A few months ago Carrie and I decided to try our hands at making some home made beer. Even though I'm not a huge beer fan, we thought it would be a good idea to get some practice before trying to make mead (assuming our bees survive the winter) and muscadine wine later in 2011. So, as with everything else we attempt, the research began. We read through the recommended books ("How to Brew" and "The Complete Joy of Homebrewing"), found numerous websites, read through several forums, and I bombarded my boss (who has been homebrewing for a while) with any other questions that came up.We decided to start with extract kits as they require a bit less equipment and time to brew than all-grain recipes. Since we thought we could get some use out of it for wine and mead making, we decided to get a heavy duty, 8 gallon brew kettle with a spigot. A 5 gallon stainless steel pot would have worked as well, but I did not envision moving 3-4 gallons of sugary, boiling water from the cook-top to an ice bath in the sink as being much fun. We figured that the easier it was to make beer, the more we'd make. We also made sure to get a pot that would fit reasonably well on the cook-top so that we could stay inside while we brewed.
Once the kettle came in, we headed to our local homebrew store to pick up an ingredient kit and the rest of the equipment we needed. We bought a wort chiller (wort is the extracted malt sugar and water that is boiled and fermented) to, again, avoid having to give our kettle an ice bath. A food-grade plastic bucket, Better Bottle, or glass carboy is also needed to ferment the beer. Though many people like glass carboys, glass breaks and adds to the weight (5 gallons of beer is roughly 40 lbs). We went with a plastic bucket that has a handle, air-tight lid with a hole for an airlock, and a spigot to make bottling easier. We also grabbed a hydrometer, which is needed to check the sugar content (specific gravity) of your wort or beer.
Luckily all these things come in starter kits from local or online homebrew stores (like this one or this one). I do suggest having an extra food-grade bucket (with a spigot) for when you bottle. Since we were going to use 1 liter flip-top bottles, we did not need the bottle capper from the kit. So we ended up just piecing the parts we wanted together ourselves along with 24 flip-top bottles (usually we need 16 or 17 per batch).
One very important aspect of beer, mead, or wine making is keeping things clean and sterile. Anything that touches the cooled wort needs to be sterilized. There are several products for this and some kits may come with one, but the best that we've found for sterilizing is Star San. It is tasteless and odorless and does not require rinsing. It is easy to make a small 1-2.5 gallon batch (.2 to .5 oz of Star San) and save some in a spray bottle (for up to 3-4 weeks). For cleaning plastic buckets and Better Bottles, the best thing we've found is some unscented Oxy-Clean Free and hot water. A scoop in 5 gallons of hot water and in an hour or two the bucket or Better Bottle is clean without having to scrub it, which is great to avoid scratching the plastic.
With all of that finally out of the way, we finally decided on a Hefeweizen extract kit for our first attempt. The kit turned out pretty good, but not exactly what I was hoping for. That didn't keep us from drinking it quickly, and then we were out of beer (16 liters gone, we saved 1). So we headed back for our next kit, and this time we bought a Northern Brown Ale. This one turned out better and much closer to what we were expecting. In fear of running out of beer again, we started a few other kits. An Irish Draught Ale kit which just finished carbonating, and an American brown ale called Caribou Slobber which we bottled two days ago. Yesterday we finished brewing a Dunkelweizen (dark wheat beer). Next up will be our first attempt at a lager, an Oktoberfest.
With the beer shortage addressed, we decided to get some practice with wine. We ordered a Pinot Nior red wine kit yesterday that should be in by next week. This should produce 6 gallons or roughly 30 bottles of wine. Hopefully that'll last a month or two and maybe it'll be ready by the time the pool is done...
I'll go over out process for brewing and eventually wine making in future posts. But now it's time to relax and have a homebrew!
