1. Easy Home Brewing

Can you remember the first got the idea in your head to take up brewing your own beer at home?

For many it is a tour of a brewpub or some other behind the scenes exposure to all that happens when good beer is made. Before that one pivotal moment, you may have never even thought about beer being made at all.

The origin of beer was the liquor store or the market and that was that. But when you realized that not only does beer go through a fascinating transformation from grains, hops and malts to this delicious brew you enjoy but that you can make your own beer if you want to, that is when the idea of becoming a home brewer started to become a reality in your mind.

For others that moment of realization that home brewing could be a whole new world might have happened when you were first exposed to “real” beer, as the home brewing enthusiasts call it. That is when you sampled a brew that was not made by one of the big retail beer makers like Budweiser, Coors or Miller and you discovered what beer tasted like when it came directly from the brewing process to your glass.

That might also have been the day that you found out what an amazing diversity of beer types, textures and flavors there were. For many when they realize that you can find a diversity of beers that is almost as extensive as in the wine world that it is often very difficult to go back to boring old pasteurized beer again.

If you are about to “make the leap” to become a home brewer yourself, you are about to step into a rich and full world that is filled with history, culture, tradition and new friends and associates. You won’t just take up the hobby of brewing beer; you will “become” a home brewer, which is a unique kind of individual indeed.

Did you know that it is entirely possible for you to make high quality beer right in your own home? All it takes is a small investment in equipment, a few base ingredients and the patience that it will take to learn the process. The method is not difficult which explains why home brewing is a passion and hobby that is growing in popularity more and more every year.

You might be surprised whom you know has a love of brewing beer because it’s not just the hard-core beer drinker you may know. Since brewing beer at home is about the art and the craft of making a quality beverage, home brewers come from every walk of life there is from bartenders to ministers and from college professors to librarians.

Home brewing is fun and exciting way of creating your own batch of delicious beer. However, what transforms home brewing hobbyists to life long makers of beer is the challenge of always finding new blends, methods ways to make their beer even more flavorful than the last batch.

Be forewarned that a zeal for becoming better at home brewing can be habit forming. If you get hooked, you will meet thousands of others in your town, around the country and the world who have the same addiction as you.

It’s a wonderful addiction that you will never regret catching because brewing beer at home can provide decades of fun and enjoyment while making your own blends. Nonetheless it provides something else just as good, which is really great tasting beer.

2. Easy Home Brewing

There are a lot of people who have taken the plunge to start making their own beer from scratch at home. However the odds are that just as many people are curious about brewing beer at home but are pushed away by the challenge of buying all of the stuff and figuring out how to do it and then the problem of the mess and the storage of equipment and beer in different phases of fermentation and completion.

For many, what is needed is an easy way to give home brewing a shot without having to go to all the effort of buying a complete set up of equipment, all of the ingredients, the bottles and storage just to find out if you like it. What is not generally known is that there is such a fast track way to making beer at home. By buying a simple device called a beer-making machine, you can easily make a batch of beer right in the home

The good thing about a beer making machine is that it is basically a plug and go situation. This takes a lot of the intimidation out of buying many individual units of equipment and going through each step of brewing and fermentation. The brewing machine goes a long way to take over the preparation so you can do all the steps using its resources. When you buy the machine, it comes with the ingredients and instructions.

The entire design of a brewing machine is based on the idea of reducing the mess and fuss of making beer. A first time home brewer needs to have some of the joy of making their own brew but not as much of the work and the worry. You certainly don’t have to be a beer-making guru to use these user-friendly machines because the instructions are clear and written in an understandable way and the ingredients come measured and ready to go.

As with any ready made solution for discovering something as great as home brewing your own beer, there are pluses and minuses to breaking yourself in on a beer making machine. One of the biggest pluses is they are a one-time use machine that you can use and throw away. This gets the problems of cleaning and sanitation out of the loop entirely. All of the ingredients are prepared and ready to add in premeasured amounts so the fuss and worry is removed as well. It is just about as user friendly as you can make home brewing be.

