How to Make Homebrewed Beer
This guide will walk you through the basics of making beer from grain. If you have purchased an extract kit, you may skip to Step 7. for an in-depth guide to brewing get John Palmer's book: How to Brew. It has been a staple of the homebrewing community.--Step 1: The setup I have is a 10 gallon setup. Make sure you have a big enough pot to boil all the beer at once. On the left, I have the louder ton. This is clean water that you heat to about 170°F. The middle is the boiling kettle. The right one is for the grains to make your extract wort. Fill your grain pot about 1/3 to 1/2 full of water and heat to between 149°F and 157°F.
--Step 2: Add your milled grains. and don't forget your ear protection.
--Step 3: Keep the temperature between 149°F and 157°F for about an hour and a half or longer. The lower end of the temperature makes a dryer beer, and the higher end makes a sweater beer. Outside of this range, it will not convert the sugars.
I built a pilot light with a recirculation pump and a temperature control gauge. This isn't needed. I'm just showing off. Usually, when you get to the proper temperature, you can cover and just wait.
--Step 4: After the sugars are converted, you will need to recirculate the wort. To do this, I would buy a boil pot with a false bottom from a homebrew store along with the pump. The pump is needed to move the beer from one vessel to another.
When it looks clear after about 15 minutes, you can move it to the boiling kettle. This is called a wort. You can buy Malt extract in the homebrew store to skip the grain part.
This is a refractomiter. It measures the gravity of the beer. also not needed but tells you how much ABV the beer will be.
--Step 5: Transfer the wort to the boiling pot. This will not fill it up all the way yet.
--Step 6: Make sure the louter ton of water is about 160°F–170°F and fill up the grain pot again. Stir it up and resirculate it for another 15 minutes to make it clear, then transfer to the boiling kettle. Repeat until the kettle is full or at the desired number of gallons. I do 10 at a time.
Checking the gravity of the full boil kettle to get the gravity reading for the ABV
When you finish the transfer to the boiling kettle, give all your spent grain to your chickens, make dog treats out of it, or use any other ideas on the internet there are for spent grain.
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--Step 7: At this point, you have either made the wort from grain or purchased the wort at a homebrew shop. Bring your wort to a boil for an hour. During this hour, you add your hops at different times according to your recipe.
The higher the alpha% and the earlier you put them in the boil, the less aroma but more bitterness (IBU) comes out. The later hops are for flavor and aroma.
--Step 8: After an hour of boiling, you need to rapidly cool the wort to prevent bacteria from forming in the danger zone. I use a copper coil and push garden water through it, which cools in 30 minutes or so. For smaller batches, 5 gallons and smaller, I covered them and placed them in my fridge until they got to 90°F or below. Hotter than that will kill the yeast.
--Step 9: Clean your vestles. I use 5-gallon buckets to ferment my beer. Use Star San to clean all your fermentation equipment. When everything is clean, move the boiling kettle to the fermentation buckets. Or if it's a small batch, you can keep it in the boiling kettle and wrap the top with Saran wrap to make it airtight.
**** In order for yeast to survive, it needs an anarobic environment. splash as much as possible to add oxygen back into the wort after boiling. or shake the bucket after it.
--Step 10: Add the yeast of your choice and cover with an airlock. The yeast is the thing that changes the beer's flavor the most, by far!
--Step 11: Let the yeast sit in a room that does not fluctuate in temperature and is within the proper temperature range for the yeast you use. lagers: 40°F–60°F; ales: 60°F–70°F; abbeys: 60°F–80°F. Wait 3–4 weeks and bottle your beer. then cool after carbonation for 24-48 hours, and enjoy! But remember, beer is like wine and gets better with age, so if you don't like the flavor, take it out of the fridge. and let it age longer; the more alcohol, the longer it should age. 3–6 months is about as much change as you will get out of it.
