by Greg Dunn

Created on: January 01, 2011

To home brew your own beer there are first a few things you need.  First and foremost, you need to love beer.   With this love, you must have the drive and will power to take drinking and experiencing beer to the next step.  Home brewing allows you to brew it at home with the ultimate goal of making that perfect beer.  The beer that combines appearance, aroma and taste, to give your fellow beer drinkers and yourself a chance to experience the ultimate satisfaction as you lift the glass of beer and have it slide down your throat.   

Beer is basically made up of four ingredients.   Malt, hops, yeast and water.  Malt is the grain that provides color, body and taste of the beer.  It also provides food for the yeast.  Yeast eats the sugar from the grain, converting it to alcohol and carbon dioxide.  Hops are flowers that provide spice in the beer.  They provide aroma and flavor.     Water makes up close to 92-95% of the total ingredients of beer.  The water coming out of your tab is fine in most cases.

Mixing these four ingredients together is not enough to make beer.  You need the proper equipment to do it in.  Since most homebrew recipes are based on producing five gallons of beer, the following equipment listed is based on creating five gallons of beer.  To get started, you will need a large three to five gallon stainless steel pot, a five gallon plastic bottling bucket, a five gallon glass carboy, an airlock and six feet of plastic siphon hose.  In approximately two weeks after fermentation, you will need two cases of bottles, caps and a bottle capper.

The secret to home brewing is cleanliness and sanitation.  You don’t want some of those bad microbes sneaking into your brew, ruining it.  Start out with a clean kitchen and utensils that will come into contact with your brew.  The basics to brewing your brew is you boil malt for approximately an hour.  Add about an ounce of hops to the wort – what the malted liquid is called after it begins to boil –for about ten minutes.

Remove the kettle, quick cool down the wort.  Once cool downed, filter the wort then transfer it to the primary fermenter, the five gallon carboy.  Toss in the yeast and cap it with the airlock.  For approximately the next two weeks, the airlock will be a bubbling as the carbon dioxide is released as the yeast and malt converts

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