Guide I wrote a year or two ago.
Sorry for the wall of text. I've tried to cover everything I could think of that a reasonable person would ask. It's all stuff I wish I knew when I started out. If any of it isn't clear or doesn't make sense, let me know and I'll have another go at explaining it.
There's a load of shit that people "recommend" or say you definitely need. In my experience, most of it is unnecessary. Each new item probably improves the final beer a tiny bit, but who really cares that much? Brew a few times on the cheap and see if you enjoy it - if you do, and you want to make genuinely excellent beer (rather than beer that's just "fine") then you can upgrade as you go. I can recommend bits of equipment to upgrade to based on the ratio of "cheap" to "actually makes a difference". I have a yeast stirplate to propagate my own wild strains and a brix meter among much else daft stuff that don't really bring much to the party, functionally speaking. However 50p worth of flavourless gelatin will make a huge difference to your beer, for example.
Brewing beer is basically making 5 gallons of sugary water, boiling it to sterilize it, then fermenting it. There's not much else to it, though people like to pretend there is. Nowadays, homebrewers typically select one of 3 methods of brewing.
"Extract brewing" - you get the sugary stuff in tins, add water, and ferment. It's technically easier, but it takes about the same amount of faffing about, basically the same amount of equipment, its very dull and anti-climactic, and the beer isn't that good. It's fine to get started.
"Brew in a Bag" - you get a mesh brew bag, fill it with grains and soak that in a giant pot of warm water for 60-90 minutes (like making a giant cup of tea out of grains). You remove the bag (still containing the grain) which leaves you with "grain tea". You boil this for an hour, adding hops at specific times, and then you ferment. It's way more fun, you get to choose what grains and hops go in, you can reuse the bag (and they're cheap anyway), and the whole process is more interesting than "add a shitload of water from the kettle"
"All-grain brewing" - same as the bag, but you don't use a bag. It's for idiots who like to make things too complicated. I have a friend who used to brew like this, but his brewing process became such a chore he stopped bothering altogether. I'd avoid this as well. You can also do a "partial mash" which is a combination of method 1 and 2. It is pointless, and pleases nobody. Also avoid.
So an overview of “brew in a bag” brewing - make sugary water (called "wort") by soaking grains in water at a specific temp for 60-90 mins then taking the grains out (still in the mesh bag), like a giant teabag. You boil the resulting grain “tea” liquid for an hour, and add hops at specific times during the boil. Then you cool it down to room temp, add yeast and ferment the liquid in a fermentor for a couple weeks to turn the sugar into booze. Stick it in a bottle with a bit of sugar and wait for a few more weeks. Done.
But how do you make it interesting?!
Well - all of these variables can be altered which changes the style. Longer "steep" of the grain? More unfermentable sugar in the beer, which the yeast can't convert, so you beer is sweeter (like with a lot of Belgian beers or stouts). Lighter grains = lighter beer. More late addition hops = more intense hop aroma. Different yeast strains convert sugars differently and give you different final flavours in the beer. If there's a variable, some mad bloke in a shed has done it: fermenting temperature variations over the primary ferment time, 2+ strains of yeast, fermenting without a lid, adding no hops at all etc etc etc. I'll describe a standard recipe and go from there to avoid all that.
Ok lemme start with equipment
Big metal pot. Capacity should be how much you wanna make +30%. I used an 8gall pot to make 5gall batches, but it also worked for smaller batches. This is the most expensive thing.
You’ll also need a grain bag for “mashing”. Mashing is just letting the grains steep in hot water like a giant teabag. These are cheap.
Big long spoon
Thermometer. I used a (clean!) meat thermometer.
Fermenting bucket with airlock. 8 gallon capacity.
Starsan sterilizer. Just a specific type of cleaning liquid that doesn't fuck with the brewing process.
A second fermenting bucket/vessel with a tap/spout thing. After the beer is fermenting, it'll have lots of yeast and crap at the bottom. You pour/decant into a second vessel (leaving the yeast and crap in the first bucket as much as possible), and you bottle from there. Means you end up with clearer beer (and there's discussion about whether leaving too much sediment in bottles affects the beer ageing).
Some bottles, enough capacity to contain everything. I collected Grolsch bottles, but reusing a load of plastic bottles is fine.
