Brewing your own beer is nice and simple. Taking the first steps is only a matter of doing it. It may sounds that easy however your might thing: How to start brewing.
Table of contents
Start brewing
The first step when beginning home brewing yourself is getting familiar with the brewing process. By gaining this knowledge you will have a good idea of what you are doing.
Which method do you prefer?
“There are two brewing methods. The first one is extract brewing where the mashing has already been done. In extract brewing, it is just a matter of adding water to the extract. Then you bring the mixture to a boil and add hops to it.
If you want to go for the full brewing experience, you can choose the all-grain brewing method. In this method, you have to do the mash, lauter, and sparge steps to extract fermentable sugars from the grains. The remaining steps, such as boiling and adding hops, are similar to extract brewing.
Start with a beer brew kit
I took my first steps in brewing with a beer making kit from Brooklyn Brew Shop. There are many other alternatives and most of these are good to end up with 3.6 (1 gallon) to 5 liters of beer. It is also good to know that most shops specialized in homebrewing do sell beer brew kits that allow you to brew bigger batches like 15 or 20 liters.
The advantage of a beer brew kit is that the recipe is already included. This is because you usually choose such kit based on a specific beer type you want to brew. Another advantage is that the needed grains are already milled, so you don’t have to do that yourself. And based on the chosen kit you also will get some additional equipment like a fermenter.
The alternative is to choose a recipe yourself and that will mean you will still have to order the ingredients separately and then you have to mill the malt. For a starter this might not the best option to begin with. I would recommend using a beer brew kit.
What equipment do you need?
There is some equipment you will need when you want to start brewing.
- Two “large” pots. One is for the mashing and the other is for the sparge water. You can then use the biggest pot to boil the wort.
- A strainer for lauter the malt.
- A thermometer, because managing the temperature is very important.
- A fermenter with airlock is useful for fermenting the beer.
- A siphon hose for filling your bottles.
- Bottles in which the beer should come. The swing-top bottles from Grolsch are ideal for this. These don’t need to be closed with a crown cap.
About the necessary pot. I have a good experience with the 10 liter stock pot from Ikea name Oumbärlig. This is a solid pot with a good size for small batches. It is a small investment, but you will have a really solid pan. I recently used it to brew a quadruple.
The first brew day: Start brewing
The first brew day is here: the real deal can begin. Take your time for this data, because brewing some beer takes might take some time.
It always starts with the preparations. First everything has to be cleaned properly. They sometimes say “brewing is cleaning”. You can end with an infection if you take it not so serious and that would be a pity of all the effort.
When everything is cleaned properly, you can prepare all the necessary items and ingredients. Fill the pots with the needed amounts of water. Prepare the grains and hops, just to have it at hand when you need it.
Also make sure you have read the brewing kit instructions carefully. And have the recipe located at a point where it is easy to see. Now you can really start your brew day.
What next steps can you take further?
When your first brew day is done it’s time to think about what’s next. You can consider to order a refill to brew the same beer again or just choose another one. It might be possible that you experienced a simple brew day and need more challenge. If that’s the case you can look for a recipe to brew.
From my own perspective I can image that ordering refill after refill can start to get boring after a few times. I had the same when I brew a couple of refills from Brooklyn Brew Shops. It was fun to brew these, but at a certain point I wanted to try something different.
Start looking for recipes
Quite a few books have been written about brewing. These are ideal for getting more knowledge about the brewing process. In addition this process, these books usually include recipes.
You also will find many recipes available online. Since I had a gallon bottle, I searched quite a few recipes for brewing exactly 1 gallon. I then ended up on the Beercraftr website.
Brew larger volumes
You get about 10 bottles of beer from 3.6 liters of beer. That amount is gone in no time, especially when the beer is tasty. A next step could be to start brewing larger volumes. This means that you may need a larger kettle and a bigger fermenter for fermentation.
Fine-tuning the brewing process
After a couple of batches, you just notice that some things can be done better. Especially when brewing at such small scale a couple of things can be experienced to be a real hassle. To reduce this you can do some investments to make everything a bit better.
For example you can invest in a lauter tun. This will make the lautering and sparging a lot easier. Other things you can do is buy an automatic siphon to transfer the beer easier. And just purchase a simple filling pipe for filling the bottles. You may be able to replace the swing-top bottles with bottles with crown caps.
Instead of cooking on gas, you can choose for an electric kettle, which can be a fully automatic version with a programmable interface. This will provide some time savings that can be used for other things.
An investment that makes the cooling of your wort easier is the spiral cooler. Instead of cooling with ice water this cooler runs on cold water that rans through the cooler. I have noticed that this will cool the wort much faster.
In principle, as a brewer you don’t need much, but most investments will make the process easier.
A last advice to end with
For anyone who wants to start brewing I would say: Start slowly and don’t set the bar too high. Read carefully and just start brewing. The first brew is a good introduction to the brewing process itself, after this it is just a matter of gaining more experience.
