Your First Home Brew

Since I have just started brewing (Oct 2003), I am either not qualified to say or very qualified, depending on your point of view. I did some reading, spoke to the friendly people at my local home brew supply, and paid for a brewing kit; I was drinking my own home brew less than two weeks later (your mileage may vary). While mine was brewing I made further enquiries (re kegging vs bottling). By the time my brew was ready to bottle I had purchased, cleaned and sanitised a keg system.

If you have already done some homework, you might have noticed that you find conflicting information about what you should and shouldn't do - relax. The goods news is that if you follow the basic steps there is a big chance it is going to work.

Basically what you need to end up with to have a chance of making beer is:

Healthy brewers yeast.
Good conditions for the yeast, including
1. The right temperature for the variety of yeast you are using.
2. Nutrients and food.
3. Oxygen. Note this is to get started only.
Not too much light.
Water.
Some flavouring.
A minimum of micro-organisms other than yeast.

What could be easier?

So here is a bit of a checklist:

Do you have the basic gear for fermenting?
1. Probably easiest just to buy a brewing kit.
2. A place to keep the brew - not too hot, not too cold. I kept mine at around 22 deg C with an immersion heater. I have since got a little more equipment, see TemperatureControl, but that first brew came out just fine fermenting in the garage.
Do you have all the ingredients to make a beer of your style? Alright so you don't have a clue what ingredients to buy, tell the home brew shop dude what you like and go with it. For my first brew I used a Coopers Real Ale kit, 500g of dextrose and 500g of dry light malt extract.
1. A concentrated beer kit
2. Dextrose/Glucose (not the stuff you put in your coffee)
3. Maybe something to give it some more body. Some dry malt extract perhaps? I didn't add any extra hops but apparently that's no big deal if you want to do it (you can just chuck them in the fermenter if you like)
4. Clean water. So the kit says to make it up to 22 litres right? I guess its a bit like making cordial, the more water you add the more watery the beer is going to be. If you have read all this stuff about boiling everything and you have the gear then go ahead (it takes a while to cool 15 or 20 litres of water). I just used water out of the garden hose. Great aeration - made it a bit difficult to see the water level with all the foam though.
Do you have a clean and practical work area? Remember before you toss the stirring spoon on the grass that most recipes don't call for dog shit.
Is the yeast going to work? Well you would hope that if it is well within it's use-by and you buy it from someone that sells a fair bit of it then everything will be cool. I chucked mine into some warm water and added a little bit of malt - there was no doubt it was working.
Is everything that is going to touch the brew clean and sanitary? I used sodium metabisulphite (I no longer use this) at the dosage recommended on the pack in a few litres of water and shook it around in the fermenter. Also do spoons, jugs, airlock and anything else that might come in contact with the brew. That probably means your hands too. Make sure the solution and the gear gets some quality time together. I haven't had an infected batch of beer yet.
The malt extract in the can is really thick, that's why they say leave it to sit in warm water for 30 minutes or so - best to remove the label first.
Have you rinsed out the sanitiser? Be consistent here - if you boiled all your water then rinsing out the fermenter with the garden hose probably doesn't make much sense. I now use no-rinse style sanitisers so it is not an issue for me. Bleach doesn't fall into that category.
Put in the ingredients.
Throw in the yeast when the brew is at around 25C (there are some exceptions - the kit should tell you).

Beyond Kits - Keep it Simple

This section has moved over to PartialMash. From there you can jump to my pictorial record of some attempts (quite successful) at partial mash brewing.

There is also an AllGrain section. Again this has pages on some recipes I have brewed.

So in 2006 I have plenty of AllGrain brews under my belt (in more ways than one), I have written Brewsta, a cross platform, open source brewing application. My personal Brewsta recipe repository.

Brewing Terms

LHBS: Local Home Brew Store
racking: Transferring from one container to another. Usually this is when you transfer from primary fermenter into secondary, or secondary into a bottling bucket.
sparge: Rinsing the grain with water in order to get that last bit of sweetness out of the grain.
specific gravity (SG): measure of the density of a fluid. If you know the SG at the start of fermentation and at the end you can figure out the alcohol content because alcohol has a lower SG than water.
trub: The cake of yeast, hops, and settled proteins that sit on the bottom of the primary after fermentation has slowed.
wort: Unfermented beer. An infusion of malt, unfermented or in the process of fermentation.