Making your own beer is easy. People have been brewing at home for several thousand years, and they did it with much less education and resources than you now possess.
The beer we are going to make is known as an extract beer. It is slightly more complex than beer kits, where you just add water, but it will have a much more refined taste. Plus, it's much easier than mashing your beer the old-fashioned way, and with the quality of ingredients now available, it's hard to tell the difference.
You may discover simpler how-to guides than this, and that's fine. I've decided to err on the side of quality rather than simplicity.
Beginning homebrew kits can be bought from homebrew supply shops for about $40 to $60, but they rarely include all the essential equipment. They are still a good deal, however, because they're cheaper as a package, rather than buying everthing seperate. If your kit doesn't contain all of the items listed below, make sure you pick them up as well. Some items can be found in your kitchen, and others you can borrow from a fellow brewer.
This is a basic recipe for an American style ale. I've left some decisions up to you, so it might end up as a pale ale, and amber ale, or something else. If your beginner's brewing kit includes ingredients (as many do), by all means use it! Just check to see that all the ingredients listed below are included in some variation or another. Above all, get the freshest fixings available.
Three to four days before the big brew day, you need to "smack" your yeast. Read the directions on the smack pack for how to do this. Make sure you shaike it vigorously for several minutes afterwards. Put the smack pack in a cool place, like your pantry, until brew day. By then, the pack will have swollen to about two inches thick. If it hasn't, it probably wasn't fresh enough, so postpone brew day an extra couple of days to give it more time.
On brew day, organize your brewing area. Make sure your equipment is clean. Sanitize your carboy, racking cane, airlock, stopper and siphon tubing. Re-read these directions so that you'll know what to do next at any given time.
If you haven't bought your specialty grains pre-crushed, you'll need to crush them now. Place them on a cutting board, and use a rolling pin to crush them to grit sized pieces. They should not be ground or chopped. Put the crushed grains into your cheesecloth bag.
Set the brewpot on the stove and add four to five gallons of non-chlorinated water, but not so much that it would be apt to boil over. Turn up the heat and put in the bag of grains. Monitor the temperature and move the bag often to prevent scorching. When the temperature is 170 degrees, turn off the heat, cover the pot, and let it sit for ten to twenty minutes. (now is a good time to put your malt syrup in a sink of hot water so it will flow easily during the next step). Pick up the bag, let it drain, then pour two or three cups of hot water over it slowly to rise out all the good stuff.
Bring the brewpot up to a boil and stir in your malt extract. Be sure to stir the bottom of the pot so the extract won't burn. This addition of extract will lower the temperature, so bring it back up to a full rolling boil. Note the time and add one ounce of hops. Keep a close eye on the mixture, because as every experienced brewer can tell you, "an unwatched pot always boils over!"
Forty minutes later, add one-half ounce of hops. Fifteen minutes later add the remaining half ounce of hops.
One hour after you have started the boil (five minutes after the last hops were added), turn off the heat and cover the pot. This is now a critical time for beer. From now on, let nothing that has not been sanitized come in contact with the beer until you drink it.
The 212 degree unfermented beer, called wort, needs to be cooled down to about 70 degrees as fast as possible. Eventually you will purchase a wort-chiller and wonder how you ever lived without one. Until then, here's what to do.
Stick your pot in the sink, or if it doesn't fit, into your bathtub. Fill the sink with water halfway up the pot (more thatn this and you risk the pot tilting over). Open the drain slightly and allow water to run into the sink so that there's a slight flow of cold water running around the brewpot. Add plenty of ice around the pot. When it all melts away, add another quantity of ice. When it melts, the pot should be cool enough. Feel the sides of the pot to make sure. If the temperature only down down to 80 degrees or so, that's fine.
The process of siphoning beer from one container to another is called racking. You now need to rack your beer from the brewpot into a sanitized carboy.
Set the brewpot on a counter with the carboy on the floor below it. Assemble the sanitized racking cane and siphon hose, and fill with clean, sanitary water. Pinch off the end of the hose, stick the end of the racking can into the brewpot all the way to the bottom, and begin siphoning. Don't worry about the dregs left behind in the brewpot when you're done.
If you don't feel like siphoning yet, use a large funnel, and pour the wort into the carboy, but be carefull, it's heavy. It's also a good idea when pouring to use a strainer to strain out whole hops if you used them.
You probably won't have a full five gallons of wort, since a lot of the water evaporated in the boil. Use clean, sanitary water to fill the carboy to the five gallon level.