The down side of using a beer-making machine to break into the craft of home brewing is that because it is completely set up when you buy it as a kit, you don’t get the chance to play with the ingredients and enjoy the creativity and experimentation that is a big part of why beer making is so fun. You go through the steps and make one good batch of beer. However, you don’t have the chance to make it a great batch of beer because you cannot make changes to the ingredients as you go.

Also a beer-making machine is sold to make one and only one batch of beer and then you, in theory, are to throw it away. This may seem like a big waste and you might try to clean it up to use it again, but the real idea of the product is as a starter experience. It really isn’t the kind of thing intended for you to buy a new kit every month and continue making that same kind of beer each time.

Keep the perspective that it is not really designed to be your total and final solution for making beer. By breaking into home brewing with the beer-making machine, you get some of the experience of making and fermenting your own beer and then bottling it to serve a few weeks later as a genuine product of your little at home brewery. The fun of that may be a great way for you to start making beer and then grow into a hobby that may last a lifetime.

3. Easy Home Brewing

Whenever you start a new hobby, its best to take a few minutes and think about what you are getting into. A lot of new hobbies require a significant investment of time and money. This is certainly true of golf, skydiving, scuba and home brewing.

So along with a plan on how to get started, it’s good to have a good plan for getting ready to plunge into home brewing full scale. If you have a road map for “checking it out”, you can determine if home brewing will fit into your lifestyle and your budget.

“Looking before you leap” means that you find out what it means to be involved in the hobby or sport as a full time member of that hobby community. When it comes to home brewing, that will only happen when you too can make your own beer at home. When that time finally comes, you can play with the recipes and make the taste of your own beer very unique. However, a mature approach to this very adult hobby means checking it out and knowing the investment of time, money and space in the home before you spend your first dollar to get set up as a home brewer.

An easy and fun way to ease into the hobby of home brewing that doesn’t cost a cent is to begin to network with those who are already well into their passion for making beer. You can find forums online to learn more about getting started. There are certainly a number of home brewing societies and clubs in town that you can find out about online or through your local retail brewing supply store.

These social connections will be people who are very much “evangelists” for home brewing because they know the fun of it. You will get plenty of chances to sit in with a new friend to step through the brewing process and not only learn what equipment you will need but how it is used as you get training from an “old pro” in home beer making.

Once you have gotten some basic training from home brewing gurus, the time will come when you are ready to consider buying your own equipment and taking a stab at it yourself. However, you have already witnessed that home brewing in the house is a big event. From filling up the kitchen, to refrigerating, to making a mess sometimes and requiring places to store, refrigerate and ferment the beer in the various stages from ingredients to finished product.

Home brewing doesn’t have to be a solitary activity. Why not get your friends and family involved? If they can attend meetings at the home brewing club or go to competitions or other events that are all about home brewing, they can catch the same enthusiasm you have.

That enthusiasm will be very important particularly in your significant other because each brewing session will be a major event in the house involving the kitchen with lots of pans, bottles and equipment. Having your wife or husband fully onboard with the process and even working on it together makes the fun of home brewing even more fulfilling.

Another area of looking before you leap is to plan out not only how you will use all of the equipment you will buy but also how you will handle issues of storage. It’s a very pragmatic concern if you bring in this arsenal of beer making equipment. While you will enjoy that equipment a great deal, you don’t want it to dominate your home.

By getting a feel for the equipment when you are preparing to start your home brewing hobby, you can prepare a storage space for the equipment when it is not in use. Think ahead about storage for the fermentation phase of brewing as well as storing up to five gallons of beer per finished batch.

By thinking ahead, when you become a very active home brewer, you will have your family and facilities all ready for the changes. That is looking before you leap into the exciting world of making and enjoying your own homemade beer.

