Making your own beer
Created | Updated Apr 10, 2014
Have you ever been in the situation where you would really, really like to go out on town drinking, even if you don't have the money for a single beer before leaving home? Or the times when you would like to have just one tiny little beer as company for an evening spent at home, but unfortunately you're fridge is completely empty of beer, and it's too late to go buy one in the stores?
Both of this situations could have been avoided if you had already taken the time and pains to make your own beer at an earlier point in time which by now would have been finished, standing in the cellars just waiting to be drunk!
There are (at least) two ways of making beer:
Option no. 1. Buy a beer kit! In the kit you will find wort (malt extract with hops), that you only have to mix with water, sugar (optional for more alochol) and yeast and then put it to fermentation. Most of the beer kits you can buy will have an instruction booklet which tells you what to do to make the beer. Most of this homebrewing beer kits will make about 20 litres of finished beer. It's much easier using such a beer kit than making it all by yourself, but will cost a bit more as well. This is by far the most normal way of making your own beer, and is increasingly popular.
Option no. 2. Make it yourself from scratch! This includes making the malt, the malt extract/wort and everything. This is a much more complicated process but far more fun in the end when you drink it, and you can only blame a single person in the whole wide world for the terrible hangover you will most likely get the day after, that is yourself! In this way you don't need to go somewhere else to lay the blame on others either. So if you're still not daunted by the rather long and complicated process it requires, here follows a description on how to make your very own beer the hard way.
HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN BEER FROM SCRATCH
This will make about 20 litres of finished beer, all for just a few pennies! And of course, you can make as much or as little beer as you like!
To make the beer in this fasion you will need:
-A plastic/glass container of about 25-30 litres
-A yeastlock
-A plastic hose
-Hydrometer to check the sugar content of the brew(this is optional but it is a very good idea to have one!)
-a big kettle of about 25-30 litres (at least) for boiling
-A container that can keep a steady temperature for at least an hour for the mashing process, of about 25-30 litres
-Bottles (and caps for your bottles. You may have to buy a bottling-machine to put on the caps if you're not using plastic bottles). While both glass and plastic bottles are usable for storing, many people feel the beer tastes better if stored on glass bottles
-About 5 kilos of cereals, most used are barley. This will give about 4 kilos of finished malt
-about 70-90 grams of hops, although you may increase or decrease the amount after you're own preferences. Some of this (everything from 5-20+ grams) should be used as aroma-hops. The difference between this and normal hops is described later in the article
-About 10 grams of beer yeast. Although fluid beer yeast usually holds a much higher quality, and it's advisable to try to find this
-Varying amount of sugar, usually something like 500 grams-2 kilos will be enough
A very important thing to remember is that all the equipment need to be absolutely clean! This is extremely inmportant to make the beer a success. And be careful that all soap or products used for cleaning the equipment are completely rinsed off after cleaning as it will very easily put a horrible bi-taste on your finished beer.
MAKING THE MALT
1 Malt is made from cereals, mostly from barley and some from wheat. Although one never or very seldom hear of beers made from other kinds of cereals, it's probably possible as well. To make the malt needed for 20 litres of beer, take the cereals (about 5 kilos), clean it thourougly with and rinse it afterwards with water of any dust, dirt and similar things that may have stuck to it. After this you place it to soak in fresh water. The first three or so days you should change the water at least a couple of times a day and take away everything that floats up to the top of the container. When the cereals are soft all the way through, remove the it from the water, and let it out on a board of some kind in a layer of about 8 to 10 centimteres thick. The temperatue in the barley should be monitored, and should not rise above 20 degrees Celsius. The ideal temperature are said to be around 15-17 degrees Celsius. If the temperature is too low, collect the barley in a heap instead of actually laying it out in as thin a layer as 8-10 centimeters. The board should be clean. Let it stay in the water until the it has spouted green buds at least one and a half the length of the cereal itself (this will take about 7 days). At this time, you will be ready to make the malt.
