Getting Set Up to Make Beer

The hobby of brewing your own beer at home is growing steadily as more people discover how much fun they can have making their beer at home and how great absolutely fresh beer can be.  There may be no more gratifying moment for a home brewer than to serve your own fresh beer to your guests iced down in your favorite beer mugs and hear the rave that your beer is as good as the store bought beer they like best or maybe even better!

Part of the reason for the huge popularity is that getting set up to make beer and finding good supplies and equipment is neither difficult nor overly expensive.  You can find or create the equipment fairly easily or get it discounted from others who have retired from the brewing business.  And right now there is probably a home brewing store in your town ready and able to provide you with the ingredients as well as instruction books and recipes for all kinds of wonderful tasting beers you can make right at home.  And with the explosion of web sites, ebooks and articles out there on the internet about home brewing, all the help you could ask for is at your fingertips to help you get started.

The reason different people get into home brewing vary.  Some love the social aspect as you join a large local and international community of brewers.  Another reason is that it is just great fun to assemble the equipment, learn the recipes and take a stab at making your own home grown batch of tasty beer.  Even if you "botch" a batch of beer, its all in the spirit of learning and it just drives you on to learn from your mistakes to make even better beer next time. 

A third great reason is you have so much more control over your beer when you brew it yourself.  Because you are not dealing with a beer that is mass produced and shipped from hundreds of miles away, you can control the taste, the consistency and even the level of alcohol to make your beer as strong or mild as you want it to be.  And you can make changes with each batch with virtually endless variations on the recipes that are available to the home brewing community.

The supplies you will need to get started are easy to find and not very expensive either.  Probably the best way to get a feel for what the best equipment is and who are the suppliers to favor would come from becoming a regular at home brewing clubs and gatherings and making some friends there.  If you make it well known that you are a "new recruit" and need some mentoring in how to get set up, you will be overwhelmed with offers for you to sit in on a brewing session or two to get a feel for the process.  If you take advantage of their zeal to help you get started, you will be way ahead on the game when you go shopping for the stuff you need to get set up to make your own beer at home.

The equipment you will need is pretty much only used for brewing beer so you will need to think of storage.  The pot for boiling your initial wort and the equipment to handle the beer, filter it and ferment it are all made in sizes and at prices to encourage the home brewing markets.  You can find them at retail prices at your home brewing retail outlet in town.  You can use the internet and shop second hand shops to get better prices.  But many like to patronize the home brewing store that helped them get their start just to make sure they stay in business to keep selling you great fresh ingredients.

That same retail outlet will be a good source for the grains, yeasts and hops you need for the actual production of beer.  Freshness is the key so communicate with the management of the store to learn of just how fresh those things are. As with the equipment, you can buy these things from the internet and that is fine.  But get to know your supplier whoever you use and make sure you are confident you are getting the highest quality materials to make your home made beer. It will make a big difference.

Going to the Source to Learn About Home Brewing

I know from experience that the time between when it first dawns on you that you could start learning to brew your own beer at home and when you actually take a stab at it is often a long one.  For one thing, it takes a pretty significant learning curve to even begin to visualize that it possible to make beer at home.  Sure, you may have heard about home breweries but to think of doing it in your own home setting is a leap of understanding that takes some time to get through.

The internet is often a source of information that we go to start learning more about a new area of life like home brewing.  Perhaps that is how you found this article and that’s good.  That means you are off on the right foot and using free information from people who have already learned a few things about brewing at home to get your orientation to what it would take for you to learn to brew your own beer at home.

As often happens with any new area of interest, if your fascination with how to brew beer at home starts to get some momentum, it’s a good way to go to log on to the major home brewing web sites and begin to get oriented to the methods, the equipment and the process of brewing beer at home.  Do be aware that some of these sites get very technical and it's easy to get intimidated. 