4. Easy Home Brewing

To become a real “master” of brewing beer, you have to understand every aspect of what happens during the brewing process. When you get home from the beer brewing supply store with your kit or your supplies to make a fresh batch of beer, it is sometimes hard to imagine that those raw materials will result in a delicious batch of beer that you made yourself. By understanding each step, you can become quite adept at making beer at home.

Each step of making beer in order is important. From sterilizing your equipment, to purchasing the supplies and then on to boiling, brewing and fermentation. That last step, fermentation and aging is unique from the rest because it calls for you not to interact with your beer. That means no adjusting the equipment or formulating the ingredients.

This step calls for you to use patience to leave your beer alone as it ferments. The fermentation process is just as crucial if not more important than any of the preparation steps. That is because it is fermentation that genuinely turns the mixture you have cooked up into a wonderful tasting beer you will be proud to serve.

There are two phases of fermentation, which are the primary stage and the secondary stage. Both are important. During primary fermentation, the yeast and the sugars that are in the wort you prepared go through a long chemical interaction that releases carbon dioxide as a byproduct. Now during this phase, you want to get that CO2 out of those fermentation bottles because if you leave them in there, the bottles will explode.

The need to get that carbon dioxide out of the fermentation bottle without opening up the fermentation to outside air entirely is one good reason to buy specialized fermentation equipment because they will come with air release devices that will utilize an airlock system to release the CO2 buildup but keep a level of separation between the outside environment and your fermenting beer.

Once you have the bottles prepared and the wort in place, its time to find a cool dark place in the house to place the fermenting bottles. Don’t give in to the urge to put them in the refrigerator because that will just stop the fermentation in its tracks. A room that sustains a constant 65-75 degree temperature is good.

Now that the fermentation process is underway, you do what is often the most difficult maneuver for any home beer zealot. You leave the beer alone and let the ingredients make magic in those bottles for about two weeks.

Secondary fermentation is the next and final phase, unless you choose to age your beer to enhance the flavor. The second fermentation is where you add some additional sugar and you strain out the sediments from the primary fermentation and trap the mixture in sealed bottles.

The CO2 build up is not as extreme so the danger of exploding beer bottles is gone. The carbon dioxide creates that bubbly attribute to your beer that will give it a wonderful head and taste.

Both phases are necessary and you will give your beer another couple of weeks in this stage before it will be ready to drink. After you have a little taste, if you want to let the beer continue to process and age, maybe even in wood containers to add a rich flavor to the brew, this is just you being the Brewmeister that will result in wonderful tasting beer to serve to your friends and family.

5. Easy Home Brewing

One of the great reasons for learning to brew your own beer is to learn more about the various grains and ingredients that makes one beer better than another one. When you first start your hobby of home brewing, you no doubt got connected to a local club or association of home brewers. They can help you learn the lingo and how to tell what the best grains are to use in your beer. Before you go to the first meeting, it might speed things up if you knew the basics.

The use of malts is at the heart of how grain contributes to a great beer. The difference between a light beer that doesn’t have a heavy malt taste and one that virtually tastes like a loaf of bread all go back to what malts you pick and the process that is used during the malting and brewing of your beer. There are a big variety of different grains that people commonly use when brewing their own beer and you may have to take some time to brew up a few batches using different grains to see which ones capture what to you is the perfect beer taste. Understanding how malting works is a good first step.

Now as a home brewing enthusiast, you will probably not actually take grain through the malting process yourself. You should become familiar with how malting works and why there is so much variety to the outcome of the process. This way you can use that knowledge when buying the malts for your beer so you can get one that will give you the flavor, color and intensity of beer that you are looking for.

The malting process starts with the grain to be used. The most common grains are barley, wheat or rye but others can be used. The grain is used from the seed form and steeped and germinated which gets the active part of the malting and brewing process underway. Germination is what happens when a seed sprouts out to become a plant, releases the stored energy of the seed that was put there to jump-start the growth process. We are going to use that energy and convert it into malt mash that you can use to brew your beer.

