The Simple Process of Home Brewing
How would you like 48 bottles of beer for as little as 20 bucks? If you're tired of paying top dollar at the grocery store, home brewing could be for you.
Home brewing is an inexpensive way of producing beer that can taste just as good as the beer big corporations make. Even better, you can customize it to your taste rather than having to settle for bland, mass-marketed beers. If you're worried it might be too difficult to brew your own beer—don’t be. It's simpler than you might think, and this article will walk you through it.
Home brewing takes 4 steps: boiling together the ingredients, cooling the resulting mix, adding yeast for fermenting, and priming.
Step 1 - Boil Ingredients
The boiling stage requires a home-brewing kettle, which costs from $35-400. Mix together water, hops, and yeast. The result is called wort, and is boiled for at least 15 minutes (though for best results, you should allow at least an hour).
Step 2 - Cool Ingredients
Next, you have to cool the wort to no more than 75 degrees Fahrenheit (24 degrees Celsius). This has to be done quickly—within 30 minutes and without exposing the wort to the atmosphere. You will use a thermal heat exchanger, which is a type of copper or stainless steel tubing that is dipped into the wort. Cold water then flows through the tubing.
Warning: Follow standard safety precautions when working with copper in contact with food. Always inspect copper for the blue-green verdigris that forms on oxidized copper. Verdigris is toxic and should be removed by scrubbing copper with vinegar or an oxalic acid-based cleaner.
Step 3 - Ferment
Once the wort is cooled, you have to pour it into a fermenting vessel. This is a container used specifically for home brewing. The pouring must be quite quick and firm to make sure the wort is aerated.
Sprinkle the yeast into the wort and seal the fermenting vessel. The fermentation process produces carbon dioxide, which bubbles through a special lock at the top of the vessel. For ideal home brewing—the vessel should be stored in temperatures around 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius) for ale and 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius) for lager.
Fermentation takes a few days. You can tell it’s complete when there’s a layer of sediment (trub) at the bottom, and the foamy head at the top has disappeared completely.
Siphon the beer into a different vessel to remove the trub and allow the beer to age. This usually takes 2-4 weeks.
Priming
Carbonate the beer by boiling either white cane sugar, brown sugar, honey, molasses, corn sugar, or maple syrup with water and adding to your final product before bottling. You may also use a special keg to force carbon dioxide into the brew. Some recommendations suggest adding a sugar directly to each bottle, but boiling your sugar and adding it to the entire batch prior to bottling is a safer food handling process.
Summary
When you taste your brew, you'll notice an immediate difference—it's literally alive. When commercial brewers make beer, they have to pasteurize it which kills off all the yeast and removes the carbonation. In home brewing, you keep the yeast alive, allowing the beer to age over time as wine does.
Although the home-brewing process is relatively simple keep in mind this is only a guide. Your home-brewing supplier will give you more detailed instructions for the specific ingredients you use, and you’ll need to plan your ingredient amounts based on what kind of system you setup.
There are a wide variety of kits available. Start with a small, low-cost beginners kit and expand from there.
ARE YOU ENJOYING YOUR BEER ON A DECK OR A PATIO? HERE'S HOW TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE.
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![Doityourself Staff]()
![Stephini Candella]()
Stephini Candella is a Nutritionist, and attended the University of Texas for a B.S. in Nutrition and Didactics. She was a manager for a small gourmet restaurant, and has spent over 15 years cooking as a hobby for health. She has extensive knowledge of food science, micro-nutrition, history of the classic foods from across cultures, modern commercial and home cooking processes, disease restricted diet meal planning (cardiovascular, GAPS, diabetes), and popular diet trend (Paleo, Keto, Vegan) diets. Stephini most enjoys meal planning that focuses on simplicity and cost-effectiveness, and she strongly believes these are the foundations for delicious and healthy meals—the basis for a happy life. She is addicted to reading food labels, and uncovering the nutritional benefits of traditional cooking techniques of the classical foods across cultures. If you let her, she will talk your ear off over her fascination for how traditional fermentation cultivates the metabolic byproduct of certain bacteria into nutritional gold for human health. Stephini is also a CRLA (Certified Reading and Writing English Tutor) and has professionally tutored college students as well as K-12 students for an accumulated 15 years expanding to private school curriculum development and teaching in STEM and STEAM. She has been a professional researcher for multiple private and non-profit companies and organizations including the University of Texas Food and Housing Division. There, she researched and wrote recommendations for the University’s campus wide composting and food waste reduction initiatives, design and management of campus wide food waste studies, and the procurement of technologies best suited for large scale composting and food waste reduction. As a former Red Cross shelter manager, she has worked with her National Guard, and the US Army and Marines in search and rescue, procuring, and deploying multiple shelters serving thousands of evacuees. She has overseen the management of over 25 shelters in the state emergency operation center, and was held responsible for procurement of meals, medical supplies, and basic necessities. She also assisted in local county natural disaster rescues, providing insurance evaluations and recommendations for approving families affected by natural disasters to receive financial aid, housing, and food assistance. In addition, she volunteered for her local food pantry and domestic violence shelter where she prepared food. These discovered passions for emergency aid volunteer work led her to pursue national and state EMS licensures. She has traveled from Houston to New York to Seattle on a Leadership Scholarship, listening to world renowned scholars on the values of great leadership. Her favorite being the opportunity to sit and connect with the grandsons of Gandhi, listening to their first hand childhood experiences growing up alongside their grandfather organizing and executing his activism. Presently, Stephini conducts research and assistance on customer relationship management campaigns for 30 year veteran executives and business owners as an operations manager for a small, boutique executive assistance CRM firm. She has retired into a quiet, family-centric life, and can be found living between her home and college towns where she is raising her children. There, she is imparting her love for DIY learning and food on to them in the hopes that self-directed creativity and production will bring to them the same sense of holistic wellness that she’s experienced for herself.