That's basically it. Aside from the metal pot (50 quid?), that should all be cheap. If you get a smaller 5 gallon pot, that cost goes down to 30 quid which is alright, and you just make 3.5 gallon batches. Nothing wrong with that. After the initial outlay, the cost is just ingredients, which means you can churn out beer for next to nothing if you wanted to. A quick google - I could make 40 pints of decent beer for about $11 (6 quid? about 15p a pint). A typical recipe for me would be around $40 so ~60p a pint. Still not too shabby!
Ingredients (in general)
Grain - 2lbs per gallon of beer you want to make for something that's about 5% ABV (see ref 1). You can increase that grain amount and make stronger beer (more grain = more sugar = more stuff to ferment and turn into booze). Grain is cheap as fuck, I used to pay $1 per pound. Probably more than that now, but not more than a quid a lb i would have thought. Get them to mill it for you at the store so it is pre-crushed and ready to go.
Hops - 2 or 3 oz is plenty. You want an ounce of something dull like Magnum, and 2 ounces of Goldings or whatever. $3 per oz maybe. These can be expensive if you pick popular ones or depending on season etc. If you aren't making a hop-forward beer, you can get away with using cheaper hops.
Yeast - the dried stuff in packets is fine. US-05 is the "industry standard" strain. $4 or so? Not much anyway. Liquid yeast starts to get a bit complicated - it is more interesting and varied but a bit of a pain.
Ferris recommends brewing his classic "Nothin' Fancy" common ale. 5% ABV. Copper ale, clean and nutty, should come out and crisp. If you want it “spicier”, switch the cascade for pacific jade hops.
(Recipe for 5 gallons)
5lbs 2-row grain (milled)
5lbs Maris Otter grain (milled)
1/2 lb Carafoam (not strictly needed if they won't sell you a half lb)
1oz Magnum hops (Any high Alpha% hop will do, ask them for their cheapest bittering hop - as long as the Alpha is over 8% itll be fine)
3oz Cascade hops (Goldings will do if cheaper in the UK)
1 package of US-05 dry yeast (don't bother with liquid yeasts for now)
The process.
Fill your large pot with however much water you want to make into beer +15% because it'll boil off. I used the measurements on my fermenting vessel - 5 gallon batch meant filling the fermenter up to 23 litres, then pouring that straight into my metal pot. Saves you having to count the litres in one by one.
Heat the water up to 68c. This is probably the only area you have to be exact. Everything else you can be close enough and you'll still get something good at the end, but you need to be fairly accurate with this - 72c is too warm, 64c won't get the job done. This is where your meat thermometer comes in - set it to "Beef - medium" which i think is around 68c. Once the water reaches temperature, turn off the heat.
Place yer bag in the pot, and open it around the top, like this:
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...and pour in all your grain. Use your long spoon to stir it all around so the grains are mixed with the water and not clumpy etc. Leave for an hour minimum to infuse. I usually do 90 minutes.
Once 60-90 minutes is up, take the bag with all the grains out (it'll be really fucking heavy), and try to get as much of the liquid back into the pot. You'll never get it all, but each squeeze is an extra pint of beer you'll get out of your brew. I used to put the bag between two mixing bowls, squeeze the top bowl down and pour off the stuff that came out. You should now just have sweet yellow/brown sugar water in your pot.
Ok, now it is time to boil. Turn the heat back on, and crank it to full. Lid on (if your pot has a lid).
Once the water is boiling, add the 1oz of Magnum hops. Set a timer for 55 minutes. Add 2oz of cascade. Set timer for another 5 minutes, and add the final oz of cascade hops when done. Your total boil should be an hour.
Now your beer is basically done. Just need to ferment it. Cool that sucker down by filling your sink with cold water, then lift the metal pot with the hot pre-beer liquid into the sink so it is getting a cold bath. Every few minutes, replace the water in the sink with new cold water so the pre-beer cools down rather than your sink water warming up. This usually took about 30 minutes.
At this point, you have to sterilize things because your pre-beer won't be boiled again so it won't be re-sterilized. Anything that comes into contact with the liquid has to be sterilized with starsan. In practice, I'm pretty sloppy and I've never had a batch of beer go wrong due to weird stuff growing in it. There isn't a microbe that can grow in beer that is harmful to humans (which is why homebrewers are still alive), but it can make your beer taste like shit if you aren't careful.
