How to make beer at home? Brewing beer without secrets

Your own beer? Brewing your own amber beverage is becoming more and more popular. As usual, the hardest thing is to start the adventure which, with time, may turn into a real passion. Of course, your efforts will not be without reward: it will be not only satisfaction but also delicious home-brewed beer

The equipment you need

Before we get down to the actual brewing of beer, a little space should be devoted to the equipment that a real brewer should have. The most important equipment are:

• mash and brewing vat – its role in homebrewing is fulfilled by a metal pot with a lid (it can be enamel or stainless steel). With a capacity of 30 liters you should be able to produce about 20 liters of beer,
• two plastic fermenters (buckets) and a plastic fermentation tube: one with a tap, the other with a place for the fermentation tube,
• silicon tubing, 1 m,
• 1.5 m needle tube,
• lugol’s liquid,
• thermometer, sugar meter, big spoon for stirring, tube for pouring beer,
• a filter made of steel braid,
• sterilized bottles with caps.

Beer is not made from hops – the most important ingredients

Contrary to what you might think, hops are only a flavoring additive to beer, which is made from malt. So the basic ingredients will be:

• malt – the best choice to start with is barley malt. Other options include wheat malt or rye malt,
• hops – added twice to create aroma and add bitterness to the beer,
• yeast – usually the so-called top-fermenting products which speed up the brewing process and make the beer taste more distinct,
• sugar additives – malt extracts, glucose.

Brewing beer from a ready-made kit

Home brewing can be started in two ways. The simpler one will be a purchased brewkit, which is a ready-made brewing kit. Usually you’ll find there hopped malt extract which looks like thick syrup, but also yeast along with instructions on how to make beer. The advantage, of course, is that the process is shorter and there is less chance of things going wrong. An alternative is to mash the malt yourself, which means boiling it at the right temperature for several hours. The filtrated wort becomes a semi-finished product used for making beer

Where to buy ingredients for making beer?

The best solution is to go to specialized brewery stores or online shopping e.g. at Homebrewing, Twój Browar or Esencja Smaku. Brewkit can be easily bought in online stores.

Brewing beer from malt, step by step

Although different recipes can be used and the proportions of ingredients can vary, each malt beer brewing process can be described as repetitive. It follows a sequence that the beginning brewer must be familiar with:

Mashing

The purpose of this stage is to get the sugar into the water. Mashing is performed until the iodine no longer colors the malt sample (this indicates full utilization). The grated malt is added to water heated in a pot at a ratio of 1 kg to 3 l of water. The mash is stirred with a spoon. It is usually brought to a temperature of 65 degrees C and kept there for one hour

Filtration

This is done to make the wort. We pour the liquid into a fermenter (bucket) equipped with a faucet. A tube helps to check whether the beer is getting clear. Cloudy liquid is poured back into the fermenter; clear liquid can go into the brewing pot.

Brewing and cooling the beer

The wort is brewed by boiling for one hour. This is the time it takes to add up to three doses of hops. After one hour of boiling, we cool the liquid to 20 degrees C. Care should be taken to ensure its sterility

Adding yeast

Pour the cooled wort into a fermenter. Add yeast, but without stirring

Fermentation

The yeast causes the so-called turbulent fermentation to start, the liquid foams. It takes a few days for it to finish. Check the progress with a sugar meter. It is followed by silent fermentation when the beer matures in another, tightly closed fermenter (bucket). For two weeks, the beer reaches clarity.

Pouring

Refermentation involves pouring into another fermenter. Glucose or extract is then added to the beer. The beer is poured into bottles and capped – it is very important that the vessels are sterile

Photo: Engin Akyurt/Pexels