How to Brew Beer

This is a step by step guide to brew beer from scratch using the raw ingredients. The method explained here is a "full mash" meaning that the extract is made from crushed malted grain and not pre-prepared extract, which can be bought in a tin.
Total preparation time until ready to drink is approx 3 weeks. (worth the wait!)

Step 1 Equipment

The main kit you'll need is a container to heat the liquid in(metal one in the picture), another large bucket/bin type container to transfer the liquid into(white in picture) and a final beer barrel to store (rack) the beer into. You can also store the finished product in beer bottles (bottle conditioned). Full list of kit:

1) Boiler/Mash Tun to hold 5 Imperial Gallons*/25 Litres. One used in picture is metal with a heating element in the bottom. I think you can buy plastic ones also. Also a large pan would work
2) Fermentor/Bucket to hold 5 Imperial Gallons/25 Litres
3) Sterilizer (eg Sodium Metabisulphite. Chlorine-based, Iodophor, San Star)
4) Water treatement, Calcium Chloride,Epson Salts, Gypsum (see step 4)
3) Stiring implement
4) Large Jug
5) Thermometer
6) Hydrometer
7) Scales to weigh out ingredients
8) Straining Bag (Mashing and Sparging bag)
9) Barrel and/or Bottles
10) Syphon tube
11) Metal bottle tops (if using bottles)
11) Gadget to get metal tops onto bottles (if using bottles)

• Note on Gallons.

1 Imperial Gallon = 4.456 Litres
1 US Gallon = 3.785 Litres

Comments

[SOMEONE733]

hi is this the malt extract and how can i find it if were i live there are no brew suplies shops is there any other place ican find it

[moaner70]

Hi there, have a search around for an online supply. There are plenty here in England. Where do you live?

[SOMEONE733]

in saudi arabia and no alcohol at all we only have nonalcoholic beer and idon't know what is the malt extract

[schingakham]

Malt extract are the sugars and proteins resulted after brewing.

[t.rohner]

Relocate!!!

[bobba]

Get as much non-alcoholic beer as you can get your hands on, add some sugar and some yeast and let it ferment. Hey presto beer with alcohol in.

[azterik]

It might have preservatives in it or the alcohol may be boiled off...

[kludge000]

What I want to do is grow my own barley. Then malt that barley, and then make my own beer from that. I would also like to culture my own yeast from wild yeast but that might be to hard, (I know that it's not super easy to start a sour dough from wild yeast)

Peace Jeff

[schingakham]

Hi, If you wish to grow your own barley, i am suggesting for organic barley which you can make organic beer.

[t.rohner]

Nice instructable i was thinking to make one myself for a while. I brew for more than 10 years now. I'm doing it a bit differently though. We have leased a room, that was a cheesemaking facility before. We have a walk in cooler and a sewer in the middle of the room. We brew in a more advanced manner, mainly because of our equipment and the batch size. (50l or 13 U.S. gal or 11 imperial gal) Pictures: Some of our malts, the big blue bin is pilsner, the smaller white ones contain munich, vienna, caramel, wheat, dark wheat...the brewery laptop, some of our fermenters. In the corner you see bottles conditioning. 2nd picture is our bottle washer, this device really rocks. 3rd picture is our "brew tower" heated by 3 x 10kw propane heaters. 4th picture is the cooling setup with counterflow chiller and pump. At the moment of the shot, it's recirculating sanitizing solution. (We use a product called "Shuredis" from diversey-lever. It doesn't smell like bleach or stain like iodophor and after a couple of 100 batches without infection, i'd say it's pretty much up to the job...)

[Chalizdekino]

Hi t. Rohner. I want to open a small scale brewery in Africa using the brewing kit like yours.Would you recommend for me what sort of kit I can buy?I am looking for one which can at least make minimum of 1000 bottles of beer/ day just to start with. You can contact me on my email [e-mail] thanking you in advance dekino

[t.rohner]

Hello dekino We make 100 botles per brew day. Ok we could make 200 with a double batch. Our bottles are 500ml. I don't know what bottle size you talk about, but you can make the calculations. This is a completely different league. You need a 500-1000 litre brewery with lots of fermenters and conditioning tanks. This means some considerable heating and cooling efforts and at least some professional bottle filler. If you want to do this seriously, you will need some 500'000$ give or take. This won't work with a kit, you will need professional advice for this. www.brouwland.com sells the whole range from hobby to professional brewing accessories. Or here http://www.himfr.com/buy-brewhouse_equipment/ Or used http://www.usedcentral.net/usedbreweries/micro.htm I wish you good luck. Thomas

