Despite what it may seem like, brewing your beer at home is not as challenging as you think. Of course,...
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espite what it may seem like, brewing your beer at home is not as challenging as you think. Of course, you must have some surface-level knowledge about breweries or at least have some experience making stuff before but the steps are quite simple. The process of how to brew beer at home has remained almost the same for millennia. There are a few variations, of course, but for the most part, not much has changed over the years.
Today, we’ll show you a step-by-step deconstruction of the steps you’ll need to take to brew your own beer from the comfort of your home.
Step 1: Gather your equipment
Now, to get started you’re gonna need a ton of equipment. You might think that you’re gonna need large kegs and pipes and tons of expensive equipment that takes up all your space, however, this is not the case. Despite what movies or your crazy uncle’s garage might make you think, the equipment needed to brew your own beer is fairly small and available at most hardware stores.
Here's a list of the supplies you’ll need:
Brewing Kettle
Fermenter + Airlock
Sanitizer
Auto-Siphon
Stir Spoon
Beer Recipe Kit (or individual ingredients)
While these are cheap and quite easily available, you can also go a different route and buy a pre-constructed beer-making kit. There are loads of options available and you can choose one that suits your liking.
Before you even get started with the process, it's important to sanitize your equipment as well as you can. The taste of your beer will be largely dependent on how clean your equipment is so you must make sure every nook and cranny of your equipment is 100 percent clean.
Step 2: Start brewing
Fill your 5-gallon kettle with 2.5 to 2.75 gallons of fresh water. Begin heating the water and soak your grains in it for roughly 20 minutes. After you take out your grains, let the water drip out of them until there’s little water left.
Once the water in your kettle reaches its boiling point, start adding malt extracts to it and turn off the stove.
Next, start adding hops every few minutes to the kettle until you feel you’ve put in enough. Make sure your kettle is not on heat while you do so.
The mixture you have in your kettle now is known as a type of sugar water called wort. What you need to do now is cool the wort, which you can do in one of two ways.
Put the kettle in a sink or tub filled with ice water or ice.
Get a wort chiller and put the chiller in your wort. Keep adding cold water to cool down your wort.
Step 3: Begin Fermentation
Make sure you’ve cleaned your fermenter thoroughly.
Begin pouring your cooled wort into the fermenter.
Add cold water to the fermenter until there are 5 gallons of liquid in it.
Grab a ladle or any long utensil and start mixing and splashing around your mixture. This will aerate your mixture and speed up the process.
Next, add dry yeast( dry yeast is pre-prepared and can be added as is) to the mixture in the fermenter.
Lastly, seal your fermenter to complete the process. You can also add a fermenter airlock if you have one. Store the fermenter in a cool dry place until the fermentation has completed.
Step 4: Storage
The fermentation process can take anywhere from 2 to 3 weeks to completely finish.
After this is done, your beer will be ready and the only thing left to do will be to store it. A 5-gallon wort will yield around 4 to 4.5 gallons of beer once fermentation finishes.
The most common and obvious way to store your beer is to bottle it. This yield will lead to about 6 250ml bottles of beer. Here’s how you can transfer your beer to the bottles.
Clean your bottles thoroughly.
Boil priming sugar in about half a liter of water and add to your bottling bucket.
Siphon the beer out of the fermenter into the said bottling bucket.
Attach a bottle filling hose to the bucket and start filling each bottle, this yield will give you roughly 6 bottles.
Cap the bottles and store them in a cool dry place for about 2 weeks to carbonate them.
After this, your beer will be perfectly safe and ready for your consumption!
We hope you enjoyed this guide and learned how to brew beer at home properly!
