SUPPLIES
- Home brew equipment kit
- Canned malt extract
- Hops
- Yeast
Overview
The explosion of new beer styles in America has led to the resurgence of a lost art: home brewing. All you need is a standard kitchen stove, a place to store bottles and a little patience. Beginning home brewers today can take a shortcut by buying pre-made malt extract. It's a thick, sweet syrup sold in 3-lbs. cans, and is added to water to get the same base that brewers get after the grain-steeping process. Think of it as beer's answer to concentrated orange juice: It may not be quite as genuine as the fresh-squeezed kind, but it's a heck of a lot easier to make, and you get basically the same drink at the end.
Step 1
Heat up the malt in water to make a 5-gallon batch. Add the hops pellets and let them steep. Move the wort (pronounced "wert") to the primary fermentation bucket and let it cool to room temperature.
Step 2
Add yeast and seal the bucket with an air lock to allow gases to escape. Let it ferment at room temperature, generally for a week or two, until the liquid stops churning with yeast activity. This produces the alcohol in your beer.
Step 3
"Rack" the fermented wort off the thick sediment at the bottom of the bucket, into the second, "bottling" bucket. Add bottling sugar. This gets the yeast going again and creates the additional fermentation to cause carbonation in the bottles.
Step 4
Bottle the wort, sealing it with the bottle caps and capper. It should make around 2 cases, or roughly 50 bottles.
Step 5
Let it sit a couple more weeks at room temperature so the carbonation can build up in the bottles. Then chill, open and enjoy.
TIPS AND WARNINGS
- TIP : Purchase home brewing kits and all necessary equipment for this process online (see Resources).
- WARNING : Cleanliness and sterilization of all equipment is crucial, unless you want your pristine, purchased yeast to get invaded by rogue micro-organisms floating around out there. Use the specified amounts of all ingredients, especially bottling sugar. (Use too little and your beer will be flat; use too much, and you will have a case full of glass hand-grenades, ready to explode.)
Resources
