Beer Brewing Method
Once you’ve got all of the ingredients and the equipment, how should you go about brewing your beer? Let’s take a step by step look at the home brew method:
1. Sterilise absolutely everything! Making sure that all of your equipment is sterilised is vital if you want to produce a good quality beer.
2. Rinse out your brewbin thoroughly – failure to do so could lead to problems when trying to get the fermentation process going. Once you’ve rinsed out the brewbin, boil one gallon of water and pour it into the brewbin.
3. Add 1kg of sugar (approximately) to the water and stir. You want to dissolve the sugar in the water.
4. Add your homebrew malt extract to the sugar solution and stir. Again, you’re aiming to ensure that all of the malt extract dissolves in the water.
5. Transfer your brewbin to the room where fermentation will take place and then top up the water level with cold water, until the brewbin holds a total of 5 gallons of liquid. Stir again.
6. At this point, you can use a hydrometer to predict the alcohol content of your brew. For example, a reading of 1.040 would indicate that your final beer will be approximately 4% alcohol by volume. A reading of 1.050 would suggest a beer of 5% alcohol by volume (ABV) and so on.
7. Add the contents of the yeast sachet and then allow all of the ingredients to cool down.
8. Over the course of the first few days of fermentation there will be quite a lot of froth forming that will need removing. You can do this using a pipe to drain the outflow into a bucket full of water. After the outflow dies down, use your syphoning kit instead of the pipe. Be careful not to close your brewbin too tightly, as you’ll want to make sure that carbon dioxide can still escape. Failure to do so could be explosive.
9. During the first few days of fermentation, stir the mixture occasionally to ensure that the yeast mixes properly with the other ingredients.
10. Leave the beer alone for 2 weeks to allow for fermentation – don’t touch it at all during this period. At the end of the 2 weeks, you can test to see whether fermentation is complete – if it is, there should be no bubbles rising to the surface. If it’s not finished, then you’ll need to be a bit more patient and allow a little more time.
11. Transfer the beer to bottles or a barrel, using the syphoning kit. You should also add a little sugar to the bottles/barrel at this point to encourage secondary fermentation.
12. You now need to wait until the beer is ready to drink! This should take a couple of weeks – you should be looking for your brew to take on a clearer appearance in most cases.
That’s about all there is to it if you’re brewing using a simple kit. Once you’ve perfected the technique, you can think about moving on to half mash brewing, before maybe looking into full mash home brewing techniques.
Enjoy the process and good luck!
The Beer Brewing Guide in full: