How to Homebrew

Home brewing is much like riding a bike, once you learn how to do it you will never forget. You will feel as accomplished after tasting your first homebrew as you did the day you first felt the wind blow through your hair while riding on 2 wheels instead of three. Just like riding a bike seems complicated to someone who has never done it, home brewing can be intimidating and many people are turned away at the thought of how complicated it could be. I’m here to urge you to persevere through the uncertainty and to try it! If you can, being able to watch someone go through all the steps first will help tremendously, having any exposure to the process will help you to understand it more when it comes your turn to try.

Like I mentioned in my “About Me” section, I have watched my boyfriend homebrew for about a year now. I never would have considered home brewing myself, first because I didn’t really know it was an option and second because I wouldn’t have known what to do, but after watching him the first couple times he homebrewed, I was comfortable enough with the process to step in and take over some of the steps. I have still not gone through all the steps by myself, but I am confident that if I had to do all the steps by myself, I would be successful.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind before you homebrew on your own for your first time. These simple pointers will make the process easier and will guarantee a tasty brew each time.

• First of all, it is important to read all the way through the recipe before beginning the process. This may seem obvious, but sometimes when you are eager to start, it is easy to overlook an item that was hidden inside the recipe. Once you have read it through, make sure you have all the ingredients on hand and that you are ready to go. (If you find a recipe on the internet you would like to try, you can bring it into the homebrew shops in town and they can help you pick out the ingredients or if they don’t have some ingredients on the list they can help you to substitute so that the taste will fit your palate.
• Second, as Ashton Lewis says in his book The Home Brewer’s Answer Book: Solutions to Every Problem, Answers to Every Question, “While cleaning and sanitizing are not difficult, their importance cannot be stressed enough,” so, always remember to sanitize your equipment – especially the fermenter. Many home brewing kits have a simple sanitizer you can use to insure all your equipment is clean and ready to use before every batch you brew. Lewis reminds his readers that “some beginners struggle with this because they approach brewing like cooking” and while “there are many similarities; good beer requires that cleaning be kicked up a notch!”
• Third, it is important to have patience in the brewing process and to focus on the task at hand and worry about the next step after you finish the first. Lewis admits that some of his “early homebrews were really awful because [he] tried to get too fancy too quickly” but he advises that “as with most things, practice makes perfect, and adding complexity only makes sense after mastering the basics.”
• Lastly, relax and have fun! Take a deep breath, follow the recipe, and you will end up with a great brew. Then you can enjoy the fabulous taste and share with your friends and family.

What’s in Beer, Anyway?

Maybe you have seen on some beer labels the kind of hops that are in a type of New Belgium beer, but you can’t quite pick out what flavor it adds. All beers, whether they are homebrewed or commercially produced, are made with the same four basic ingredien ts.

1. Water makes up more than 90% of beer. For home brewing purposes, tap water is fine to brew with unless there is extreme mineral or chemical content.
2. Malt, or as Lewis refers to it, “the backbone of beer flavor,” comes from cereal grain (usually barley, but wheat and rye are other cereal grains that can be used) that is moistened, germinated then dried. It provides food for the yeast, gives its body and color to the beer, and provides the satisfying, nutty, grain flavor in beer. Aston Lewis explains in his book The Home Brewers’ Answer Book: Solutions to Every Problem, Answers to Every Question that beers produced with “pale malts have a sweet, grainy flavor with a touch of toastiness” whereas “beers that have special malts such as crystal, Munich, and roasted malts, take on richer flavors of caramel, nuts, chocolate, and coffee from these darker malts.”
3. Hops are a type of flower that are the spice of the beer, balancing the rich sweetness of the malt. Lewis states that hops “give beer its pleasant bitterness” and they also “contain a whole multitude of aromatic oils that impart floral, citrus, piney, and perfumelike aromas to beer.”
4. Yeast is the magic ingredient in beer, a single-celled organism (many millions of them per batch) that eats sugar, multiplies, and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide as waste products. As Lewis explains it, the yeast “transforms the syrupy sweet, hopped wort into beer” and it even adds flavors such as “fruity esters, spicy higher alcohols” as well as “the clove, banana, and bubble gum aromas associated with hefe-weizens.”  Belgian ales and German hefe-weizens are notably flavored by their specific varieties of yeast. Lewis adds that in unfiltered beers (such as homebrews) “the yeast adds a breadlike aroma and flavor”.

According to http://www.alabev.com/ingredie.htm, a website that discusses the ingredients of beer, “some beer styles are “spiced” with ingredients such as coriander, curacao, all-spice and others” like juniper berry, orange/lemon peel, and lemon grass.

The website listed above also explains that in commercially produced beers”Adjuncts, other ingredients such as rice or corn, can be used to “extend” the ingredients imparting a “clean” to “no taste” and providing the beer with longer shelf life.”

Step-by-Step Procedure

There are many resources online that you can use to follow a step-by-step procedure when home brewing.  Because I am not an active home brewer, I can not explain every step of home brewing like the experts can, so I will leave that up to them in order to present you with the best information.

There are many resources online that you can use to follow a step-by-step procedure when home brewing.  Because I am not an active home brewer, I can not explain every step of home brewing like the experts can, so I will leave that up to them in order to present you with the best information.

First of all, the website of Hops and Berries, a homebrew shop in town that I have mentioned,  (http://www.hopsandberries.com/instructions.html) gives a very good overview of the equipment needed, how to sanitize to get good beer and each step in brewing, fermenting and bottling. Here is what the experts at Hops and Berries suggest to you, the new homebrewer! All credit for this information is given to Hops and Berries.

