Sometimes your loved ones think it's so cool to buy you a kit that claims to make beer and it's easy as 1-2-3. You go ahead and make the beer, but it doesn't turn out that great and are left wondering if that's what home brew is all about...
I mean the beer doesn't necessarily taste bad, but it often times turns out to be somewhat watery. Well, I guess that's the quality you get with things that are easy to make. It's like micro-wave pizza, it can be good... if it's 2 am and you're hungry after a party, but it will never compare to making brick-oven pizza from scratch.
Well making home brew from scratch will make you way better beer than some of these kits, but it can also be somewhat complicated and as a new brewer you don't want to get too crazy. I know I was confused as to what to buy and what I needed to brew beer. I just had no clue of all the possibilities and the different ways to make beer at home.
So let's dig into the process and find out where to start out. If you bought one of those 2 gallon Mr. Beer or Beer Machine type kits or got it as a gift from the wife or thee girl, then you might as well use it. All I would recommend as far as those kits go is to replace the table sugar or booster pack with some dry malt extract (pound for pound). That will take care of the watery problem and give you a nicer beer.
So the process on those kits is basically adding the ingredients to water, adding the yeast into the fermenter and bottling... 1-2-3 done...
The next level to brewing would be extract brewing. The only thing that changes here is that instead of using a can of extract that has already been hopped, you are going to add the hops yourself during the boil. So you add plain dry malt extract to water and boil for 60 minutes and add hops at different times. The longer the hops in the boil, the more bitterness you get from the hops. The less time the hops are in the boil the less bitterness, but more aroma you get.
Then everything else is the same, you pitch the yeast and you bottle.
Not many brewers do just extract, because you can add one step before and use specialty grains. When you use specialty grains you can create pretty much any recipe just like you can with all-grain brewing. You would be using the same equipment as with extract and I think this is where new brewers should get started. Kits like True Brew or other similar ones have all that's needed (buckets, hydrometer, bottling equipment, etc.)
Then all you need after that is recipes which can be found all over the internet, in brewing magazines or even your local home brew supply store. A good supply store will also help brewers put together recipes and have many tips for the beginner home brewer.
Now there is another level of brewing which is known as all grain. So far, we've been adding dry or liquid malt extract to water and making beer with it. So what exactly is malt extract?
Well, when you take malted barley or wheat and you soak it in hot water, the starches in the grains get converted into sugar. This sugar is then used to make the beer. What companies do is convert the sugars for brewers and package it in spray powder or syrup form and sell it as dry malt extract or liquid malt extract... so it's really the same thing.
That means that all grain brewing is doing everything from scratch, but it also requires a whole lot more knowledge and if you are just getting started it may be too overwhelming to start at this level. It would be like starting out a black belt in jiu-jitsu... yeah, it would be cool to do so, but not when you are thrown into a ring to fight against someone who has been a black belt for years...
Learn the basics and then move up.
The nice thing about starting with extract and specialty grains is that you will need all that equipment for all-grain as well. When you move up to all-grain brewing you will need more equipment, which makes the initial investment a little steeper. You'll need a mash tun, which can be a cooler adapted to soak grain and allow you to separate the water from the grains. You'll also need the ability to boil at least about 6 gallons of water, which means bigger pots, burners, space, and it requires more time. There isn't necessarily any kits for this, you just have to buy the kit for extract and then get a mash tun. Most people use the coolers although a few setups can be custom made using old kegs and stuff. Some of these setups can cost a few grand, so it depends on how advanced you want to with all this.
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