Make your own damn beer

There is nothing quite like catching a buzz from homebrew you cooked up in your kitchen and then stored in a cool dark closet for a couple of weeks. Here is how to get started on making beer at home.

There are some basic pieces of equipment that are necessary to make your first batch. Your first batch will be what we call an extract batch and you’ll buy a recipe kit from a homebrew shop. This is the simplest and least expensive way to get into brewing. You will do some boiling, mixing of ingredients, chill the hot liquid down to room temperature and then add some yeast to ferment the liquid and make alcohol. Making beer at home is as simple as that. The active time in the kitchen is around three to four hours. You’ll then watch the CO2 bubbles for two weeks in the fermenter and then a couple more weeks of magic in the bottle while it carbonates. You’ll be sampling your new hobby in less than a month. A normal batch is five gallons which translates to about two cases of beer.

Make beer at home

Here’s what you’ll need to get started:

1. A (minimum) five gallon pot preferably of the stainless steel variety, if you have a 7.5 gallon pot that would be best but at a minimum we need to be able to get two to three gallons of water in a pot and then add the the ingredients to perform a partial boil. More on that later.
2. Two cases (24 per case) of 12oz, brown bottles. The kind that require a bottle opener, not the twist type. You can use bigger bottles, too, if that is what you have.
3. A starter homebrewery system
4. An extract recipe kit

There will be many options when you go online (or to your local homebrew shop). I’ll walk you through the best place to start.

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I would start with this basic Home Brewing Kit from MoreBeer! This will get you all of the equipment you need to get started.

If you don’t have any bottles laying around or you don’t want to scrape off the labels and clean them, I would recommend getting two cases of bottles. You’ll be able to reuse these for future batches. Buying bottles also reduces the risk of contamination and an unpleasant first experience.

Lastly, you need to figure out what kind of beer you want to make. Take a look at this list of extract kits. There are varying degrees of complexity here. We’re going to stick to an ale as a lager beer will require a lower fermentation temperature than you probably have at the moment. Maybe stick with English or American style beers for now. Pale Ale, Amber, Porter, Stouts are good places to start.

Order your extract beer kit

When you figure out which beer will be your maiden batch, there are a couple of options. Here are my recommendations:

1. Select “DME”, this is Dry Malt Extract and is a little easier to deal with for batch one. We can upgrade to Liquid Malt Extract (LME) on a future batch.
2. Yeast. For this batch let’s stick with dry yeast. I’ve had good luck with Fermentis.
3. Grab some Wyeast Yeast Nutrient.
4. The grain bag, hop bag, and sanitizer comes with the Home Brewing Kit so skip those.
5. You will need 4oz of Priming Sugar to carbonate the beer.
6. We talked about bottles, so skip those and the bottle caps are included in your Home Brew Kit.
7. We aren’t making a yeast starter so you can skip the Propper Yeast Starter.
8. And lastly, we aren’t kegging yet so no need for a tap handle.

That’ll get you ready for your first day of making beer at home! Check out the resource page for helpful books along your journey.