[Cracticus]

Moaner, It's a good instructable, very clear and well presented. But yours is a pretty clumsy way to make beer, seems to me. Get yourself a sealable fermentation barrel, or better yet two of them, and do it the easy way, is my advice. A couple of points: taking a gravity reading while the wort is still hot won't give you an accurate reading. Hydrometers are calibrated accurate at 15 degrees C. You can get conversion tables to calculate SGs at different temperatures, if you want one. I prefer to get the temperature down to what I intend to ferment it at, before I take a reading. I generally ferment at 22 degrees C., for an ale; 15 for a lager. A final SG of 1010 looks a bit high to me, for a brew that started at 1040. I would be looking for something closer to 1005. Was it fully fermented when you took that final reading? Two identical consecutive readings taken at 24 hour intervals is a reliable way to be sure fermentation is complete. Then give it another 24 hours, getting its temperature down to about ten degrees C. before bottling. Ordinary beer bottles will do, including twist-top ones. I've done well over a thousand, and never had one fail. Rather than leaving your wort to cool overnight you might consider running it through a wort chiller. A good counterflow chiller will cool it to room temperature in the fifteen minutes or so it takes to run it through. The sooner you can pitch your yeast and get fermentation up and running the sooner your wort will be safe from any ester producing elements that may be working their mischief in it. To whoever said sodium metabisulphite is not a steriliser — of course it is! Stick you head in a barrel full of the gas that solution generates as it evaporates, and it will kill you, along with any bugs that might be in there. Let it fully evaporate and you will have a sterile container, to be sure. You are right, the how-dare-you sayers wrong: aerating your wort won't do it any harm. Air is an enemy of fermented beer, not of unfermented wort. Many of us deliberately aerate our wort with filtered air through an aquarium air pump in order to raise its oxygen content. Yeast needs some oxygen to get started quickly, and thereby eliminate developing esters or infecting agents. A minimum 10 parts per million of dissolved oxygen is generally recommended. Recently boiled water or wort contains close to zero ppm DO. Pouring it vigourously from one container to another will help a bit, but not much. Exposure to the air is not good, insofar as the air may contain fungal spores and microbes; but all that messing around with it you do is more dangerous than pouring it from one container into another. I say keep it in a sealed fermenter, keeping it protected by a thick blanket of CO2. Personally, I pipe the CO2 from the airlock into a second fermenter; then after fermentation is 2/3 completed, rack the beer into that second fermenter, adding finings at the same time, and let it finish fermenting. Rather than ever opening it up and disturbing that protective CO2 cover, I syringe some out through the airlock hole to read its SG in a test jar. You need an eye-level view to get an accurate reading anyway. Geltatin won't do the beer any harm. It coagulates any solids it the beer, which then fall to the bottom as sediment. Isinglass is just another kind of gelatin. Any food-grade gelatin will do the job just as well.

[Chalizdekino]

Hi instructables. I want to open a small scale brewery in Africa using the brewing kit. Would you recommend for me what sort of kit I can buy?I am looking for one which can at least make upto 1000 bottles of beer/ day just to start with.

[t.rohner]

Hello all

I wanted to share a very useful tip with you Instructabrewers.
I heard and read about "wet milling" before, but i never thought it's so easy to do on a homebrew scale.
In the last Zymurgy issue i read about it again, just before i went to brew.
I told it to my brew-buddy and we decided to give it a try. In this article, they used a spray bottle to distribute the water evenly. Our spray bottle at the brewery has sanitizer in it, so i just sprinkled the water from a glass, while my buddy poured the malt from one bucket into another. Then we mixed it by hand and let it sit for 5 minutes, before we started to mill. We use a fixed gap JSP Maltmill.
The grist came out with more husks intact, than with dry milling. The resulting grist also has more volume.
The lautering went on wonderful, even with 70% wheat malt in the grist.
We don't normally have problems with lautering. Except with high percentage wheat grists, or pumpkin and potatoe mashes.(Zombie brewing...)

Give it a try, you will be amazed.

