I’ve had several friends ask how the home beer brewing process works so I figured I would document my latest batch, a Belgian Ale.
Terms
wort (pronounced wert) – This is your beer before it’s actually ‘beer’.
racking – The process of transferring your wort into the carboy, or bottling the finished beer
trub – The sediment at the bottom of the carboy after fermentation
Equipment
First off, you will need to buy a home brewing kit. Here is the kit I purchased. Good kits will come with:
- PET Carboy – This looks like a large water cooler jug and is used to house your wort during the fermentation process. PET is a special type of plastic that is highly resistant to absorbing odors and is generally preferred to glass carboys as they are lightweight, unbreakable and easier to clean.
- Carboy brush – A long bendable soft brush for cleaning your carboy
- Long spoon – A really long plastic stirring spoon (don’t use wood!)
- Bottling Bucket – This is a food-grade bucket with a spigot near the bottom
- Bottling wand – A tool that has a spring activated release at the end that greatly simplifies bottling
- Hydrometer – A Hydrometer checks the gravity (more on that soon) of your wort
- Racking cane – A straight metal tube that siphons your wort at bottling time
- Air lock – A device that allows carbon dioxide to escape, but keeps air out
- Drilled Bung – A rubber stopper with a hole in the middle
- Bottle capper – A handheld tool that caps your bottles
You’ll also need a good sized kettle. I use a 21 quart pot I picked up from a grocery store.
Oh yeah, and about 50 pop-top beer bottles — so start saving them! Screw-top bottles won’t work!
Ingredient Kit
These kits are available online for around $50. The kit will include all grans, malt, yeast and priming sugar that you need to make about five gallons of beer. Depending on the style of beer you’re making, it might also include candy sugar, fruit essence, or even Irish Moss (which is used to clarify your beer). The yeast will either be dried powder or a liquid — liquid form is the good stuff, but is perishable! Most importantly, they come with full instructions.
Preparation
The single most important thing you must do is to make sure everything that touches the wort is sanitized.
If bacteria gets into your wort after boiling it will cause your beer to go bad. Toxins cannot live in beer so you won’t get sick or die, but you’ll end up with five gallons of drain cleaner if you catch my drift.
Now don’t freak out too much, sanitation isn’t the same thing as sterilization. I normally soak items in hot water with a good amount of bleach for a moment or two and give it a good rinse. You’ll want to wash and rinse the inside of your carboy, the racking cane, airlock and bung.
Making the wort
You’ll want to closely follow the included instructions, but the process follows these general steps:
- Steeping the grains. Put the grains into the included cheesecloth bag, tie it off and throw it in a pot of water (usually between three and five gallons), and put it on to boil. Once the water hits 170 degrees, take out the grain bag and let it drain off into the pot. Toss the grains.
- Adding the malt – Your malt will either be in powdered or syrup form. Either way, dump it in.
- Boiling – Now here is the difficult part, you’ll have to boil the water for about an hour. Yep.
- Adding hops – About 45 minutes into the boil, you’ll add your flavoring hops. These look just like rabbit food pellets; just open the pack at dump them in. About 58 minutes into the boil, you’ll then add the aroma hops.
- Cooling – The idea here is to cool down the boiling wort to room temperature as quickly as possible. The longer the wort is exposed to the air, the greater the chance of contamination. I dunk the pot in the kitchen sink filled with salted ice water. It still takes about a half hour to get it to 70 degrees.
- Check the OG – Take a sample of your cooled wort into the hydrometer tube and drop the hydrometer into it. The hydrometer will tell show you the Original Gravity (OG) and potential alcohol content. Make sure to record the OG!
- Racking to the carboy – Stick the metal end of the racking cane into the carboy and siphon the cooled wort from the pot to the carboy. Be careful to leave the sediment behind!
- Add the yeast – Just dump it in and give it a stir.
- Put the bung into the bunghole and insert the air lock (stop laughing)
- Stick the carboy in your basement for a week or so
Fermentation
At this point you can watch biology at work. The yeast cells will now go to work eating the sugars in the wort and, well, crap out alcohol. You’re drinking yeast poop.
The first stage of the fermentation process is interesting to watch. Within the first twenty four hours the calm wort will start to bubble and swirl as though someone is stirring the pot. You’ll see little globules swimming all around and the wort will develop a large head of bubbles and the airlock will start releasing a lot of carbon dioxide gas.
The entire process will take a week or two, just keep your eye on the air lock. After a while you’ll see that the escaping gas and bubbles will start to decline. When all is calm, you’ll want to take another gravity reading with the hydrometer. When the gravity is near the Final Gravity (FG) it’s time to bottle.
Bottling
Soak your bottles in a bleach/water solution and rinse well in clean warm water. You’ll need about 48 pop-top bottles. It sounds like a huge pain, but it’s really not that bad — it’ll take about a half hour to do. You’ll also need to sanitize the bottling bucket, racking cane, stirring spoon and bottling wand.
When you’re done with this, boil your bottle caps in some water for a quick moment to sanitize them and then boil the priming sugar in two cups of water. Allow both to cool to room temperature.
Insert the racking cane into the carboy and siphon the fermented beer into the bottling bucket. Take care to not move the carboy as the trub will be redistribute back into the beer. Make sure to leave the trub in the carboy. Pour the priming sugar into the beer and give it a quick stir.
Attach the bottling wand to the bottling bucket’s spigot and then turn the spigot on. You should see nice, clean, clear beer flowing up to the end of the wand.
Insert the wand into an empty bottle and press down. The beer will begin to flow; just remove the wand when the beer reaches the top of the bottle. Continue until you’re out of beer! My batches have yielded about 40 bottles of beer.
Cap the bottles and hide them for two weeks while the priming sugar carbonates your beer. The longer you wait to drink the better, but let the bottles sit for two weeks so they can fully carbonate!
Wrap Up
This process might seem daunting, but it’s really not all that difficult.
I’ve made two batches so far and the last one I did without help on a boring weekend day. The boiling part of the process takes about three hours and the bottling portion takes about two. Most of the time you’re standing around watching pots boil.
In the end, you’ll be satisfied to sit down with a bottle of your very own beer. You’ll be surprised how good it is! It just tastes better; you’ll see.
Legality
In Ohio, you can brew up to 100 gallons of home brew per adult living in the household (up to 200 gallons total). You are fully free to share with any person of legal drinking age, however, you cannot sell any beer without a liquor license, period.