Sterilize your fermenting bucket with starsan (follow instruction on bottle - its basically "pour some starsan in and add cold water"), and rinse it out. Pour the pre-beer liquid (which should now be at room temperature) into the fermetor. Add the yeast sachet directly into the liquid, add the lid to your fermenting bucket and seal up the airlock.
Leave for 2 weeks minimum, though I typically do 3 weeks.
You now have 5 gallons of uncarbonated beer, so you have to carbonate it by adding sugar. The logic here is that there is still yeast in the beer (there's yeast in all beer, it is impossible to filter it out) so if you give it more sugar, it will "wake up" and start fermenting again. Because it will start doing this in a sealed bottle, the CO2 that's produced will be forced into the beer rather than escaping out the airlock, and the beer will become carbonated. Too much sugar, and the beer will be mondo fizzy so you have to add the right amount, and distribute it evenly throughout the beer.
Pour the uncarbonated beer into your other fermenting bucket (the one with the tap/spout), leaving as much of the yeast and sediment behind. You can pour the yeasty sediment down the sink/loo as you don't need it. You should end up with about 5 gallons of proto-beer in your fermenting bucket with tap - check how much you have (the buckets typically have volume markers on the side), and add sugar. I use this calculator (
http://www.brewunited.com/priming_sugar_calculator.php), and typically only carbonate to ~2.3 atm of pressure. Best method is to add the sugar to a pint of water, wait for it to dissolve, then pour the pint of sugar-water in as it spreads more evenly throughout the beer. Don't add too much as the beer can over-carbonate and be way too fizzy. If you want really clear beer, put 1/2 tsp of clear gelatin into a small bowl of water, and microwave for 20 seconds, then stir that mixture into the beer at the same time as the sugar.
Add the newly-sugared beer mixture to your sterilized bottles (I put the bottles in the dishwasher on high rather than sterilize each one individually) by pouring the liquid into each bottle using the tap on the fermenting bucket. Leave an inch or so of air in the bottle and screw the tops on or seal them however (I had about 45 Grolsch bottles that I used for this because you could pop the tops back on so easily), and leave for 3 weeks.
Pop in the fridge for 24 hours prior to opening to settle the sediment. Open and enjoy x 40
It sounds like a lot of work, but it really isn't. You have one fun day of brewing, one less fun day of bottling, one fun day of opening and drinking beers, and 3 weeks in between each step. I don't bother measuring things like fermentation levels, sugar amounts, fermenting temperatures etc because it has so little effect. Who cares if the beer is 4.7% instead of 5%? Or it is done fermenting after 10 days but you leave it for 2 weeks? Or its a little cloudy or not exactly the style you expected? Not worth bothering to me, but some people are mad for that kind of stuff.
But Ferris, this all sounds very involved! If I want to start a little bit, and stay super cheap - is there an alternative?
Yeah, you can make cider for nothing. 1 gallon fermenting jug, 4 litres of nice apple juice (no preservatives), an airlock, some yeast. Yeast in fermenting jug, pour apple juice on top, add airlock. Wait 10 days. Your apple juice is 8 pints of uncarbonated cider now. Decant into another vessel and bottle or just drink straight from there. My advice - pour it all into a large jug (leaving as much sediment behind as you can), add a pint of unfermented apple juice for flavour, drink the lot. Yum. I use champagne yeast on mine (Lalvin EC-1118 is the strain, its pretty common and any homebrew store should have loads in packets). You can get the bits for that for about 6 quid all in, which is pretty good. You can carbonate in bottles using the steps above if you like, but flat cider is legit. I used to have a formula written down somewhere on how to work out the cider ABV based on the grams of sugar per ml, but I can't find it now. Top of my head, most apple juice ferments out to about 6% without any help, but you can add sugar/maple syrup/any other sugar source to increase the ABV if you want - EC-1118 has an alcohol tolerance up to about 18% (I think?) so fill yer boots.
Ok that's a long enough email for now. I can help with anything else if you need - turns out I have more opinions on brewing than I thought I did. If you want my opinion on specific bits of kit, send me a link and I'll have a look - I don't know the UK brewing scene but I know the North American one pretty well so will try and help however I can.
Your pal
Ferris
x
References
1 - The quick formula i used when designing recipes is (LBs of grain/Batch size in gallons) x 2.5 = approx ABV
So a 5 gallon batch with 11 LBs of grain would be (11/5) x 2.5 = ~5.5% ABV
A 3 gallon batch with 9lbs of grain would be 7.5% ABV etc