Cheers Thomas

[esqueeze]

I did this on my latest batch and after I did this the fermentation slowed. I am assuming this took the viable TOP fermenting yeast with it. I added some more cheaper yeast that I had on hand and fermentation started again, phew. I am not very happy because I invested in good yeast to improve the flavours and now my beer is brewing with el cheapo concentrate cap yeast.

Do this and I'm sure you will remove some of the yeast which result in a higher FG and lower alcohol content.

I will not be trying this again for the following reasons:

1) I don't think my previous attempts where I haven't done this have been excessively "bitter".
2) I like really strong, hoppy and bitter beer, Indian Pale Ales in particular. Get hold of some Little Creatures Pale Ale for the ultimate Hopgasm.
3) I'm not trying to make a commercial style brew. I like my beer to have it's own gamey (Belgian) character.
4) I have found that with really bitter beers a bit of lagering makes the beer more mellow. Leave it for longer.
5) Refrigeration also hides bitterness and living in Western Australia I drink cold beer anyway.

I think that this guy drinks his beer warm and weak.

[psi3000]

WTF are you doing? I don't see a hose on that Mash Tun leading down into the fermenter so that it doesn't aerate, add excessive oxygen, to the wart. You should know better when brewing from grain!!! Shame on you, and your telling other people to do this. Their beer will have a very offset flavor!!

[dimhof78]

PSI... That's exactly what I thought when I saw this... STOP IT!!! You're killing the beer!!! Where are the brewing police when you need them! Plus why are you using Gelatin in your beer??? Clarification? Yeah, your "Beer" will be clear, but it will be stripped of a lot of the flavor...

[t.rohner]

Hi psi and dimhof, moaner doesn't brew exactly as i do it. Well, i read some(almost all) books available on the topic, before i started to build and buy my setup. I know about the possible effects of hot side aeration, but only from reading about it. I never tried to do it deliberately to see how much it takes to ruin a otherwise perfect batch, have you? Or did you start with HSA and then reduced it? Otherwise it's only hearsay. I know some guys around here, they use a centrifuge to lauter their mash. I'd never do it that way, because of hot side aeration and the filtration is far from perfect. As a next thing i'm too lazy to transfer the mash into the centrifuge and then back into the mash tun to add some sparge water and back into the centrifuge. They end up with a murky wort when the boiling starts. They actually started with this centrifuge thing, because their lautering took very long. This was because they milled their grains with a household grain mill. It was much too fine and the husks are shredded. Lately they come to our brewery to get their grains crushed on our MaltMill. But with all their "wrongdoings", the resulting beer comes close to ours and it's definitely better than most commercially available stuff. I read scientific books about cheesemaking, because i wanted to try it once. (it has yet to happen...) Then i saw how they make cheese here in a small hut in the alps. Wood fired without running tap water or electricity. But then, this guy had some 40 years of experience with his rustic setup. The cheese he made tasted fantastic and had good keeping qualities.(that's why they started to make cheese) The way he did it had a couple of flaws, compared to what i read in the scientific books. But the resulting product told another story.

[jp_pianoguy]

The fines (cause of the "murk") become filtered by cycling back the first few quarts over the grain bed.  The grain bed becomes a filter bed and filters out the fine particles from the inefficient grinding.

In the boil phase, the addition of a very small amount of irish moss helps to coagulate haze forming proteins.  It is thus important to leave behind a small bit of wort because it is full of junk (hops particles, coagulated proteins), known as the "trub".

That being said, I wouldn't use a centrifuge either.  Seriously though, would it kill you to invest in a little bit of tubing to get the liquid to fill up from the bottom of the container.

[grizybaer]

I thought he had 5 gallons of wort. if his bottles are 16oz, he should have close to 40 bottles? is there heavy volume loss by evaporation or sediment?

[Atrophik]

What about store bought purified water? Any need for additives for that?

[churious]

I worked in a brewery for a while and there we used a solution of Peracetic acid to sterilise everything.  I'm not sure of the concentration but I think it was fairly low.  As far as I know peracetic acid is used because it leaves safe residues behind that wont harm humans or the environment.

[Scurvymcdiggle]

it is way easier to mix a water sugar solution and add it a fermentation bucket then siphon the beer off the sediment into the new bucket with the sugar solution then rack to bottles.

[Jalakahops]

I know the instructions say you HAVE to use those expensive bottles or they will explode. I have used plain beer bottles bought from the grocery store and reused them with no problems. Its cheaper to buy the bottles with beer in them than have empty ones shipped to your house. How does that work?