What happens during the germination process of those grains is that the stored energy in the seed is changed as it is released. When the starches in the seeds changes into sugars by the enzymes that are active part of the germination process, those sugars give us one of the core ingredients for great beer. It’s at that exact moment that the germination process is suspended using kilns to dry the grains and all of that good sugar and enzymes that became active remain in the malt for use during the brewing process.

Obviously this description of the basic malting process is simplified but for our purposes it gives you a background into what happens before you buy the malts you will use in your home made beer. Based on this description, you can go on to get a feel for the wide variety of malt types. The more you know about malt, the better informed you will be about what malts you wish to use when you brew your beer. Those decisions will have a big effect on the taste of your beer. So for great tasting beer, use great malts and knowing one malt from the next is the key to knowing which to use for the best home made beer possible.

6. Easy Home Brewing

Beer is about more than just a great tasting beverage. The fact that a culture has grown up around the joy of making and enjoying fine beer testifies how much it has become a part of how our culture works.

The drinking of the beverage is only partially about the taste of the brew itself and very much about where you have your beer, what you drink it out of, how the beer looks in the glass and who you are drinking it with.

While you as a home-brewer cannot control many of those factors, you can control the quality and ambiance of the beer you make so it not only tastes great but is visually appealing as well.

If you pour a commercial beer from a bottle or can, you may not be aware of how much those beer makers put into not just the taste but also the affect of what other senses have on the beer drinking experience. The way the beer pours, the aroma as you pour it, the head that wells up in your mug and how the beer looks in the glass all are just as important as the taste itself.

The emphasis the big beer producers put on ascetics is so extreme that they even make the sound the can makes when you “pop a cold one” to be unique because they know that sound alone can prepare you to receive the taste of a great beer drinking experience.

The truth is none of that will change whether the beer itself is of high quality or is good to drink, but visual appeal matters. One area of visual appeal that you have some control over when making your own beer at home is clarity. Clarity simply refers to how the beer looks in the glass. If you can see through the beer and it is a consistent beige or amber color, that is visually appealing.

If things are floating around in the beer, even if they are perfectly harmless byproducts of the brewing process, that can diminish how inviting your beer is to enjoy and even diminish how enjoyable the beer is to drink even if the beer itself is of high quality.

A lot of the “stuff” that floats around is beer comes from the yeast that is crucial to the fermentation process that makes beer. Some yeasts are better than others about settling out of the beer during fermentation. Another source of visible material in the beer comes from what is referred to as non-microbiological particles or NMPs, which are a byproduct of the brewing process.

Again, none of these visible materials are harmful to consume nor do they reduce the value of the beer. They just look bad and hurt the clarity of the beer, which is one-way beer, is measured for quality.

Many of the NMPs are introduced during the initial creation of the wort, which is phase one of any brewing operation. The wort is boiled at a high temperature for a significant period of time to cause the proteins in the ingredients to break down and become part of the fluidity of the wort rather than remain in a substance state or a “floc” which remains visible in the finished product. To avoid this, make sure your boil sustains a temperature of 215F for 90 minutes to assure complete processing of the proteins.

Another important brewing step that you can do to reduce visible agents in your beer is to cool the wort very quickly. By bringing the temperature down rapidly, the clarity is vastly enhanced as is the flavor and overall quality of the beer.
The best way to accomplish such rapid cooling is to move the wort quickly from the brewing process to a very cool environment or using a specialized wort cooler to quickly bring that temperature down and eliminate many of the flocs that might be there if the cooling goes more slowly.

Seeking beer clarity can become a major passion of yours as a home brewer and there is a whole science to using clarifying agents such as Irish Moss to enhance beer clarity without diminishing beer quality or taste. Learning good techniques for making your beer clear and appealing is just another step in your ongoing quest to become the best amateur beer brewer possible. That is a quest worth pursuing.

7. Easy Home Brewing

For a beer lover, one of the most enjoyable hobbies you can pick up is to brew your own beer at home. Once you get set up with the equipment and basic supplies, it’s a fairly affordable hobby and you will get a lot of entertainment out of going through the brewing and fermentation process.