But if you can just get an understanding about the equipment and the ingredients and some basic ideas of how the process would go if you were the one doing the brewing, that is a good start.  Because online articles and web sites mix expert knowledge with newcomers orientation, if you do stumble into a section of those sites that you don’t understand, just surf on to pages that are intended to help you where you are and understand that when you get to that level that that technical sophistication, you can always come back to these pages.  Just build a good bookmark library because it will serve you well.

But to pick up speed on learning the real details of what brewing is all about, you don’t have to depend just on reading or books.  Because brewing beer in your own home is more than just book knowledge, it is handling of equipment and ingredients, the more direct exposure you can get to the brewing process, the better.  But it is also very likely that you developed your interest in home brewing while enjoying a good brew at your local brew pub.  Most towns have brew pubs where home made beers are sold in just about every flavor, color ant texture.  Many times these brew pubs grew up out of a home brewing hobby that just got bigger and bigger until it became an enterprise and a money making business.

That is why most brew pub owners are more than happy to give tours and lessons in home brewing.  This is probably some of the most value exposure you can get to how the process of home brewing works.  By walking through a brewery where the beer you love is made, you can step through the process to get a feel for how you will proceed.  You can see the boiling pots, how the strainers are used and the filters and fermenters and everything that is needed to take beer from raw materials to the finished state of a fine brewed beer.  In fact, with a little charm and by working for free, you may be able to apprentice in the brew pub making beer.  This time will be tremendously valuable to you to help you learn the ropes of making your own beer.

You combine this hands on knowledge with what you are learning on line and from other training sources along with what you can learn by networking with other experienced home brewers and you have a powerful source of knowledge that will pay you well when you start making your home beer yourself.  And that knowledge will result in some great tasting beers from your kitchen so you will be glad you took the time to learn all you can before taking the plunge.

Great Grains for a Great Beer

One of the great reasons for learning to brew your own beer is to learn more about the various grains and ingredients that makes one beer better than another one.  When you first start your hobby of home brewing, you no doubt got connected to a local club or association of home brewers.  They can help you learn the lingo and how to tell what the best grains are to use in your beer.  But before you go to the first meeting, it might speed things up if you knew the basics.

The use of malts is at the heart of how grain contributes to a great beer.  The difference between  a light beer that doesn’t have a heavy malt taste and one that virtually tastes like a loaf of bread all go back to what malts you pick and the process that is used during the malting and brewing of your beer.  There are actually a big variety of different grains that people commonly use when brewing their own beer and you may have to take some time to brew up a few batches using different grains to see which ones capture what to you is the perfect beer taste that will make your home made beer unique.  But understanding how malting works is a good first step.

Now as a home brewing enthusiast, you will probably not actually take grain through the malting process yourself.  But you should become familiar with how malting works and why there is so much variety to the outcome of the malting process. In that way you can use that knowledge when buying the malts for your beer so you can get a malt that will give you the flavor, color and intensity of beer that you are looking for.

The malting process starts with the grain to be used.  The most common grains are barley, wheat or rye but others can be used from time to time.  The grain is used from the seed form and steeped and germinated which gets the active part of the malting and brewing process underway.  Germination, which from your high school science class you know is what happens when a seed sprouts out to become a plants, releases the store energy of the seed that was put there to jump start the growth process.  We are going to use that energy and convert it into malt mash that you can use to brew your beer.

What happens during the germination process of those grains is that the stored energy in the seed is changed as it is released.  When the starches in the seeds changes into sugars by the enzymes that are active part of the germination process, those sugars give us one of the core ingredients for great beer.  It is at that exact moment that the germination process is suspended using kilns to dry the grains and all of that good sugar and enzymes that became active remain in the malt for use during the brewing process.

Obviously this description of the basic malting process is simplified but for our purposes it gives you a background into what happens before you buy the malts you will use in your home made beer.  But based on this description, you can go on to get a feel for the wide variety of malt types.  The more you know about malt, the better informed you will be about what malts you wish to use when you brew your beer.  And those decisions will have a big effect on the taste of your beer.  So for great tasting beer, use great malts and knowing one malt from the next is the key to knowing which to use for the best home made beer possible from your home brewing efforts.