[Scurvymcdiggle]

its even cheaper to raid the recycling bin and dumpsters....that is if you live in an area that has that sort of thing.

[Scurvymcdiggle]

is this step because of the type of yeast you are using? i have never heard of this step and have not noticed a problem with it before...just curious.

[moaner70]

Hi, I've had a quick search around and I can't see a scientific/brewing reason why pouring and aerating my wort is a problem. If you could enlighten me please as anything to improve an already astounding tasting beer would be fantastic. Regarding gelatin..well that I know is a known working aux fining. What would you suggest as a fining to be even better? I read Issinglass is better? Thanks. Mark

[bjornjacobsen]

Hi there,
a good instructable for sure.
The concern about splashing the wort only relates to while it is hot.
It is called "hot side aeration".
http://www.howtobrew.com/section3/chapter16-2.html
after the wort is cooled, using an immersion or plate chiller to chill rapidly or NoChill in a cube over night, you will need to aerate the wort to give the yeast ideal conditions.
thanks
Bjorn

[nimann]

i live in colorado, but i dont think there is a a brew shop in the whole state! where can i get it otherwise?

[jonabarth]

I live in colorado and I know theres one in colorado springs,Its down off Pikes Peak across from holy rollers tattoo shop. Ill find out the name and post it for you.

[patitou]

www.midwestsupplies.com

[Etano]

Depending on where in Colorado you live, I do know that there is a fairly good winemaking and brewing shop in Fort Collins called Hops and Berries. Their website is www.hopsandberries.com, and it looks like they just opened up a web shop.

[At29035ft]

There are stores in both Denver and Boulder.
http://www.stompthemgrapes.com/

[moaner70]

Here is my local shop, they deliver worldwide.
http://www.beersunlimited.co.uk/

[Daleeburg]

I do a little wine making as a hobby and can vouch that Iodophor is an amazing sanitizer. They say it kills 99.95% of bacteria in 30 seconds contact time. I have been using a cap full in a gallon of water to sanitize my wine making tools and have not had any problems with foreign contaminates from my tools.

[karlosantana]

I'm just wondering in step 4 you cleanse the water with chemicals and such. Forgive me if I'm being stupid (again) but wont it affect the taste of the beer? or do you simply use the water to sterilise the pot? Sorry it left me a bit confused can anyone help me out? Cheers Karlos

[moaner70]

Hi Karlos, The short answer is No, the taste of the beer is not affected in a detrimental way at this stage, the idea is to change the makeup of the water to improve the taste of the beer. In step 4 I'm adding Calcium Sulphate which is a natural occurance in some water springs/wells around the world. I'm guessing the Water Company takes this out when processing the water before it reaches your tap. Here is some good blurb I found from a beer website...

Mineral Salt Adjustment
===================

Historically, breweries were located on sites with established, consistent water supplies having characteristic mineral compositions. This led to the emergence of regional beer characteristics in locations such as Burton-on-Trent, Dortmund, Pilsen, and Vienna. Mineral salt adjustment was held to a minimum and, often, recipes were adapted to the shortcomings of the brewing water.

-* Calcium Sulphate *-

Calcium sulfate is often used as a source of calcium ions and is generally used in brewing British pale ales and bitters. Calcium sulfate treatment is sometimes referred to as "Burtonization" (after Burton-on-Trent in England) because Burton-on-Trent waters are rich in gypsum and this area is world-famous for its pale ales.

-* Magnesium Sulphate *-

Magnesium sulfate is similar to calcium sulfate but is not as effective as calcium in reducing the pH of the mash as demonstrated by the calculation for residual alkalinity.

-* Sodium and Calcium Chlorides *-

Sodium chloride is used to increase sodium and chloride content. Like calcium sulfate, it accentuates bitterness and enhances the flavor and fullness of the beer.

[bluenevus]

I've read that it's good to accelerate the chilling of the wort, but I don't know why. Have you tried doing this? Do you have any untoward effects from letting the wort cool overnight?

[xxburton182]

The point of chilling the wort is to get it to a temperature that makes it acceptable to add the yeast in (too hot and the yeast will die). The longer you wait to get it fermenting the more problems you can encounter with things like bacteria and wild yeasts getting into the wort. So basically the faster the better. Happy Brewing!