Then once you start bringing out your own home brewed beer, you get the sense of pride because this beer made entirely by you, not to mention the enjoyment of sucking down that hearty blend that you created yourself.

One of the hold ups that may have kept you from getting into making your own beer may have the cost issue. If you have ever taken a tour of a brewery and you see the huge machines and storage tanks, it’s hard to see how you can do that in your kitchen with just a few simple devices.

However, there is an entire home brewing subculture that is based entirely on being able to make beer yourself without spending a fortune. Its legal, its fun and brewing beer can become a lifelong hobby.

With all of that said, it’s true that the initial costs can be pretty intimidating. The cost of the pots, fermenters and other specialized equipment can run into several hundred dollars.

It’s risky to sink that kind of money into a new hobby before you even know if you will enjoy making beer, whether the beer you make will be drinkable or if you will stick with it. During a time when we need most of what we earn just to get by, that is a risk that may be holding you back from getting into the hobby of home brewing.

Of course one natural solution is to get your first exposure and training in making beer with someone else’s equipment. Once you start poking around home brewing web sites and places where the equipment and supplies to make beer are sold in town, you can find out about clubs and societies that are full of people who are making beer all the time right at home like you want to do.

These people not only love home brewing, but they can become real evangelists for their hobby and with very little encouragement! You can enjoy some Saturdays in their shop or kitchen learning how to brew beer with someone that already knows how. This kind of experience is priceless because you learn what to look for in equipment and what is essential and what is optional.

You can go through the brewing process and learn a lot about how to make actual beer that is drinkable and what pitfalls to avoid. Meanwhile, you may not have spent any more money than to buy your new friend lunch or to bring the pretzels for the tasting party when the beer is done.

When you are ready to get started, your knowledge of what you really need will pay off big time. You still don’t have to pay top dollar for the equipment to get up and running. Many people get started with making beer and for many reasons, their hobby stops suddenly. The outcome is that there is a pretty brisk used home brewing equipment market out there.

You can find discounted equipment in new or like new condition out on eBay or Craigslist all the time. Don’t overlook the local sources as those home brewer clubs and associations may have bulletin boards with listings of people who want to sell their equipment. Pawnshops in the area are another great resource.

Another great way to save money is to go together with a friend and buy the equipment together and split the costs all the way down the line. This makes brewing beer more fun and social and each of you can have the equipment and supplies home at different times to get to know it and learn to make good beer separately so you can make great beer together.

Who knows, you may get so good at it that you start selling your beer to local pubs. Plus, when the big bucks come rolling in from that, your investment in learning to brew beer will really look good to you.

8. Easy Home Brewing

As we have discussed before, often the urge to take the plunge into home brewing comes when you visit a brewpub and pay ten dollars for an imported beer that was brewed in house.

Even if that beer is good, it’s easy to start to suspect that you could do as well making beer and that your beer would be perfectly fresh and would cost a lot less than ten dollars a glass to enjoy this flavor all the time. When that thought crossed your mind, the home brewer in you is born.

The community of beer lovers is very large as documented in the huge beer sales that stay consistent around the world. That is why it is almost a shame and a crime when beer is mass produced and bad beer is sold so widely. It’s a crime because it is so easy to make really good beer. If you have that desire to enjoy the finest of this ancient recipe, you will find that getting started on this great hobby is far easier than you may have thought.

While you will have to learn a few things about the process of making beer, it will be more fun than any class you took in high school for sure because you are learning to make something you love and you get to drink your final exam!

Unlike school though, once you get down the basic process of home brewing, the variety of “right answers” on how to make a great beer are diverse and fun to play with. You can try different grains, hops and yeast combinations.

You can also adjust when each ingredient is added and learn how to balance the bitter flavor with the hops flavor to give you a deep rich blend or a light beer and all using the same equipment and much the same ingredients. So with that enticement to the fun and endless variety you can find in home brewing, it’s just a matter of getting started.

