Beginners Guide to Home Brewing
Thinking about getting into home brewing? This article will get you going in the right direction.
Beer making is a rewarding hobby that is easy to start and impossible to stop (uh oh). There are endless things to explore so you’ll never get bored.
What is Beer Anyway?
Although there are as many sub-varieties and styles as there are people in the world, in the very broadest sense beer is a fermented drink made from grain. Usually the grain is malted barley (malt).
To make beer brewers extract sugar from the malt and boil them with water before adding bitter hops to balance the flavour.
This mixture, called wort, is fermented with yeast. So there you have the four main beer ingredients:
- water
- hops
- malt
- yeast
Take a look at this if you want to find out more about these essential ingredients of beer:
Beer Ingredients : The Foundation of Brewing
Home Brewing Options
You may have heard phrases such as all grain, beer kit or extract brewing but are not sure what they all mean.
This explains the difference:
Brewing Beer At Home : An Illustrated Guide To Your Options
Many beginners start with a beer kit. They’re easy to use and require little equipment. But although they produce good beer, they’re not very satisfying.
You can do much better.
It’s actually very easy to start all grain brewing from the beginning, and control every aspect of the beer.
A beer brewed with a kit is one thing, but imagine offering someone a glass of something completely your own creation. The recipe, the flavour, everything.
How To Make Your Own Beer (The Satisfying And Easy Way)
When you’re ready for more detail, these two photographic guides explain the two big tasks: brewing and bottling. With these two pages alone you can brew a beer:
Brew In A Bag : A Simple and Complete Illustrated Guide
In this you’ll see:
- My preferred brewing method
- The equipment you need
- How to sanitise
- A complete step-by-step guide to brew day
Bottling Beer : An Illustrated Guide to Bottling Day
This teaches you:
- Which bottles are suitable
- Priming (adding extra sugar so that the beer comes out fizzy and with a good head of foam)
- Cleaning and sanitising
- Siphoning the beer into bottles
- Storage of beer
Before doing anything else, run through those guides and brew some beer.
After two or three batches everything will be much clearer and you’ll get more from the rest of the Home Brew Manual.
You’ll also be super motivated after tasting how good your beer is.
What Next?
When you’re looking to expand your brewing, you can find recipe ideas here:
Advice and instructions for other areas of brewing including beer recipe design, yeast harvesting and more can be found in the archives.
Explore them here:
I’m always adding new brewing guides and information to the site. To stay up to date just enter your email below:
If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment on one of the posts.
Thanks for reading this far, and happy brewing.
Cheers!
