What Equipment Do You Need To Start Making Home Brew Beer?

Home brew beer making doesn't need to be an expensive hobby. Beer has been made for thousands of years, and you can be sure that ancient civilizations didn't have expensive pH meters, refractometers, and hydrometers.



As a minimum you will need:

A fermentation bucket

This can be any kind of bucket that has a lid (you would like it to be food grade though, so you don't introduce toxic chemicals to your home brew!). Around 5 or 6 gallons capacity is perfect.

Bottles

You're going to need bottles to store your treasured home brew nectar in, after it leaves the fermentation bucket. Glass or plastic bottles are fine, but you must make sure they are suitable for use with carbonated drinks. Plastic bottles are preferable due to the high pressure that will build up inside the bottles, and the fact they are cheaper and easier to cap. You don't want exploding bottles everywhere now do you?

Syphon tubing

This doesn't need to be anything fancy, just some clear tubing (preferably food grade) to get the home brew from A to B.

Ingredients

You can buy packs of ingredients ready to go, or buy the individual yeast, hops, barley, etc. For the beginner, it is much easier to get an ingredients kit. Using a kit will save you having to purchase and weigh individual ingredients.

This is a list of the very bare minimum home brew equipment needed to make beer. There are other pieces of equipment you can buy to make your beer producing efforts more successful, and lessen the risk of failure.