New to Brewing Beer

Making great beer at home takes very little cash, some time, and not much space. You will use your kitchen for several hours; you will also have some cleanup to do. There will be a fascinating week or so of fermentation, as the yeast goes through its life cycle; then another week or so of bottle-conditioning time. You will then have the opportunity to serve the Finest Beer in the World to your friends and family.

By following the steps in this article, you’ll make a batch of all-malt ale and bottle it.

I Already Know What Beer Is!

Start by defining beer as a fermented, alcohol-containing beverage made from just four ingredients:

Water. Tap water contains different components in different parts of the world, but what comes out of your tap will be fine unless you have extreme mineral or chemical content. Some famous brewing water has very high mineral content.

Malt. Cereal grain (usually barley, but wheat and rye are other cereal grains) that is moistened will germinate and begin to sprout. The starch in the grain – food for the baby plant – becomes “activated” at this time. But if you dry the grain to stop the sprouting, you have made malt. Malt, germinated then dried, is the heart of beer. It provides food for the yeast (maltose, a sugar); it lends body and color to the beer; and it provides the satisfying, nutty, grain flavor in beer. For this first batch of beer, you will avoid using non-malt fermentables such as corn, rice, or sugar and stick with the basics.

Hops. These flowers are the spice of the beer. Pleasant bitter flavors and herbal aromas come from hops. Think of them in beer as the oregano in spaghetti sauce; while the tomato might be the heart of the sauce, it just wouldn’t be the same without seasoning. Malt flavors alone in beer would be far less interesting and sometimes even cloying without snappy hops to balance the rich sweetness of malt.

Yeast. The magic ingredient in beer is a single-celled organism (actually many millions of them per batch) that eats sugar, multiplies, and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide as waste products. The most elusive flavors in beer seem to be the ones produced by the yeast during the process of fermentation. Belgian ales and German hefeweizens are notably flavored by their specific varieties of yeast.

Items You Will Need

You will need a few items that you might not already have in your kitchen. You can find these items at your local homebrew shop or in a catalog:

• Stainless steel brewkettle. Anything less than four gallons will be frustrating due to boilovers or scorching. You will want a top for it if possible. This is a good thrift-store item.
• Five-gallon glass carboy and five-gallon (or larger) food-grade plastic bucket, or two plastic buckets. You will use these as a fermenter and bottling vessel. If you choose a carboy, you’ll need a #7 drilled rubber stopper; if you go for two buckets, you’ll need a lid for one of them with a hole drilled for the airlock.
• An airlock. This allows carbon dioxide produced during fermentation to escape from your fermenter.
• A racking cane (rigid plastic) and 6 feet of vinyl siphon hose that fits over the end of the cane.
• Two cases of clean, non-twist-top beer bottles.
• A bottle capper and a package of crown caps.
• Two cans of unhopped, liquid malt extract (total weight 5.5 to seven pounds); or a five- to seven-pound bulk purchase of malt extract. Choose light, amber, or dark according to your taste.
• Two ounces of hops with alpha-acid levels between 4 percent and 8 percent. Choose pellets or “leaf” (whole flower) hops, but pick one that has a cool-sounding name and is as green as possible. Yellowed hops might be old or losing some flavor.
• A package of ale yeast. Dry yeast, rather than a liquid culture, is fine for this first batch.
• 2/3 cup of dextrose, also known as corn sugar, to use at bottling time.
• Chlorine bleach, for use as a sanitizer.

Around your kitchen you might find a few other items that will make your mission more fun or easier: a measuring cup, a large spoon for stirring, a large funnel (if fermenting in a carboy), and a large strainer (if using leaf hops).