affect the taste of your beer.

Next, add the wort (unfermented beer) you made in part one to your carboy or brewing bucket. Don't strain the wort as you add it, those little particles floating around in there are important to the fermentation process.

Add enough spring water to fill your carboy or bucket up to the five-gallon line you made earlier. Five gallons of beer should give you roughly 48-52 12-ounce beers.

The next step is to add the yeast. Yeast is the key ingredient for fermentation. Yeast eats the sugars from the malt and hops, and produces two byproducts - carbon dioxide and alcohol. Before you add the yeast, it's important to let your wort cool to below ninety degrees Fahrenheit. Adding the yeast to a wort that's too hot could kill it, and with it, your dreams of making a delicious beer. Once the wort is cool, pour your yeast over the top of your wort, and let it stand for ten minutes, then stir the wort gently to mix the yeast in.

At this point, you will add any extra ingredients your recipe calls for. For example, many IPA recipes call for wood chips to be added at this point in the process. I recently made a wheat beer, and added three sliced lemons at this point in the process to enhance the natural citrus flavor wheat beers exhibit.

The final step is to place your stopper and airlock setup on the top of your carboy or brewing bucket, and fill your airlock about half way with water. Make sure you have a nice tight seal. The airlock is designed to let carbon dioxide from the fermentation process escape, but keeps outside air and contaminants out of your beer.

And that's all there is to it. You will start to notice bubbles in your airlock within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and it should bubble aggressively for a few days. This is normal, and means your yeast is hard at work converting sugars to alcohol. The bubbling will then slow down and stop within a few more days. In about one week, you'll be ready for part three, bottling.

Part III: Bottling

In this section, we'll take the beer we brewed and stewarded through the fermentation process, and bottle it.

At this point, your beer has been fermenting in your brewing bucket or carboy for about a week. It bubbled like crazy for a few days, but now it's pretty quiet. It's time to bottle that beer so it can be enjoyed!

To bottle your beer, you'll need a bottling bucket with a built-in faucet near the bottom. You'll also need a funnel with a filter (or cheesecloth), a bottling wand, some plastic tubing that fits both your bottling wand and the faucet on your bucket, and a capping tool. You'll also need the priming sugar that came with your beer ingredients, and of course your fermented beer. You'll also need a package of at least 50 bottle caps and a bottle cleaning brush. All of the above items can be bought at your local home brew supply store, often in a complete brewing kit.

You'll also need approximately 50 empty 12-ounce beer bottles. You can buy them by the case at your local brew store, or you can save the empties from the beers you're drinking anyway and reuse them. Dark brown bottles work best, as they block out the most light, which can affect your beer's taste. Also, they must be pop-top bottles...twist tops won't work. Soak the bottles overnight in a bucket of warm water and soap or wallpaper remover, then carefully scrape the labels off with a razor blade and a steel wool pad. Clean any residue out of the bottles with the bottle brush, and rinse them thoroughly.

Before you begin, fill your bottling bucket with warm water and a bit of disinfectant (such as bleach) and sterilize the inside of the bucket, your funnel, bottling wand, filter or cheesecloth, and anything else that will come in contract with your beer.

You'll also need to sterilize the empty beer bottles and bottle caps in a sink or bucket. Make sure to rinse everything very well after sterilizing it.

Place the carboy or bottling bucket with your beer on a counter or table, and place your bottling bucket on the floor underneath it. Using the plastic tubing, siphon the beer from the carboy to the bottling bucket through the funnel with the filter or cheesecloth. Leave the last inch or so of beer in the carboy or bottling bucket. You should be able to see a large amount of sentiment in the bottom of your beer, and you don't want that in your bottles. The filter or cheesecloth will catch any stray bits and pieces that go through the siphon.

Next, in a pot on the stove, combine your priming sugar from your ingredient kit and one cup of spring water. Stir the mixture until the sugar is completely dissolved, and bring it to a boil. Turn off the heat, and pour the mixture into your bottling bucket. Priming sugar reactivates the yeast in your beer. The yeast will then consume the sugar and create carbon dioxide and a little bit more alcohol. The extra alcohol is negligible, but the carbon dioxide that is trapped in the bottle creates the carbonation in your beer. Be careful to follow the instructions on this step carefully...adding too much priming sugar can cause your bottles to explode!

Place your bottling bucket on a table or counter, and attach the plastic hosing to the end of the faucet on the bucket. Attach the other end of the tube to your bottling wand. The bottling wand is a great little device that you can buy at your local brew supply store. It is a stiff plastic tub with a small button at the end. When the button is not pressed, the wand holds liquid. When the button is pushed, however, it allows liquid to flow through. This handy device will help you fill bottles with beer in an accurate manner.

Open up the faucet on your bucket so beer flows into the tubing and bottling wand. Now, take an empty beer bottle, place the bottling wand in the bottle, and push the tip of the bottling wand against the bottom of the bottle. Beer will begin to flow and will start to fill your bottle. Lifting the bottling wand up from the bottom of the bottle will stop the flow. To get a perfect fill, let the bottle fill with beer until it is just a very small bit below the top of the bottle, and then remove the bottling wand. The extra room created in the bottle by removing the bottling wand leaves you the perfect amount of air space at the top of your beer (slightly above the beginning of the neck).

To cap your beer, place a sterilized bottle cap on top of your bottle, and place the capping tool on top of the cap. Capping devices come in a variety of types, but all use leverage to press the cap onto the bottle and create a nice seal. Follow the directions that came with your capper.

Repeat the bottling and capping process until the bottling bucket is empty. You should have between 48 and 52 12-ounce beers from your five-gallon batch of beer.

All that's left is to wait. Your beer needs a minimum of two weeks in the bottle to carbonate and for the flavors to mature. Three to four weeks is even better, if you can wait that long.

So, with a week of fermentation, and two or three weeks in the bottle, the complete brewing process takes about a month, with the majority of the work done in two sessions (brewing and prepping for fermentation then bottling).

Once enough time has passed, ice down your home brews, invite a few friends over, and enjoy the beer that YOU made.

Happy Brewing!