The Simple Process of Home Brewing

By J. N. Lister

How would you like 48 bottles of beer for as little as 20 bucks? If you're tired of paying top dollar at the grocery store, home brewing could be for you.

Home brewing is an inexpensive way of producing beer that can taste just as good as the beer big corporations make. Even better, you can customise it to your taste rather than having to settle for bland mass-market beers. And home brewing is simpler than you might think.

The process of home brewing is very simple: you boil together water, malt extracts and hops, cool the resulting mix, and add yeast for fermenting. That's it!

The boiling stage requires a home brewing kettle, which can cost as little as $35. The mix of water, hops and yeast is called wort, and is boiled for at least 15 minutes (though for best results, you should allow at least an hour).

Next, you have to cool the wort to no more than 24^oC (and preferably as low as 18^oC). This has to be done quickly and without exposing the wort to the atmosphere. Home brewing experts will use a thermal heat exchanger, which is a type of copper tubing that is dipped into the wort. Cold water then flows through the tubing.

Once the wort is cooled, you have to pour it into a fermenting vessel, a type of container used specially for home brewing. The pouring must be quite quick and firm to make sure the wort is aerated.

Sprinkle the yeast into the wort and seal the fermenting vessel. The fermentation process produces carbon dioxide which bubbles through a special lock at the top of the vessel. For ideal home brewing, the vessel should be stored in temperatures around 21^oC for ale and 10^oC for lager.

Fermentation takes a few days. You can tell it is complete when there is a layer of sediment (trub) at the bottom, and the foamy head at the top has disappeared completely. At this stage of home brewing, siphon the beer into a different vessel to remove the trub to allow the beer to age. This usually takes between two and four weeks. Then carbonate the beer, either by adding corn sugar, or using a special keg to force carbon dioxide into the brew.

When you taste your brew, you'll notice an immediate difference: it's literally alive. When commercial brewers make beer, they have to pasteurize it; this kills off all the yeast and removes the carbonation. Home brewing means you keep the yeast alive, allowing the beer to age over time like wine.

Although the home brewing process is relatively simple, please bear in mind this is only a guide. Your local home brew supplier (or website retailer) will be able to give you more detailed instructions for the specific ingredients which you use. There are a wide variety of kits available, some of them aimed specifically at beginners.

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