Lots of people start homebrewing with the idea that they are going to "save money on beer" and then end up spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars over a few years on equipment. This is a guide on how to make great beer without all the expensive equipment.
First things first, it's not difficult to brew good beer. The real difficulty is brewing the exact same beer again, which really boils down to consistency in your process and temperature management. In any event, that's a problem for commercial brewers but no big deal for home brewers - a little bit of variance is just fine.
The general process is like so:
- Heat up water
- Soak the grain in water to extract the sugars (called mashing)
- Boil the resulting liquid (called wort) along with hops
- Cool the wort down to about room temperature while keeping bacteria out
- Move it to a container, add yeast and wait 3 weeks while the yeast convert the sugar into alcohol
- Add a little more sugar and put it in bottles and cap them
- Wait two weeks while the yeast convert that sugar, making CO2 that carbonates the beer
The method used here is Brew In A Bag (BIAB). Traditionally, mashing is done in a converted ice chest, but that stuff is expensive, complicated, messy and completely unnecessary. Instead you are going to buy a giant mesh bag for $6 and steep it in your boil pot like a giant teabag. You can also buy malt extract where they've done the mashing for you and you just add water, but doing it from grain has a much lower per batch cost and the quality is better.
Equipment required:
Tamale steamer, as big as you can find. Mine is 52 quart. 32 quart would work fine too, but if you can find a giant one, get it. Head down to your local Mexican grocery store in the US and they should have some for $20-$35. Don't buy the one for $60 on Amazon, it's too expensive. It's going to be thin metal, but it doesn't matter. I've moved mine with 10 gallons of liquid and it holds up fine. The key is that it has a false bottom to keep your mesh bag from contacting the actual bottom of the pot.
Two brew buckets and one lid. Any clean, unscratched food safe bucket with a lid can be used, but the brew store will have one with a predrilled hole in the lid. One of the buckets should have a spigot at the bottom, it will probably be called a bottling bucket. I think they cost about $20 each.
Large grain bag. Should be about $5.
4 feet of clear plastic tubing that fits snugly in the hole on your fermenting bucket. Available at your hardware store.
6 feet of 5/16" ID clear plastic hose
A vase, jar, pitcher, etc that can fit the end of the big tube. Free from around your house.
Thermometer. A meat thermometer can work if you have it, a long probe is best. Floating thermometers are fine too, candy thermometers do in a pinch, but I hate glass as you'll break it eventually. A digital, waterproof thermometer ($10) works best because it reads the temperature quickly so your hand doesn't burn over the hot water. You can also rig something up with a yardstick, a string and some kind of clip on weight to dangle a meat thermometer the right distance, or if the water is the right depth you could probably clip it on the side.
Bottle of StarSan. $12.
Clean spray bottle never used for cleaning products. $1
Auto siphon 3/8" - $10
Bottling wand - $3
Wing bottle capper - $16 (the ones with metal gears are a little better, but mine with plastic gears is holding up just fine)
PBW by Five Star or other brewing cleaner - $12
New sponge
A big spoon - free around the house.
Beer bottles. Twist-offs won't work. 22oz bottles are often used because it's half the work to put the caps on. You can buy new bottles at the brew store, or you can rinse out existing bottles. Some bottles have paper labels that come off easily when soaked in hot water if you care. When you drink a beer, immediately rinse the bottle using warm to hot water. I find that putting some water in the bottom, capping it with my finger and shaking is all the cleaning you need if you do it three times. You can look inside to see if it got everything. You'll sanitize them later, but you need all the gunk out. They sell bottle brushes too, but if you rinse immediately you won't need it.
Equipment highly, highly recommended but skippable if you are flat broke:
Three piece airlock with stopper - $5
Hydrometer - $10
Adhesive thermometer - $1
A second fermenting bucket so that you can have two batches fermenting at the same time.
Second sponge
Membership to your local homebrew club
Optional equipment:
Plastic Hydrometer jar - $7
A big propane burner. It makes the process a lot quicker. Turkey fryers can be used or the big burners used for crawfish boils and pozole.
An immersion chiller. Cools your wort in place, wastes water. Also kinda expensive at $50. Possibly a good purchase down the road if you like brewing.
Consumable items:
Bottle caps.
Priming sugar. You can use table sugar in a pinch.
Grain called for in your recipe. The base grain will be 2-Row, its cheapest in 50 lb bags. However, you have to grind the grains to use them and you probably don't have a grinder. Your local homebrew shop will probably have some way around that - they might let you bring your bag of grain back and grind it later if you bought it there. If they are really cool like mine, they let you buy a card that costs the same as a 50-lb bag and then they just check off the lbs as you use them. The specialty grains you can just buy per lb at the store.
Hops called for in your recipe. For now, buy just the amount you need at your local homebrew store
Yeast from a packet. Check the expiration date, the dry yeast has twice the cell count as the liquid yeasts. We aren't doing a starter, so it matters. Safale US-05 / WLP001 is a common strain that's good to start with.
