DIY : Craft Your Own Delicious Beer – Sander Noordam – Medium
Brewing your own beer at home is fun, inexpensive, easy and your brew will be far superior to the canned stuff! Imagine the look on the faces of your beer buddies when you tell them the beer their drinking is of your own secret recipe!
Let me explain to you the basics of brewing!
Ingredients:
Malt extract (liquid or dried)
Hops
Specialty grains
Yeast (varieties all depend on the type of beer you are brewing)
Preparation:
Step 1:
Keep it clean. Clean everything that is going to come in contact with your beer. The easiest way is to do it in the dishwasher or use a powdered cleanser such as PBW.
Step 2:
Rinse everything well! Use very clean potable or distilled water.
If you’re using bleach add one ounce (30ml) of bleach to five gallons (19 liters) of cold water, followed by one ounce (30ml) of white vinegar. Do not mix the bleach and vinegar together before adding to the water! The vinegar will make the water more acidic, which helps the bleach sanitize.
The best and most effective way to clean your equipment properly is to use either a food-grade cleanser or sanitizer such as One Step No-Rinse Sanitizer.
Brewing:
Step 1:
Take notes of everything! Write down the cleaning process, what strain of yeast, the amount and specific type of malt, what variety of hops, and any other ingredient that you are going to use to produce your beer. This will allow you to reproduce any brew, but also gives you the opportunity for experimentation and improvements.
Step 2:
Steep your grains. Put any specialty grains into a grain bag, it’s like a tea bag only a lot bigger, and steep them in a large stock pot in three gallons (10 liters) of hot water (around 150F (66C)) for about 30 minutes.
Remove the grain bag and allow the water to drip out of the grain bag into the pot. Do not squeeze the bag! Because you may extract tannins that will make your beer taste yuck.
Step 3:
Add the malt extract and bring everything to a boil. The hops are usually added in intervals to add flavor, bitterness, or aroma depending at the time you add them.
In general, hops added early in the boil will contribute more bitterness, but at the expense of flavor and aroma.
Hops added at the end of the boil will give you the pronounced flavor and aroma, but will contribute a lot less bitterness to the beer.
Step 4:
Chill your wort. After you have boiled the liquid, called wort, you need to cool is as quickly as possible! The easiest way to do this is to put the whole pot into a sink filled with ice water.
By gently stirring the wort, you help to expedite the cooling. Once it’s around 80F (27C) you are ready to transfer it to the fermenter.
Step 5:
Pour the cooled wort into your fermenter. After the wort is cooled, transfer it into your fermenter. Now slash as much as possible, yeast will need the oxygen!
Once fermentation has started, you don’t want any ait, as it will lead to off flavors. Use a large strainer to scoop the hops out. Add water to make five gallons (20 liters) and add the yeast. Some yeast requires that you “bloom” (stir with warm water to activate) prior to adding. Put the lid on top and affix the air-lock.
In about 24 hours you should notice that there is a lot of bubbling in the airlock. If it hasn’t started doing anything after 48 hours, you might have a problem such as dead yeast. And you’ll have to start over…
Bottling:
Step 1:
Prepare for bottling! After a week the activity for the airlock will slow down a lot. Leave it alone for two weeks from the first time you started brewing. If you bought a kit, it probably came with some priming sugar or DME, to provide carbonation to your beer once you’ve bottled it.
Boil the sugar in little water and cool it. Then add it to the empty, cleaned and sanitized bucket or to your fermented beer.
Step 2:
Transfer your brew. Using your plastic tubing as a siphon to transfer the beer as gently as possible from the fermenter to the bottling bucket. Try not to get any sediment from the fermenter into the bottling bucket.
Step 3:
Get your bottles ready! Fill the tube (attached to the bottle filler) with water and put the open end in the fermented beer and place the bottle filler in a glass, bottle or the sink. Press down to let the water flow out, this will result in beer flowing with it like a siphon. Fill each bottle just to overflowing, then remove the bottle filler. This leaves an (almost) perfect airspace at the top of the bottle. Cap the bottle with a handy bottle caper, and repeat until all the bottles are full.
Step 4:
Age your brew! Store your homemade brew for at least a week, preferably two, in room temperature, then refrigerate.
Step 5:
Enjoy! When you’re getting thirsty and want to enjoy your own brew, open the bottle and pour carefully in a glass. Leave about a quarter inch in the bottle, the sediment tastes a little yeasty.
Here are some sites which offers everything you need: (I’m not making money off it)
https://www.mrbeer.com/
https://www.northernbrewer.com/
