How To Get Started With Home Brewing

How to Win Friends and Influence People? Get a Handle on the Basics of Home Brewing.

If you’re reading this, we’re guessing you’ve already considered trying to brew your own beer. We’re here to tell you that making beer isn’t hard — it’s a fantastic experience that you can enjoy with friends during both production and consumption. It also makes for a stellar winter season or rainy-day activity because it can easily be done indoors — plus drinking beer while brewing beer is mandatory for good luck. Who wouldn’t want to crack a breakfast stout or morning IPA while firing up a new hobby project? As this author’s dad always said, “It’s really no different than making soup. Sure, you might want to throw in some extra onions or add carrots that aren’t in the recipe, but it still comes out soup. Even if it doesn’t line up exactly with what you thought it would taste like, it’s still worth sharing and eating.”

We’re confident that if you can whip up some tasty oatmeal on a camp stove, or produce edible mac and cheese at home, you can make beer. To be clear, I’m not a brewing professional or expert on this subject, so if you’re looking for a scientific or perfect brewing outline, this won’t be it. If you’re thinking about brewing your first batch, this article should simplify what you may be concerned with.

Fundamentally, brewing beer is like cooking oatmeal with different grain, and then adding some hops and yeast to the mix and waiting for it to ferment into booze. The only thing you need to be good at is maintaining the right temperature and watching the clock. The most technical thing about brewing beer is making sure each step of the process is done for the right amount of time at the right temperature. Other than that, it’s pretty easygoing.

How Does the Process Work?

There are many articles about how to brew beer, so we won’t get into details on processes or methods too heavily. Between Google and YouTube, you can sort that out easily. Our hope is this article will entice you to get started with a homebrew kit for yourself. The brewing starts with supplies: grains/extracts, water, hops, yeast, and vessels for cooking the beer and fermenting the beer. After cooking and fermentation are complete, you need empty beer bottles for refilling and new caps for sealing. The best way to get started is to start drinking beer and saving the empty bottles. We call it “brewing preparation” — it feels good to refill bottles with beer you made, and it’s more sustainable too.

Anywhere you shop for your first kit should have a clear outline of the things you need to complete the process. It’s worth doing research and asking questions. Another thing to love about brewing is the beer and home-brewing community. Online forums, local shops, and even strangers you meet who home brew are incredibly helpful and love to share. Everyone wants to help, recipes are shared, feedback and alterations of recipes are discussed, and you never have to struggle for help. It makes this hobby incredibly rewarding and easy to grow your skills.

You can order a home-brew kit online, or better yet, find a local home-brew store near you. Having a local shop as a resource is highly recommended. I’ve been home-brewing for 10-plus years, and nearly every time I go to my local home-brew store (known colloquially as LHBS), I come home with some new methods to try, clarity on how to make my next batch better, feedback on beers I’ve shared with them, or just fun new recipes to try. We suggest starting with a stove-top 5-gallon batch kit, which comes with everything you need. The only additional things needed are containers and small bits to complete the overall project. Your LHBS may even rent these to you.

H20

The basics of brewing begins with water. The pros and more educated brewers will focus on finding just the right water, whether by testing the pH or adding ingredients to balance this out. Again, we’re no pros, but we’ve made beer with tap water, water filtered through a pitcher, and also “RO” (reverse osmosis) water you can get at any water store in town.

If you’re picky about what type of water you use for your espresso or pour-over coffee, you might also care about the water you use in your beer. If you’re fine with filling up your coffee maker from your tap or fridge, don’t stress the beer water, just get cranking. If you know you have some really hard water or with heavy mineral content, you may want to get some filtered water. Otherwise, don’t let this step hold you back. You’ll need more water than your final 5-gallon recipe will call for due to the water you lose when you soak the grain and discard it. Your recipe will likely cover how much to start with in each step, but expect to get 7 to 10 gallons for a final 5-gallon batch.

Mashing

Let’s talk mashing, the first step. This consists of getting your water heated up to the proper temperature so that, when you add your grains, you get the right temperature for soaking for 60 minutes. Beer is usually mashed at 150 to 160 degrees F — this is an important step. Your beer recipe will likely give you a specific temperature, or a range of 2 to 4 degrees to hit.

There are some convenient online calculators or apps that help solve this guesswork. Because your grain is sitting at room temperature, depending on your location and where you store it (inside the house, garage, cellar, etc.), the grain mass added to the water temperature will change the result. These online calculators make it very simple to figure out. Search for “strike temp calculator” online.

For example, if you have 5 gallons of water and 15 pounds of grain, just input your water volume, grain mass, grain temperature, and it’ll give you a “strike temperature” measurement for the required water temperature before you add your grain. This will put the water temperature above your mash temperature, and once you add the grain, it should drop to your target temperature. As a result, you won’t need to add heat to the pot to raise the mash temperature after the grain is added, risking burning the grains on the bottom of the pot.