"Pitch" the Yeast into the carboy by cutting off a corner of the smack pack with scissors and pouring the lot into the wort. If you used dry yeast, it will have to be hydrated first.
Cover the carboy with a piece of sanitized foil and rock it back and forth, splashing the wort around. This is called aerating the wort. Do your rocking on a piece of carpet or cardboard so that the carboy won't chip or break. Keep it up for five minutes at least. It's good exercise.
If you use a five gallon carboy, you will need to use a blow-off tube. If you use a six and a half gallon carboy, assemble your airlock and stopper and fit into the carboy. Make sure that you still have plenty of space between the top of the wort and the neck of the carboy. Fermenting beer will develop a lot of foam, and it's not a pretty site to wake up in the morning to find a third of your beer on the floor. Put your beer in a cool, dark corner or cellar, cover with a towel to keep stray light out, and wait one week. You can watch the airlock while you wait.
If after a week, you still get bubbles through the airlock more often than once every thirty seconds, wait some more until it has slowed down.
It is a good idea to have someone help you bottle. There are a lot of steps in bottling, so it might help to practice first. Develop a good rhythm. A good division of labor is for the brewer to fill the bottles and the helper to cap them.
Clean and sanitize your bottles, caps, siphoning apparatus, bottle filler and bottling bucket. Boil a sauce pan of water with the 3/4 cup of bottling sugar. The sugar solution will give the yeast in the bottles just enough stuff to ferment as to cause carbonation. Cover and let it cool. Put the sugar solution in the bucket and siphon the beer from the carboy into the bucket. Try not to agitate or spash the beer. Gently stir the beer a couple of times to make sure the sugar is well distributed.
Assemble your racking cane and siphon tubing, this time adding the bottle filler to the end of the tubing. The bottle filler will let the beer flow when you gently push down on the tip, and stop the flow when you lift up.
Siphon the beer from the bottling bucket into an empty bottle, cap the bottle, get another empty bottle, repeat.
Put the bottles in a cool dark place, not your fridge, because the yeast still have a little work left to do. The beer will be ready to drink in two weeks (one week if you're desperate). Uncap, pour into your favorite beer glass, leaving the thin layer of yeast behind. Enjoy! It's the best beer you've ever had!
Sanitation does not mean sterilization. Sterilizing your equipment is simply not practical for a home brewer. Sanitizing will get rid of almost all the beer-spoiling microbes on your equipment. Your goal is to make sure your friendly yeast get to your beer before other microscopic beasties can.
Nothing can be sanitized if it is not cleaned first. Bits of grease, grime and scum are perfect places for bacteria to hide from your sanitizer. Clean your countertops. Clean your hands too! Keep flies away from everything.
The three most common sanitizers for homebrewing are campden tablets, chlorine bleach, and iodine sanitizer. Campden tablets are more suited towards wine and mead making and I would advise against using them. If you decide to use chlorine bleach, it must be unscented. Iodine sanitizer is sold under many different brand names. B.T.F. and Iodophor being common brands.
If you use chlorine bleach, add one to two ounces to five gallons of cold water. Sanitize your small equipment in this solution for at least a half of an hour. Then pour your solution into your carboy to sanitize it. Rinse off the solution from your equipment with clean, sanitary water.
If you use iodine sanitizer, mix two ounces into five gallons of water. Let all equipment remain in contact with the solution for at least five minutes. With this type of sanitizer, you can let your equipment air-dry without rinsing.
Starting a siphon is easy, just suck on the end of the tube. But don't do it! You get all of the bacteria in your mouth on the siphon tube where they will find their way into your beer. Starting a sanitary siphon is not much more difficult, however. There are a few siphon-starting gadgets on the market, but they have their drawbacks.
The most basic way to start a siphon is to fill the racking cane and tubing with clean, sanitary water. If you have a bacterial filter on your kitchen faucet, just hold the end of the tube under a stream of water. Otherwise, use one of those tiny funnels that will fit into the tubing, and slowly pour in some bottled water. When the water reaches the end of the racking cane, pinch off the end of the siphon tube. Make sure that there aren't any air bubbles in the line. Put the tip on the racking cane.
Make sure that the bottom of the container you are siphoning from is higher than the top of the container you are siphoning to. Put the end of the racking tube in the first container all the way to the bottom. Put the end of the siphon tubing into the other container, and voila! A siphon.
It is a very good idea to practice this technique with buckets of plain water before you attempt it for the first time on your precious beer.
©David Johnson, Stephen Lowrie, 1997 - 2008
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