Homebrewing: It's stupidly simple... until it's not

I remember walking into the kitchen as a kid and this pungent smell smacking me in the face. At the time I feared that a soup had gone terribly wrong. I watched as my dad stood over the stove and stirred a pot dropping what appeared to be fish food in to this steaming mixture.

Knowing I had to eat whatever was put in front of me for dinner, I asked, "What are you cooking, Dad?"

I was bracing for a vegetable filled death march with my spoon at the dinner table, when he broke this image with a simple word, "Beer."

I remember thinking to myself that my father was a silly man. You don't cook beer! You go to the fridge and open a bottle. DUH!! What was he thinking?!

My dad did this many more times over the years, but I can tell you that I didn't really have an appreciation for it until I lost my craft beer virginity in college. I gained an appreciation for good beer and the hard work that goes into making it. This was amplified when C got me a gift a few years ago. A Northern Brewer Starter Kit**! I felt like I was that kid getting his first Chemistry set and being uber excited about it! C got me an American Wheat to start off with.

Before we get started if you need a refresher take a look at my beer glossary.

Brew day!

We had read the instructions with the brewing kit and watched a lot of YouTube videos to give us a feeling that we kinda sorta knew what was going on. I found out that if you know how to boil water and dump things in, then you can make beer. A really good beer at that. NOTE: Kits usually give you enough ingredients to make a five gallon batch of beer.

1. Sanitize - This is THE most important rule and procedural step in brewing a beer at any level. Clean everything that could touch the beer. Clean everything that could touch the beer after the boil a second time.
2. Make sure you have all of your ingredients and equipment.
• In the interest of keeping this post from being long I will write about equipment and ingredients soon in a different post.
3. Turn on your heat source with around 2.5 to 3 gallons of water in a brew kettle, bringing the water to a boil.
4. Pour your malt extract into the water.
• Malt extract is a syrup that will be the main source of sugar in your wort
• Sugars are what yeast eats to make alcohol and carbon dioxide
5. At specific intervals add hops to your boiling brew.
• These times will be called out in any instructions you get with a kit
6. The boil will usually go on for 60 minutes. Your boil time will be listed on the instructions. 
7. Remember to sanitize everything! The beer you are making is very vulnerable at this point!
8. After the boil is done, the liquid in the pot is now called wort. You will now want to cool the wort as quickly as possible.
• This can be done with:
1. Ice baths
2. Using blocks of ice. 8 pounds of ice = 1 gallon of water... ish.
3. A copper coil with cool water passing through it (called a wort chiller**... clever right?)
• You need to cool the wort from around 212 degrees F to around 70 degrees F.
9. Once you get the wort to the cooler temperature, you can transfer it to a carboy or fermentation container. 
10. Pitch the yeast. This is a fancy way of saying put the yeast in the wort. I will cover activating the yeast in post soon.
11. Cap the fermentation container with an airlock. This is a rubber piece with a hole filled with a funny looking plastic thing with a liquid in it.
12. Now you wait for fermentation to take place. Depending on the beer this could take a couple weeks or a few months, but that is something you will see before you order your ingredient kit.
13. Once fermentation is done, you will transfer the wort to a bucket with a spicket(or spigot whichever you prefer) and some sugar water
14. From the bucket, you put the wort in bottles.
15. You will wait a couple weeks for bottle conditioning to complete.
16. Now you can enjoy the beer you made!

That is it to brewing a simple kit. Boil, add ingredients, cool, ferment, bottle, and drink!

But wait these are the simple steps. Like any activity or hobby, brewing beer CAN (doesn't have to) become expensive and complex. Adding intricate equipment, ingredients, calculations, and terminology can really seem overwhelming at first but if you take your time and realize that you are drinking a good beer, the learning comes easy and fun!

In the next few posts I will be talking about why it is inexpensive to brew with the basics, the variety of equipment compared to essentials for brewing, and the role each ingredient plays on a beer. 

**These products are not the ones I used just examples. I got my wort chiller from a local store and Northern Brewer has changed the packages up since I got my equipment kit.