How To Brew Beer At Home

Brewing beer is like cooking anything else, use the highest quality ingredients you can find and don't mess with them too much. But first let's talk equipment. Any beginner's brew kit will contain all you need to get started. Food grade plastic buckets, a bottle filler, some tubing and an airlock is all you'll need to start.

An airlock or fermentation lock is probably the only 'specialty' item you'll need. It's often called a bubbler because you fill it with water and wedge it into a hole in the lid of your fermenter. As the yeast creates CO2, it escapes through the water in the lock and bubbles out. Without it, the lid would blow off, creating quite the mess, because of the build up of CO2 gas.

When it comes time to bottle, you have two choices (you could keg it, but that's a bit advanced). I suggest you use either 60-12 oz. bottles and plenty of new unused bottle caps and a bottle capper OR 45-16 oz. Grolsch style beer bottles with the ceramic stoppers and their rubber rings intact.

Less bottles means less opportunity for spills and using the attached ceramic and rubber stoppers means you don't have to buy the capper or loads of caps each time you brew.

Lets' talk about ingredients. Canned malted barely extract is the way to go here, especially if its your first beer. Later, you can get into intermediate steps all the way up to all-grain brewing. We'll stick to the basics, here. You'll need 2 cans of it. They are usually about 3.5 pounds each.

If you barley malt is already hopped - a fine way to go - you don't really need extra hops, but if it is un-hopped, you should have 4 oz. of hops separated into 2 2oz. portions.

The only other ingredients you need are water and yeast. Your tap water should be fine. If it contains a lot of chemicals, you might want to filter it. As for yeast, use ale yeast - not bread yeast - trust me.

Beer Brewing Videos!

The process is simple. First sterilize everything your beer will come in contact with. I use a solution of five gallons of water and 4 or 5 tablespoons of plain, unscented bleach in a bucket and throw everything except the pot which will become sterile in the boil and the capper, caps and bottles. We'll do them later.

Boil the malt in 1.5 - 2 gallons of water for at least fifteen minutes. Don't walk away. Boil over is likely without stirring and monitoring and its a real mess.

Pour 3 gallons of cold water into your fermenting bucket. Add the contents of your brew pot. Wait until the temperature is below 78 degrees Fahrenheit and throw in the yeast.

Put a lid on it - with the airlock - and let it ferment for a week.

Next week boil some corn sugar or dried malt extract with some water and pour into the second, recently sterilized, bucket. Siphon all of the liquid beer off of the spent yeast layer at the bottom into the new bucket, bottle, cap and put away for at least a week. I'm always tempted to try one in three or four days, but they do get better with time.

Check out a complete video tutorial on how to brew great beer at home that's super easy, check out these videos -
Beer Brewing Videos!

How To Brew Beer At Home