Make Beer
How To Make Beer At Home
Take some sugar from malted barley, add to water, add Hops and yeast and you basically get beer. It really is as simple as those four steps to brew beer. What confuses many new home brewers is all the different variations in beer styles and brewing techniques.
If you are starting out brand new, the best place to start is with extract and specialty grains. Many brewers get a kit, but I don’t recommend those because the quality is not exactly the best unless you understand brewing a bit more in depth.
Most kits ask the brewer to add a booster pack or table sugar to their beer. This makes beer turn out watery and reduces flavor in beer. If you got one of these kits as a gift or just went ahead and bought one anyway, not all is lost. All you have to do to improve the flavor of your beer is to add Dry Malt Extract (DME) instead of the table sugar. Pound per pound is about what you want to replace it with.
The reason you do this is because table sugar or corn sugar is 100% fermentable. That means that the yeast eat up all the sugar and leaves your beer without any residual sugars. DME has multiple types of sugars (sucrose, maltose, etc.) and not all of them are 100% fermentable, so at the end of the fermentation phase, you are left with residual sugars which gives beer the malty flavor and adds body to the beer.
If you compare a light lager beer with a dry stout, you’ll notice that stout beers are heavy bodied beers and that is because they have a lot of residual sugars left after fermentation. Since not all the sugars are fermented, they often times have less alcohol content than other lighter colored beers.
The main drawback of using kits is that you can’t experiment with recipes or modify them as easily. Usually you buy a can of extract which already has all the flavors and hops added to them.
If you learn how to brew using plain malt extract, you can make pretty much any style of beer.
Here’s how…
There are different types of malts which add different flavors to your beer like caramel, chocolate, roasted barley, etc. Using these specialty malts, you can combine them with each other to brew different styles of beer ranging from amber ales, pale ales, all the way to porters and stouts.
You basically steep (soak in hot water) these grains for about 25 minutes at 154 F, and then you add your Dry Malt extract and boil the mixture. During the boil you add your hops and the rest is the same as you would do with a kit, which is cooling down the mixture (called wort) and pitching the yeast. Pitching the yeast simply means to pour the yeast or add the yeast. It’s not a special process or anything it’s just a fancy word.
One of the biggest mistakes I see from beginner brewers is wanting to start out with all-grain brewing. While it’s not impossible, it is a steeper learning curve and it is very likely for new home brewers to mess up the beer.
If you started out with all grain and are now a great brewer, good for you… pat yourself in the back… you are one in a million.
All grain brewing is not much different than brewing with extract and specialty grains, it simply gives you more control over the Brewing Process. Instead of adding extract, you steep all the grains in a mash tun (could be a cooler or a kettle), but because you are using malts that can have their starches converted into sugar we call this process mashing instead of steeping.
Since you control the temperatures and times you can make the same beer style with more fermentable sugars (to get more alcohol at the expense of losing body) or make it with more unfermentable sugars (to get more body at the expense of losing alcohol content). Whatever you preference…
There are also ways of increasing both body and alcohol content in a beer and that’s one of the advantages of both all grain brewing and extract with specialty grains.
That is basically all the different ways you can about making beer at home, but the overall process can be summarized this way.
Step 1. You extract sugar from malted barley
With all grain brewing you do everything from scratch. With extract brewing you steep specialty grains and then you add DME. With kit brewing you simply add the extract can to water. It is easier, but it doesn’t taste as good as extract or all grain brewing.
Extract brewers can brew beer just as good as all grain brewers and often times brew better beer. All grain brewing doesn’t necessarily brew better beer, it simply gives you more flexibility and more control, but you must know how to take advantage of that.
Step 2. You add hops and boil for 60 minutes
Hops are simple to understand. The longer you boil them the more bitterness they give you, but the less aroma they give you. The less you boil them the less bitterness they give you, but the more aroma they give you.
The universal hop schedule is to add hops at the beginning of the boil (60 minute hops), which are your bittering hops. Next you add hops during the boil (45-20 minute hops), which are your flavor hops. Last you add hops towards the end of the boil (15 – 0 minute hops), which are your flavor hops.
Step 3. You cool down mixture and add yeast
Yeast produces esters and other by-products at higher temperatures so it’s important to cool down the wort as soon as possible.
Many brewers make the mistake of not making a yeast starter when brewing beer. Also, yeast starters are only for liquid yeast. Dry yeast is usually re-hydrated instead.
Step 4. You ferment beer until specific gravity reaches final gravity
The biggest mistake I see on this step is going by time. Most beginners are anxious to drink their beer and rush the process. They want to bottle after 4-7 days or whenever they see the airlock stop bubbling.
The beer should be left in the fermenter until specific gravity (density) reaches a good final gravity which is about 75% of the Original Gravity reading. Then it should be left a few extra days to allow the yeast to clean up and condition the beer. (a step often times skipped by beginner home brewers)
Step 5. You prime & bottle condition for 2 weeks or longer
Most brewers use the universal rule of thumb of 5 oz of corn sugar to prime with. Carbonating beer depends on the style and personal preference. Some beers are better with low carbonation levels while others are better with high carbonation levels.
The time needed for beer to carbonate varies. Small beers with Original Gravity readings in the 1.035 – 1.056 can sometimes be done in 2 to 3 weeks. Higher gravity beers will take more time (up to 3 months) to carbonate!
Step 6. You Drink
Last is the drinking part. Believe it or not, serving the beer has an impact on how the beer tastes. The colder the beer the less you taste the beer. This is good for certain styles like american light lagers (most known commercial beers) which you don’t really want to taste, but not so good for other aromatic and flavorful beers.
So the overall process to brew beer remains the same but little tweaks here and there can make certain styles of beer much much better than anything else you’ve ever had. How good your beer comes out is limited by your knowledge and experience.
About the Author
Jorge Zarate – Author of the blog BrewBeerAndDrinkIt (dot com), which deals with Home Brewing, and Beer Bloggers Network (dot com), which is a site dedicated to craft beer enthusiasts who just like to drink the liquid and looking to expand their bucket list of beers to taste…
How to make Beer (1 of 4)
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