Posts Tagged ‘Beer Brewing Equipment’
So you’ve decided that you want to Make Your Own Beer? Now what do you do? Believe it on not making your own beer at home is very easy and rewarding! All it takes is a few hours of brewing, a little waiting and some patience. Once you’ve purchased your initial equipment (typically $75 – $150) making beer is very inexpensive to make. To give you an example of this, you can purchase an American Ale ingredients kit for about $25 – $30. That beer ingredients kit will make 5 gallons of beer greatness! 5 gallons of beer is the equivalent to roughly 53 beer bottles, that’s a lot of beer for $25.
Typical Steps for Making Your Own Beer.
1. Order your beer brewing equipment.
2. Order your beer ingredients kit.
3. Brew your beer.
4. Let the beer ferment for roughly 2 weeks.
5. Bottle or keg your beer.
6. Carbonate the beer.
7. Invite your friends over and try your homemade beer!
You can get the basic brewing equipment kit for around $100. Your brewing kit should include the following.
· 5 Gallon Glass Carboy
· 6.5 Gallon Plastic Fermenter with Lid
· 6.5 Gallon Bottling Bucket with Spigot
· 4 Gallon brew kettle (Pot)
· Sanitizer (i.e. Easy Clean No-Rinse Cleanser)
· Drilled Carboy Bung & Airlock (Keeps air out)
· Hydrometer (Determines alcohol content)
· Bottle Brush
· Carboy Brush
· Bottle Capper (i.e. Twin Lever Red Baron Bottle Capper)
· 50 – 12 oz Beer Bottles
· 50 Bottle Caps
· Bottle Filler
· Siphon (An Auto-Siphon is even better)
· Siphon Tubing
· Shutoff clamp
When you’re ordering your beer kit make sure you also order a beer ingredients kit. There are three levels of beer ingredients kits. The first level is Extract kits (beginner), the second level is Partial Mash (intermediate) and the third is All Grain (Advanced). For now I would start with the extract ingredients kits. After brewing a few extract batches you can then move up to the partial mash kits.
When brewing your first batch of beer, make sure you set aside a few hours to complete the brewing process. Make sure you read through all of the directions that come with the ingredients kit before you get started. Typically the directions that come with the kits will be pretty much the same. However, depending on the kind of beer you’re brewing you’ll be adding hops at different times throughout the brewing process. Once you’ve finished brewing the beer you will cool the beer (or wort as it’s called at this point) down to at least 80 degrees. This can be done by placing the pot in a sink with ice or using a wort chiller. Once you’ve cooled the wort down to at least 80 degrees you will then pour the wort into your 6.5 gallon plastic fermenter. Make sure you check your direction. You’ll likely need to add water to the fermenter to bring the level up to the 5 gallon mark. Once you’ve done that you will add the yeast and then aerate the wort to make sure you get enough oxygen into the wort for the yeast to work properly. You will then place the lid on top of your fermenter, place the airlock into the lid and place the fermenter into a dark closest. You want to make sure your fermenter is in an area that will stay somewhere between 70 – 80 degrees.
Now here comes the hard part. You’ll need to wait about two weeks for your wort to ferment into beer. Once you get towards the end of the fermenting process you’ll start checking the beer using a hydrometer. You’ll check it each day until the reading on the hydrometer is no longer changing. Once this happens the fermentation is complete! At this point you have two options – you can either bottle your beer or you can transfer it to your carboy. Transferring it to the carboy and letting it sit for another week or so will allow the beer to age a little bit and more importantly it allows the beer to clear up. If you skip this step you will likely have cloudy beer. It’ll still taste good it will just be a little murky.
Now that your beer is done fermenting it’s time to bottle or keg the beer. Bottling your beer is nice because you can easily take your beer to a friend’s house. However, that’s 4 dozen bottles that you have to clean, fill and cap. Your second option is to Keg the beer. Once you start kegging your beer you will likely never go back. It’s harder to take beer to a friend’s house but so much easier to clean and fill.
Once you’ve decided if you’re going to bottle or keg the beer you now need to carbonate it. There are two ways to carbonate the beer. The first one is called natural carbonation and the second is called force carbonation. To naturally carbonate your beer you will add sugar (i.e. corn sugar) to the beer before you bottle or keg it. The residual yeast will eat the sugar and create C02 that will then be absorbed by the beer. This process usually takes 1 – 2 weeks. To force carbonate your beer you will need to use a keg. In this case you will not be adding sugar to the beer. Once you’ve transferred the beer to a keg you can now attach a C02 tank to the keg and apply somewhere between 10 – 20 PSI of C02. Depending on the temperature and type of beer will determine how much C02 pressure you need to apply to the beer. Force carbonation can take anywhere from just a few days to a week or two.
Now that you know how to Make Your Own Beer you can make your friends jealous that you now have an endless supply of inexpensive beer.