BREWING YOUR OWN BEER: WHAT YOU NEED TO GET STARTED

So you want to make your own beer. How hard could it be, right? Really, it’s not that hard, and I’ll have a nice home beer brewing equipment for you soon that outlines every aspect of the process.

Before you get all fired up about it, though, let me be the voice of reason and point out that you’re going to have to spend a pretty nice chunk of change before you can even make your first batch.

While the actual process of brewing is simple, it is pretty time consuming, and when you first get started, there is quite the long list of equipment and ingredients that first need to be bought.

Not all of these are cheap, either, but after your initial investment, the home brewing process is actually much more affordable than buying beer at the store. Let’s take a look at what all you’ll need to get ready to brew.

Every single article or guide that I have read is sure to emphasize this one key point: sanitize like a maniac. Every item that will have even the slightest contact with your beer at any phase of the brewing process needs to be as clean as you can get it.

You can, of course, use a mixture of bleach and hot water to soak everything, and then rinse everything thoroughly. This can add additional time to the process that you don’t necessarily have to spend.

Many sanitizers do not require rinsing and most are on the inexpensive side, costing less than $5 on average and up to $15 for a large container. One package or bottle will last you through many brewing sessions, so they are a fantastic deal. I would definitely make the small investment in a good no-rinse sanitizer if I was planning to brew on a regular basis.

I suppose that you could use any old stock pot for making your wort, but I wouldn’t recommend it. First, when you’re boiling your wort (pronounced wert- see my guide to beer for more on that), you will need plenty of extra room to avoid overflowing the pot.

Most home beer recipes make five gallons, so you need at least an 8 gallon pot to have enough additional space during the boiling process. This is not your average-size stock pot.

Additionally, brew kettles are made specifically for making beer (obviously), which means that they have nice heavy bottoms for even heat distribution.

You can also get them with built-in temperature gauges to easily keep an eye on that, which is really important for the step that follows the boil- adding the yeast (if you add it when the wort is too hot, it kills the yeast, and dead yeast=no beer).

You can even get a kettle with a built-in spigot, which will come in super handy. These two features cost more, but even a basic kettle will be a bit pricey, with the price climbing upwards for the extra features and larger sizes.

Known in the beer fermentation equipment as a carboy, a fermentation vessel is simply the place where the wort and yeast are combined and allowed to sit for several days to turn into beer.

Whatever you use for this fermentation process needs to be 100% airtight so that not even one airborne microbe can get in to alter the taste of the batch.

Keep in mind also that you will need at least two containers for this part of the process, because you will siphon the beer out of the first fermentation vessel into a second one after a few days (more on that part of the process in my next article).

A plastic carboy will run you around $30, which isn’t too bad, and these won’t be nearly as heavy to try to move when they are full of liquid as a thick glass fermenter (also referred to as a fermentor).

On the other hand, a good glass carboy will last forever, with proper care and handling, and they start around the same price point.

You can get away with buying a simple food-grade plastic bucket for under $20, but I haven’t seen one that has a gasket on the lid to make for a truly air-tight seal, whereas all the better carboys and other actual fermenters will have a gasket.



HYDROMETER

Before I go into what a hydrometer does and why you need one, we need to talk about gravity. No, I’m not talking about the kind of gravity that keeps your feet on the earth.

I’m talking about specific gravity, which, according to Wikipedia, is “the ratio of the density of a substance to the density (mass of the same unit volume) of a reference substance,” with the substance being your fermenting beer and the reference substance being water.

Specific gravity in beer is important because it’s how you can determine the percentage of alcohol in the final product. When you first start the process, the density of the liquid will be higher, closer to that of plain water.

As the yeast in the fermentation vessel consumes the sugar in the malt and converts the liquid into alcohol, the specific gravity inside the container will drop, because alcohol is considerably denser than water. Once the gravity stops dropping, you know that the yeast has finished its work.

A hydrometer is a device that measures the specific gravity of your brew, so it’s useful for determining the aforementioned readings. Also, by taking the measurement of the final gravity inside the container and subtracting it from the original gravity of the brew, you can determine the percentage of alcohol your product contains.

A hydrometer looks like an oversized, old fashioned, mercury thermometer, and costs around the same amount, so it’s not an expensive tool to buy and is pretty useful to have around. You just don’t want be measuring non-stop during fermentation since you’d be letting air into the container.

You can simply measure before putting on the lid or stopper and then again when you siphon the beer filling machine out for the secondary fermentation that I mentioned before. We recommend this one.