Homebrew Underground

Equipment and Ingredients:

This is my first homebrew beer, so I elected to order a brewing kit. Here is a shot of it on my kitchen table …

I ordered the Deluxe Beer Brewing Kit with Ingredients here from Beer-Wine.com:

The kit comes complete with all the ingredients and everything you need – except for the brew pot, so I ordered a 16 qt stainless steel boiling pot. They can be quite expensive … even a cheap one locally was going for almost 50 bucks. I got lucky and found one online from eBay.com for about 15 bucks – including freight.

Step One: Brewing

Add the specified amount of water to the brew pot and bring it to a boil. In my case it was 1 1/2 gallons. I used regular tap water, but I have a cartridge type water filtration system for drinking water – which removes all the bad taste and heavy chlorine odor. Next add the ingredients according to the recipe. Pretty much all the homebrew recipes will use malt extract and, of course, hops:

Malt Extract:

Hops:

The kit came with 3 – 1 1/2 oz packets of hops, but the recipe only called for one packet. I added the hops in stages to try to preserve some of the flavor of the hops so it wouldn’t all get boiled away. The recipe called for the ingredients to be boiled for 30 minutes, so I added about 3 tbsp of hops in the beginning, about 1/2 tbsp after about 15 minutes, and at the end of 30 minutes I added the remaining hops from the packet (about 2 tbsp) and let it boil for 5 minutes more. The brewed batch is called "wort".

Step Two: Fermenting

This is a two-stage recipe … it calls for the wort to be transferred to a fermenter, and then after a few days when the yeast stops bubbling, the recipe calls for the beer to be transferred to a 5 gallon glass carboy to be aged for about 10 days or so before being bottled. While the beer is brewing on the stove, sanitize the fermenter, the lid, one of the air locks, the thermometer and any utensils that will come into contact with the beer with special sanitizer (obtain from a homebrew supply store). Some kits come with enough sanitizer for the batch.

CLEANING AND SANITIZING IS VERY IMPORTANT

During the fermenting and aging and bottle conditioning, the yeast is converting the sugars to alcohol and gasses, giving the beer the desired flavor. If bacteria is introduced, it can grow in the beer as well … a little bit of bad bacteria can grow enough to spoil the taste.

After brewing, cool the wort down and transfer it to the fermenter. You want to cool it down rapidly so any bad bacteria won’t have a chance to start growing. You can put the brew pot in a tub of cold water or you can freeze one gallon plastic containers of drinking water and cut the plastic off and put the block of ice in the fermenter and ladle the wort into the ice. Use whatever method works best. The next step is to pitch the yeast into the wort. You want the temperature to be between 68° and 75° Farenheit to add the yeast.

Here is a shot of the wort in the fermenter with the thermometer floating in it.

Priming the Yeast

Just before the temperature is ready to add the yeast, add it to a sanitized glass about half full with warm (not hot) water, then stir it with a sanitized plastic whisk (or plastic spoon). Wait for about 10 minutes, then add the primed yeast to the fermenter, then whisk briskly with a sanitized stainless stell whisk to thoroughly aerate the mixture and give the yeast a good start.

The brewing kit also comes with a hydrometer. Both the thermometer and the hydrometer come in a plastic tube. Fill the plastic tube about 3/4ths full and take your first hydrometer reading and write it down on a sheet of paper along with the date. Discard the beer in this tube … do not risk contaminating the beer.

Put the lid on the fermenter and fill the air lock about half full of water, then put the air lock into the small hole with the black "O" ring to seal it.

Bubbles will appear in the air lock during fermentation. Let the beer ferment for 3 or 4 days or until you stop seeing bubbles in the air lock.

Continue to Beer Making – Part II