It’s very easy to fall under the influence of “beer purists” who will advocate very expensive and complicated equipment and using exotic ingredients to make a beer of very high quality and taste. If you make it a practice to socialize at the home brewing retailer or at home brewing clubs or web sites, it’s easy to pick up that side of the community that is very particular and advanced in the craft of home brewing.

However, it is important to remember that just starting out that you are not a home brewing purist yet! It’s best not to try to be one because starting out, its best to let others help you get some very basic equipment so you can learn the craft of home brewing and develop your skills easily and without so much pressure.

If you spend thousands on very elaborate and hard to operate equipment too soon, you will be frustrated and if the outcome is not just right, you will be disappointed. So cut yourself some slack and buy just the basics and just learn to make a very down to earth starter batch of beer. You have all the time in the world to learn your craft and grow until you can afford to be a “beer purist” and be fussy and particular too.

So don’t be ashamed to buy a basic beer making kit at the beer retailer store or online to get you started. These kits come with all you need in equipment and supplies to step through making your first few batches of beer. It’s important you give yourself the time to use these starter kits to learn your basic skills.

Then once you have the basics, it will be great fun to buy different types of grains, hops, and yeasts then experiment to refine your skills. That is a natural way to learn and a way to become a long-time beer making enthusiasts and enjoy this wonderful hobby for many years to come.

9. Easy Home Brewing

We tend to think of “malt” as a thing. Of course, there is the candy malt and there is the old fashioned “malted” that was the stable of 1950s “malt shops” which in our mind is more like a modern day milk shake.

However, when it comes to beer, just about anyone, even people who are not involved in home brewing can list the ingredients as hops, malt, and grains. So as part of our quest to become more familiar with all of the aspects of beer making, it’s a good idea to explore more deeply what exactly the malt in beer is all about.

When you hear the word “malt” in regards to the brewing of beer, the reference is actually to malted barley. Malt is the outcome of the process of malting which starts with pure barley grain, the same grain you might use to make muffins or barley soup. That is a good way to ground the concept of malting to something very familiar.

Even then the term “malted barley” is not specific enough. Malting gets right to the heart of how beer is made because the core ingredients of beer is what results when the sugars from malted barley are fermented. Those sugars are scientifically named maltose hence, malt. The malt used to make beer is the outcome of fermenting the sugars from malted barley whereas the candy or desert forms of malt are those sugars themselves, unfermented. However, what makes brewers malt so useful in beers is that there are a wide variety of types of maltose sugars that result from the fermentation. Each of these can be brewed into a very unique beer.

How malt is produced can make for interesting trivia. It gives you insight into how the malts you use in your home brewing come to be. The process of malting barley begins with jump-starting the germination process that is nature’s way of preparing the barley plants to grow from seeds into sprouts.

The barley is soaked and then they are drained fairly soon so the seeds will be stimulated to begin to germinate. The part of the germination process that is interesting to brewers happens when certain enzymes are released by germination.

These enzymes are powerful chemicals that convert the stored sugars and starches in the seeds that will become food to power the germination and growth of the plant. It is those enzymes that the brewer is looking to capture.

The entire objective of malting is to activate those enzymes in the seeds and release them so the brewer can capture them for the brewing process. So as soon as the germination process starts, the grain is quickly dried so the enzymes are captured in that raw state to be processed into malted barley.

Once the brewer has the malted barley in the condition we just went through, that malt is saturated in hot water. This stimulates and activates the enzymes and puts them to work again.

Under the controlled conditions of the brewing process, the enzymes do their job of converting the starches in the barley to sugars. As those sugars go directly from conversion to be boiled with hops and then combined into fermented yeast, the result is this little thing we call beer.

Now this is all good information but most of us who are making beer at the amateur level. For our purposes, malt extract that is sold by your home brewing supplier is a great way to have all of that skilled preparation at your disposal without you having to do all the work.

