The only thing better than drinking good beer is making it … and then drinking it. Typically made five gallons at a time, beer created by homebrewing allows you to create beer tailored to your taste and experiment with new styles of beer no commercial breweries are even producing. While it can seem daunting to actually brew beer, it’s simple once you try it out and learn the basic elements.

What you need

The easiest way to get your brewery started is to buy a kit from a homebrew store. A good kit will include a 6.5 gallon plastic fermentor, bottling bucket, bottle capper, siphon, hydrometer and a homebrewing guide. To avoid shipping costs from online stores, E.J. Wren Homebrew Inc (209 Oswego St.) in Liverpool carries everything you need. In addition to the kit, you’ll also need a five-gallon stainless-steel stock pot for brewing, although aluminum will work for the cash-strapped.

Keep it clean

Sanitation is the most boring but also the most important part of brewing. When you have your pots, buckets and implements of brewing ready, sanitize everything that will touch the beer. The easiest products to use are no-rinse sanitizers available from homebrew stores. Simply mix it with hot water in one of your buckets and sanitize everything in it at once.

Four elements

Beer is made of only four ingredients: water, malt barley, hops and yeast. To skip the trouble of figuring how much or which kind to use while starting, stores offer recipe kits with everything you need for around $25-35. Beginner kits will also save you the trouble of dealing with large bags of grain by providing malt extract, which is syrup of sugar taken from malted barley. While convenient, some kits are comprised of only one ingredient or use pre-hopped malt-these will turn out inferior beer. The best kits, however, will include a few pounds of specialty grains to be used along with the extract.

Get it on

Here’s how it goes down. Heat two gallons of water on a stove top. If you have specialty grains, steep them in the hot water for 15-30 minutes without letting the water boil. Once the grains are removed and the water is boiling, add the malt extract and hops as the recipe calls for. After the beer has boiled for an hour, remove the pot from the heat and cool it in a sink or bathtub of cold water.

Becoming beer

Once the beer has cooled to below 80 degrees, pour it into the fermentor, without splashing. But don’t pour gently because you want to let air into the beer for the yeast. Now toss your brewer’s yeast in and seal up the top, complete with water in the airlock. Within two days, the beer will begin fermenting, and in a week it will be nearly finished. You will now have beer that can either be bottled or moved into a secondary fermentor to mature. A week after bottling, the beer will be carbonated. However, the longer you wait, the better it will taste. And yes, waiting really is the hardest part.

Published on October 31, 2006 at 12:00 pm