Don’t stress too much on your first try, as it doesn’t need to be exact. This took us over 20 rounds to figure out, so it’s great to know these techniques up front. Anywhere within 150 to 160 is fine; it’ll still come out beer. As you get more into brewing and repeatedly make the same recipe, you might be able to taste the difference of a batch at 152 versus 158; kudos to you if your palate is that discerning. Once you have your mash set, grains soaking, and temperature in the right range, wait for 60 minutes. Crack a beer and add to your stash of empties.

Wort and Hops

After your mash has soaked and pulled the sugar content, color, and flavors from the grain, you’ll have your wort water. This will make up the body of the beer, and after you add the hops on the next step, you’ll have the completed beer minus alcohol and carbonation. This portion will come out sugary sweet to taste and smell.

It’s highly advisable to taste during each step so you know how it all adds up to the final result. Every recipe you do smells and tastes different at each stage, and like soup, it’s worth tasting along the way to enjoy the process and understand how everything blends together. Dark beers turn jet black from a small amount of roasted grains. Watery-looking pilsner batches look barely yellow or even clear. Ambers and browns land somewhere in the middle, but the final result is the best part. Whatever color your liquid is while moving from mashing to the wort is the color of your beer. 

Once you have the leftover wet grains behind you (which also make for a fantastic composting material in your garden or food for livestock), you’re ready for the wort. It can also be discarded in most green waste garbage bins. This phase is fun because you need to maintain a rolling boil to keep the beer sanitized as you add the hops. There are mathematical calculations for sorting out bittering units (IBUs) and aromatic flavors, but we don’t need to worry about that now.

Measure the weight of the hops listed on the instructions and throw them in the boil at the outlined times. You’ll need to monitor a stopwatch and maintain a rolling boil using the burner flame size and intensity. Most recipes call for a 60-minute boil, though some require 90. Adding the hops enables you to open, weigh, and smell each hop you throw in and get a sense of how to combine sweet, floral, and citrus flavors.

Yeast

Once you’ve finalized the wort boil and hop additions, the time has come to add the yeast. You’ll need to cool the beer down, because adding yeast to beer that’s too warm or hot will actually kill it. Yeast, as with any alcohol process, needs to be alive in the liquid to eat the sugar content you created with the mash and grain steps. This will produce alcohol and CO₂ gas. This step is crucial in pulling out the sugar content and producing your ABV or “alcohol by volume” as the final product.

Yeast can be added to the beer once your temperature reaches the low 70s. To be safe, lower is better. After adding the yeast, give it a good stir. If you have access to a refractometer or hydrometer (unique measuring devices), you can take what’s called the “original gravity” of the beer, measuring the sugar content in the liquid. By checking this before fermentation and after fermentation, you can calculate the real ABV. Without it, you’ll have to guess by how you feel once you drink a few later. All kidding aside, it’s helpful to take notes to plan for future batches.

There’s no temperature that’s too low for adding the yeast. The only concern is whether it’s too hot for the yeast to survive and thrive. Some ferment beer for over six months to age/delay as the CO₂ produced from fermentation pushes all the oxygen out.

Storage

The final step is to store the beer in a clean container. You can use a food-grade bucket or large water bottle sometimes called a “carboy” with a one-way “airlock” valve on top. This allows CO₂ gas to escape as it ferments, while keeping a protective seal on the beer to prevent outside air or particles from compromising the batch. The fermentation process takes two to three weeks.

Keep it at a constant temperature. Cellars are the best options, as they stay rather regulated. You could store it in your home if you maintain a consistent temperature inside. The smells you get from fermentation are typically pretty hop-heavy, so each day you’ll be reminded of the beer you created. UV will damage the beer, so the beer needs to be stored out of sunlight or covered with a towel. Most important is to maintain it at a constant or minimally varying temp. You don’t want temperature spikes like in a hot summer garage. Try to find the most consistent spot in your house, like a bathroom or closet with no exterior walls around it.

Bottling

When your fermentation is complete, the bottling process begins. This requires sterilization, which is pretty simple. A standard brewing kit should include some iodine-type sterilizer. Follow the instructions, use a bucket or an ice chest, and soak those empties according to the instructions. After that, mix up some sugar in boiling water to add to the beer. This gives the remaining yeast in the beer something to eat to produce the CO₂ inside the bottles after you seal them with the caps. This amount matters too, so follow along according to the instructions. When you’re carbonating in bottles, add about ¾ cup of priming sugar for each 5 gallons you make.

Once bottling is complete, you should only have to wait eight to 14 days for carbonation. Then, it’s time to crack them open and see how you fared. Brewing usually takes less than a month from your brew day to take-a-swig day.

Many prefer to put the beer in kegs, chill it in the fridge overnight, charge with 30 psi, and shake them until the regulator stops “humming.” Let them sit overnight and then adjust the psi back to serving psi (10 to 14 psi to pour). They’ll last in kegs for six to 12 months easily as long as no oxygen gets in there.

Hopefully, you enjoy what you created. Whether it’s what you expected or not, it’s far cheaper than any IPA you’d buy at your grocery store. Plus, you’ll get better as you continually repeat the process and try new things. Put in good ingredients and you should get good results.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Carnivore Magazine Issue 6.

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