By buying the malt in extract form, it is ready to go into your boiling water and join the home brewing process in full swing. As you add the malt, those enzymes will kick in and the chemical reactions needed to create great tasting beer will be well underway.

Maybe there will come a time when you will get more involved in the more complicated procedures of brewing or at least visit a brewery where the malting process is underway. Since our love of home brewing is about learning all we can about how beer is made by making it ourselves, getting a feel or the malting process is both educational and fascinating as well.

10. Easy Home Brewing

The time between when it first dawns on you that you could start learning to brew your own beer at home and when you actually take a stab at it is often a long one. For one thing, it takes a pretty significant learning curve to even begin to visualize that it possible to make beer at home. Oh, you may have heard about home breweries but to think of doing it in your own home setting is a leap of understanding that takes some time to get through.

The Internet is often a source of information where we go to start learning more about a new area of life like home brewing. Perhaps that is how you found this article and that’s good. That means you are off on the right foot and using free information from people who have already learned a few things about brewing at home to get your orientation to what it would take for you to learn to brew your own beer at home.

What happens often with any new area of interest, if your fascination with how to brew beer at home starts to get some momentum, it’s a good way to go to log on to the major home brewing web sites and begin to get oriented to the methods, the equipment and the process of brewing beer at home. Do be aware that some of these sites get very technical and it’s easy to get intimidated.
If you can just get an understanding about the equipment and the ingredients and some basic ideas of how the process would go if you were the one doing the brewing, that is a good start.

Since online articles and web sites mix expert knowledge with newcomers orientation, if you do stumble into a section of those sites that you don’t understand, just surf on to pages that are intended to help you where you are and understand that when you get to the level of technical sophistication, you can always come back to these pages. Just build a good bookmark library because it will serve you well.

To pick up speed on learning the real details of what brewing is all about, you don’t have to depend just on reading or books. Since brewing beer in your own home is more than just book knowledge, it is handling of equipment and ingredients, the more direct exposure you can get to the brewing process, the better.

It is also very likely that you developed your interest in home brewing while enjoying a good brew at your local brewpub. Most towns have brewpubs where home made beers are sold in just about every flavor, color ant texture. Many times these brew pubs grew up out of a home brewing hobby that just got bigger and bigger until it became an enterprise and a money making business

That is why most brewpub owners are more than happy to give tours and lessons in home brewing. This is probably some of the most value exposure you can get to how the process of home brewing works. By walking through a brewery where the beer you make is made, you can step through the process to get a feel for how you will proceed.

You can see the boiling pots, how the strainers are used and the filters and fertilizers and everything that is needed to take beer from raw materials to the finished state of a fine brewed beer. In fact, with a little charm and by working for free, you may be able to apprentice in the brewpub making beer. This time will be tremendously valuable to you to help you learn the ropes of making your own beer.

You combine this hands on knowledge with what you are learning online and from other training sources along with what you can learn by networking with other experienced home brewers.

You will have a powerful source of knowledge that will pay you well when you start making your home beer yourself. That knowledge will result in some great tasting beers from your kitchen so you will be glad you took the time to learn all you can before taking the plunge.

11. Easy Home Brewing

In any family when one person gets excited about something new, everybody gets in on the act. That is certainly true of children. They love to be active in whatever hobbies mom and dad love to be part of. If you bowl, the kids want to go and play the video games. If you love Shakespeare in the park, the kids will go and play on the ground nearby. So if you can find a way to give the kids a part of what you are doing, that keeps the family together.

That may seem tough with a hobby like home brewing. After all, the process of brewing is pretty involved and there is boiling water and sterile instruments to think of. That kind of thing really isn’t fun for the kids. So if you can find a way to make a “beer” just for them, then they too can enjoy the excitement and feel part of what the adults are doing.

A way to fill this need is to brew up a delicious batch of ginger beer for the kids. The nonalcoholic beverage drinkers in the family will love it too! Of course, ginger beer is not real “beer” in the sense of an alcoholic brew although it can be mixed with beer for delightful and very British toddy. However it’s so easy to make that the kids can get involved and they will love the beverage that results almost as much as mom and dad love their home brewed beer.

