Can You Brew Beer At Home?

When new people I meet ask me what I do and I answer: I teach people how to brew beer at home... their reply usually is "Wow, you can do that?"...

Yes! You can absolutely brew beer at home without buying expensive equipment like tanks, copper piping or other stuff that you'd normally find at a micro-brewery.

Your investment for home brew equipment can be as little as $30 - $40 or you can go more advanced and treat yourself with a nice $400 - $600 setup...

Most people simply get a kit to brew pretty much any style of beer and they usually run for about $80 - $120 dollars.

What's the difference?

Well, there is three ways, or methods to brew beer at home and each one requires different equipment. Each one has advantages and disadvantages.

The most advanced where you have to do everything from scratch is known as All-Grain brewing.This method involves all brewing steps...

1. Mash the grains (Soak in hot water)
2. Lauter (Collect the grain 'tea')
3. Boil
4. Add Hops
5. Add Yeast
6. Ferment
7. Prime & Bottle Beer
8. Drink

The first two steps requires extra equipment which can often times be just a cooler with an adapted manifold or false bottom which will be used to separate the grains from water. The rest of the equipment is the same for the other method.

What this first two steps do is simply to convert the grain starches into sugars.

There is another brewing method that is less advanced and that is Extract brewing. Instead of mashing grains and converting starches into sugars, many brewers simply buy what's known as Dry Malt Extract, which is nothing more than the sugars from barley already converted.

Since no mashing is required, extract brewers only need a pot to boil the ingredients. The difference between using extract and mashing is that mashing allows brewers to fine tune their beer further, although it is easier to mess up the beer. Many beers entered at competitions are often times brewed with extract, and are often times better than some all-grain. Only true experts can brew using all-grain and it's usually not a matter of brewing better beer, but rather a matter of having more flexibility and being able to custom tailor a beer to their taste (make it lighter, heavy bodied, increase head formation/retention, etc.)

There is still another method to brew beer and that is kit brewing. It is essentially the same as extract brewing, but the difference is that, instead of buying plain extract and adding specialty grains and hops, you can buy an extract kit, which is basically a pre-made ingredient kit that you just add water and yeast to.

Without buying a kit, as an extract brewer you would have to know what kind of specialty grains you would need to add to plain malt extract to make a specific style of beer. For example, if you wanted to brew a porter, you would need to know that you need to add caramel, chocolate, maybe some roasted malt, and how much of each to add.

With a kit all these ingredients are already mixed for you.

So the advantage of extract brewing over kit brewing is that you could add a little more of a specific ingredient and tailor the beer to your taste rather than drinking just what someone else decided would make a good beer.

The advantage of all grain over extract brewing are not as apparent since you can brew pretty much the same beers using both methods. In fact, it's nearly impossible to tell whether a beer was brewed using all-grain or extract. It really comes down to being more in control of the brewing process when it comes to all grain.

However, since it is more involved and requires more attention to detail, new all-grain brewers will often brew worse beer using all-grain than if they would brew with extract.

If you are just getting started with home brewing, I strongly recommend you start with extract brewing and use specialty grains. Most extract kits often times deliver suboptimal results and discourages many brewers because of it.

If you got a kit as a gift and want to use it, here's a couple tips to follow.

The instructions will have you add a booster pack or table sugar. This type of sugar is extremely fermentable and will produce more alcohol than other sugars. While giving ABV a kick might sound appealing to some, what many don't know is that this will make your beer watery and can actually take away from the overall impression of the beer.

Instead, you should replace the table sugar with Dry Malt Extract, which carries a wide range of sugars, which vary in the levels of fermentability. This allows some residual sugars to be leftover after fermentation and give the beer a nice body and improves the overall flavor.

The second biggest mistake I see new home brewers make is not using a yeast starter. This is specially true for those who buy their ingredients online and risk getting a yeast packet that has been exposed to too much heat, during summer months. While some yeast may survive sometimes it's not enough to fully ferment a beer.

If you make a yeast starter you can catch this issue before you spend a few hours making a beer only to find out that your yeast is no good. This can also reduce the lag time between pitching yeast and fermentation.

A big concern new home brewers have is the lack of airlock activity during the first day or two. It can take up to 72 hours for any airlock activity to show up. However, airlocks can be faulty or sometimes the fermenter may have a leak and will keep the airlock from getting any activity at all. The right thing to do in this case is to take a gravity reading and see if there is any fermentation going on. Gravity reading is the most reliable way to find out whether fermentation is stuck or active.

Written by Jorge Zarate, author of Better Home Brew Formula, a training program that teaches home brewers how to brew better beer using extract.