EQUIPMENT NEEDED

Boil:	2.5 gallon or larger stainless steel kettle (not aluminum)
Primary Fermentation:	Bucket or Carboy with airlock (6 gallon recommended) Adhesive or other thermometer Hydrometer (Optional)
Racking/Bottling:	Racking Cane Tubing
Bottling:	Bottling bucket or other bucket or carboy Springless filler Bottles (2 cases, 48 bottles for 5 gallons) Bottle Caps Capper

SANITATION/CLEANLINESS

Sanitation, while not an ingredient of beer, is one of the keys to good brewing. Wild microbes can spoil the beer very easily. Infection will cause off flavors (ranging from medicinal/solvent to extremely sour). Every piece of equipment that touches the beer after the boil should be cleaned and sanitized thoroughly. Several non-rinse sanitizers are available that will effectively sanitize brewing equipment in two minutes without imparting any residual flavor to the beer (Star-San and Iodophor are the two most popular). Bleach can also be used as an effective sanitizer; however, care should be taken because residual bleach will affect the flavor of the beer. An effective level of bleach is 2 teaspoons of unscented bleach in 5 gallons of water. At this concentration sanitation will take 30 minutes, but the equipment will not need to be rinsed. A higher concentration of bleach will take less time to sanitize but will need to be rinsed afterwards.

THE BREW DAY

• Assemble all of the equipment needed for the brew:  Kettle, spoon, fermenter, airlock and siphon assembly or funnel.  Go ahead and sanitize everything except the kettle and spoon.
• Look through the recipe and make sure you have all the ingredients and they are prepared (if necessary).   Prepare yeast if necessary: dried yeast takes no preparation, White Labs yeast should be removed from the refrigerator allowed to warm to room temperature during the brew, Wyeast packs need to be activated (follow instructions on back of yeast pack).
• Add water to your brew kettle.  A minimum of 1 ½ – 2 gallons of water is needed, use as much water as possible while still leaving 1-2 gallons of head space in the kettle to help reduce the risk of boil-over.  If the kit does not contain specialty grains skip to next step.  If the kit contains specialty grains, then heat water to near boiling (160°-170° F), turn off heat. Put specialty grains in a muslin bag and tie shut.  Steep the grains in the water for 20 minutes.  Do not boil grains.
• Remove grains.  Add malt extract (if the kit contains both liquid and dried extract, add both) and mix thoroughly.  Make sure extract is completely mixed in, pay careful attention to the bottom of the kettle.  Turn heat back on and bring mixture, now referred to as wort, to a boil.
• As the boil begins the wort can foam significantly and boil-overs are very common.  Keep a close eye on the boil, be prepared to adjust the heat as needed.  Boil-over is also possible while making hop additions.
• At the beginning of the boil start a timer for 60 minutes.  Add hops to the boil at the time specified on the kit inventory.  The time marked next to each hop is a countdown to the end of the boil (for example, if the inventory calls for 1 oz. of Cascade hop at 30 minutes, the hops are added 30 minutes before the end of the boil… hops that call to be added at 0 minutes are added immediately after the boil has stopped and allowed to steep in the hot wort until it cools). Any spices should be added at times indicated on the kit inventory.
• At the end of boil, cool the wort to fermentation temperature as quickly as possible by placing the kettle in a sink of cold water (ice added to the water speeds this up).  Rapidly cooling the wort reduces the risk of bacterial contamination and aids in precipitating haze causing proteins out of the beer.
• Once the wort is cooled, transfer to sanitized fermenter by either pouring or siphoning.  Leave as much of the hop sludge (trub) in the kettle as possible.  Bring volume to 5 gallons using filtered tap water.  Take a hydrometer reading, record it for comparison with final gravity.
• Verify that the wort is at the desired fermentation temperature then add yeast and place an airlock filled with clean tap water on the fermenter.  Dried yeast should be sprinkled on the surface of the wort and allowed to hydrate for 5 minutes.  Shake fermenter vigorously to introduce as much oxygen as possible.

FERMENTING

• Place fermenter in an area that stays a similar temperature to the optimum fermentation temperature indicated on the kit inventory.  Avoid areas that receive direct sunlight.  Signs of fermentation (foaming and bubbling through the airlock) should be visible in 24-36 hours.  If bubbling through the airlock is not evident, check the seal on the fermenter.
• Depending on the recipe, fermentation should be very active for 3-5 days at which point activity will slow.  Some recipes, particularly stronger beers, will remain very active for a longer period of time.
• Let fermentation continue until the airlock bubbles less than once a minute or the gravity does not change from one day to the next (approximately 10-14 days).
• At this point the beer can be bottled or transferred to a secondary fermenter for further aging and clarifying.

BOTTLING

• Before bottling, sanitize every piece of equipment that will touch the beer (bottling bucket, siphon assembly, bottle filler, bottles and caps).  You will need approximately 48 x 12 oz beer bottles or 26 x 22 oz bottles and the appropriate number of caps.
• Bring one pint of water to a boil, add priming sugar and boil for 5 minutes.
• Pour priming sugar into bottling bucket.
• If the kit contains fruit extract, add it to the bottling bucket also.
• Siphon beer into bottling bucket, be careful not to splash the beer.  Any oxygen introduced at this point can lead to premature staling of the beer.
• Attach tubing and bottle filler to spigot and fill bottles.  Fill to the top of the bottle, when the filler is removed, the level of beer should be about ¾ of an inch below the top of the bottle.
• Cap bottle.
• When bottling is complete, place bottles in a dark warm space (70 degrees).

Here are two examples of other websites that also give very simple and easy-to-follow steps.

http://morebeer.com/themes/morewinepro/mmpdfs/mb/GretBeer6Hours.pdf

http://www.byo.com/newbrew