It’s a good thing to have the procedures, tools and ingredients for your ginger beer all ready to go on brew day because it’s a great surprise to the kids to let them know that they are going to get to make their own beer too! Since the steps for making ginger beer are fast, easy and harmless, the kiddos can have a ball doing it using a very simple recipe and even if they drink it all gone, it’s easy enough to whip up another batch.

The ingredients for ginger beer are not exotic and they can be found at any grocery store.

They include:

– Be ready with 8 plastic bottles that will hold a pint and 4 bottles that will hold a quart
and some bowls to mix the ginger beer up with.
– Ginger – you can get it fresh at larger grocery stores. Two ounces is enough.
– Cream of tartar – about one teaspoon will do.
– Two lemons sliced.
– A pound of sugar
– An ounce of yeast
– Boil one gallon of water.

Now it’s just a matter of putting it all together. Cut the lemons in big sized rings and combine them in a big bowl with the other ingredients. The only other preparation you need to do besides boiling the water is to crush the ginger so it mixes with the water and other parts of the beer.

Now just chill the mixture to room temperature and add the yeast. Put it in the larger bottles to let it ferment for a couple of days. Once that is done, skim off the residue on top and your ginger tea is ready to enjoy.

12. Easy Home Brewing

When you first learn the craft of home brewing, one of the big steps is the transfer of the beer into larger bottles for fermentation and then smaller bottles for storage as well as to serve your guests a delicious brew. This can be messy but it is an important step along the path to great tasting beer. Learning the beer transfer and bottling skills will be a big step as your sophistication at home brewing comes along.

There comes a time that you can consider the next big step in becoming more skilled in your home brewing talents. That next big step is into kegging your home made brews. However before you make that step, its good to know what you will need and the costs and efforts involved so you can go into the kegging step with eyes wide open.

For one thing, kegging your own beer can get a bit expensive. There is another level of equipment including CO2 storage tanks; the kegging canisters and even a kegerator that can all add another level of cost to your home brewing hobby. Hopefully if you have been making your own beer for a few years before you make this step, you can see that the money you have saved on beverages has been significant enough justify making the next big step into kegging.

The first step perhaps of moving into kegging is to get the family on board, especially your spouse. A natural progression, though, is to start your hobby of home brewing for the fun and the savings and then to go toward brewing when you become a serious home brewing zealot and you know the quality of your beer demands this step. So if your family has evolved and you are a home brewing family, they will be as excited as you are to learn this next step.

Along with the costs, get a good feel for the additional storage space kegging will add to your beer making needs and requirements. Along with the equipment for kegging, you will also need additional refrigerator space.

This might be the time to consider the purchase of a specialized refrigeration unit called a kegerator that is made just for chilling and serving your fine beer from the kegging setting. However, if you entertain a lot and you are getting those rave reviews for the quality of your homemade beer, such a purchase is a slam-dunk decision.

The upside of kegging is that it does reduce much of the fuss and mess of using bottles and always having to clean and make sterile those bottles for the next use. Kegging gives you a lot of control over the levels of carbonation in your beer.

That gives you even more options and freedom to adjust carbonation to use in the creation of unique styles and tastes in your beer. That is just one of many ways kegging improves the over all quality and diverse flavors you can achieve with your homemade beers.

Of course there still will be a place for bottling your beer even if you have overhauled your storage and at home serving method to move to kegging. There is a real fun and pride when you can serve family and guest’s great tasting ice-cold beer directly from a keg like you could get it in the pub.

However, you will want to keep some bottles around to create bottled beer for gifts or to take with you to a social outing. When you show up for that next big barbeque with bottles of your own home made and kegged beer, you will be the hit of the event.

Related Info Products:

Grape Growing and Wine Making – The Total Wine Making System

The Red Wine Diet

Beer Brewing Made Easy