Books:
How to Brew - for free on the internet at http://howtobrew.com/
Recommended first brew:
Centennial Blonde - subsitute the above yeast. http://ift.tt/1DvvNPN
A few tips about the process that will make things much, much easier:
When you mash, use the full volume of water that you'll be using in the recipe (or as much that fits in your pot with some of space). If you are doing this stovetop, use as much water as you can heat in a reasonable time period and add bottled (or previously boiled, sealed and cooled water). More water in the mash means more consistent temperatures. If the temperature drops, you can add heat to bring it back up. Just keep in mind that the temperature will lag a bit and you'll need to move the water around to get even temps everywhere. I cut the heat at 2 degrees below where I want to be. You heat the water up to 2 degrees above the mash temp, put the bag in the water and open the top, then pour in the grain while stirring. Easiest with a helper.
You can move the grains every 15 minutes or so by just stirring it. When it comes time to stop mashing, you just pick the whole thing up, let it drain a few seconds and stick the bag in a bucket. It will be heavy and hot, a step ladder might be helpful if you are doing it on the stove.
Try to avoid moving the pot full of hot liquid if possible. In fact, try to organize your brew process around moving the pot as little as possible. I fill my pot with water where it stands, mash there, boil there, cool it there and then move the liquid with the auto siphon. There's no point where it's full of liquid and on the move (it's much easier to move a bucket). Of course I also have an immersion chiller and you won't at first, but you can let it just sit there and cool for an hour before you take it to an ice bath.
There are multiple ways to cool the wort. The expensive and typical method is to get an immersion chiller and run cold water through it (use the runoff to fill a rain barrel or something). If you have a pool, you can pick up the whole pot and put it on a step in your pool. You can also use one of the big tubs with the rope handles and a bag of ice from the store. If you are doing it cheap and have room in your freezer, you could prestore ice so you don't need to buy it. Finally the cheapest run cost method and one that works well with partial boils on the stovetop is to boil a couple gallons of water and freeze it in a container with a lid that allows you to remove the ice. You can put the sanitized ice block directly in your bucket and then pour the hot wort over to cool it. If you keep track, you can figure out the right wort to ice ratio that results in the right temperature for pitching yeast almost immediately. Lastly, you can stick it in the bucket warm let it cool down on it's own over 24 hours (which may have some affect on your beer).
Yeast is part of your runtime cost, but you can use the yeast up to 5 times. Start with your lightest and least hoppy beers and end with your IPAs and Porters. My typical frugal cycle goes like so - pitch one packet of dry yeast into a low alcohol beer like the Centennial Blonde above. Give it two weeks to ferment. Start another brew day, transfer the first beer to a second bucket. Once it's cool, poor the new wort over the old yeast cake. That gets you 5 batches from the same yeast packet. You can also do yeast washing after the first batch and keep them in your fridge to expand that to 17 batches per yeast packet.
For an airlock, you'll take the big hose you bought, sanitize it, and run it to a vase or pitcher full of starsan. That keeps it from getting gunked up if you have a vigorous fermentation. After things settle down you can swap it out for the 3 piece airlock. If you are broke, just leave the big hose.
Hops can be bought online for cheaper than your local homebrew store but you have to buy a full pound (which is a lot). If your homebrew store is a good one, they'll let you buy just what you need which is perfect for the hops you don't use all the time. After you get going and figure out what you use, you can get the commonly used ones online and keep them in your freezer.
Your local homebrew store may not be as cheap as online, but many provide useful advice and guidance. You'll need them to stay in business to have access to the grains, hops and yeast you need, plus they'll know about local clubs and some might offer a free or cheap brew class. If it's a $1 more at the homebrew shop, I go ahead and get it there. I do guarantee you that you don't anything beyond what I've listed (unless I forgot something) to make good beer.
The homebrew club is a great resource. Ask if someone can do a demo brew with you or help you with your first brew day. They'll help you troubleshoot flaws in your beer and maybe there will be someone quitting and you can inherit their gear. They have events where everyone brings a beer and tries everyone else's and the cost of admission is a beer you made. Can't beat that!
Your first brew day will be chaos. You'll probably forget some things and need to run to the store. Don't get stressed out, don't panic, don't yell at your SO, your beer will turn out just fine so long as you sanitized things. The second brew will go much more smoothly and by the third your process will be pretty much hammered out. It's also probably not going to start bubbling for 24-48 hours. You didn't ruin it, just wait. Relax and have a homebrew.
Measure, keep notes and record your process! I recommend this brew sheet: http://ift.tt/2qkgnZP It's a big help if you want to brew that beer again or when you are trying to fix a problem with your beer.
Temperature control - temperature while fermenting is critical. I use the party bucket with rope handles, put it on top of a towel and put some water in the bottom, then use ice to keep it the right temperature. I put an old T-shirt over it, and keep it wet, the evaporation helps keep it chilled. I got some ice packs so I can just rotate them out of the freezer (water bottles would work just as well). It's more of an issue during the first few days of fermenting. If you've got a cool corner of the house or a basement, that really helps. If you've got someone that can throw in some ice at noon while you are at work, that helps too. I've always been able to achieve tolerable temperature control with just ice packs and evaporative cooling. If your ambient temperature is too high for that, Belgian style beers brew at higher temps.
If I've forgotten anything absolutely essential to making beer, put it in the comments so I can add it.
Submitted April 27, 2017 at 03:36PM by enfier http://ift.tt/2pr0aEO