2. When the cereals have spouted green buds of about the same length as the cereal or a bit longer, you take it out, dry off most of the water, and roast it. This will finish the malting process. You can use a normal oven, at about (80-130 degrees Celsius), for about (5-7 hours), at which time it's supposed to be finished. The more heat you use, the darker the malt, and of course the darker the finished beer. So here you will be able to choose between the different types of beer and make the one you like the best. However, it may be very difficult to make sure that the malt will be either dark or light, since it is not possible to keep a constant temperature in a normal kitchen oven, which will influence the malting process. Actually, the making of the malt is the absolutely most difficult part of making the beer. It's said to be an art, and to make good malt yourself may take a lot of practice.
TO MAKE THE WORT
3. When this is done, you're ready to make the wort. To make about 20 litres of beer, you will normally need 4 kilos of malt (about 5 kilos of cereals). More malt will give the beer a stronger taste while less will make the beer taste watery. Roughly crush or open the malt first. The main point with the crushing of the malt is to make the interior core in the malt to open up and give out its sugar and taste contents. The best way to crush the malt is to use a malt mill but much simpler equipment may do the trick. You then take the crushed malt and add boiling water (at least 2 litres of water for every kg. of malt). Let the mix of water and malt stay at about 55-60 degrees Celsius and stir occasionally. It is supposed to stay like this for about 1 hour at a steady temperature. After this period, sift off the water from the malt, and add more water and sift it off also, to get as much of the malts taste and sugar content out and into the malt juice. If you may, you can do this more than twice by adding even more water to the malt. After you've done this, you can throw away the malt. Add water to the malt-juice so that you boil as much as possible of what will later be the wort you will set for yeasting. The most ideal is that you will boil about 205 litres for a 20 litre brew. Heat the malt-juice you've got out of the mash so it boils well, it's not supposed to only simmer. After about 10-15 minutes, add hops to give bitterness to the beer (this hops is the bitter-hops). The more hops you add the more bitter the beer will be. The malt juice is supposed to boil for about an hour to make the wort. If you want, you can put more hops just some minutes before the boiling of the malt-juice is finished. This is said to give the finished beer a more fresher taste of hops, and more aroma (therefore the name aroma-hops). You should take out all the small bits and pieces floating on the top while boiling the malt juice. When you have finished boiling the wort, sift it a couple of times so that all the leftovers from the malt and hops are removed from the wort. After this, cool it down as quick as possible. The longer you let it stay cooling and in contact with air, the bigger the chance of an infection of bacterias may infest the brew and destroy the brew. You're now almost ready to set the beer for fermentation.
FERMENTATION
4. Take the wort and mix it with water until you have the intended number of litres (about 20 litres of wort and water for this recipe). If you've been boiling 20 litres, some will have disappeared as steam and you will need to add more. You will need a big container either made from plastic or glass. Don't use a metal container. Mix it with cold water, so that it will not kill the yeast from heat. You may check the beer for its sugar-content (the more sugar, the more alcohol the beer will contain since the yeast makes alcohol out of the sugar in the brew). This is done by using a hydrometer. Add more sugar if you think the beer will be too weak. The sugar content in the brew will both come from the malt and the extra sugar you may have added. To find out what sugar-contents your beer have, you will have to use a hydrometer. The hydrometer is also useful to check at what time your beer has finished fermenting.
5. When you've added as much sugar as you want and stirred it in thourougly so that it has mixed well with the beer (instead of just lying at the bottom of the container) you're now ready to add the yeast. You may use normal yeast for baking, although not the dry yeast, or normal beer yeast which is also possible to buy. Stir it in, and close the container thorougly, put on a yeastlock to let the gases produced in the fermentation proces out of the container, at the same time as air will not be allowed into the container. The normal thing to do is to let the beer ferment at room temperature, but if you let it ferment at a somewhat lower tempereature (about 6-10 Celsius), it's supposed to get a better taste but the fermentation will take longer as well. Only certain types of beer, like ale, are supposed to be fermented at room temperature. At room tempereature, a beer with about 4,5% alcohol will require something like a week to finish its fermentation process, although this may vary a bit. After about a week, transfer the brew into a new contianer for a second round of yeasting, removing all the sediments at the bottom of the first container in the process.
If you have a hydrometer (a very useful tool for brewing), you may find out when the beer has stopped fermenting. The hydrometer will most probably have a chart which tells you when your beer has finished fermenting, but a reading of something around 1002-1004 indicates that the beer has finished fermentation. Sometimes the beer will finish fermenting before the hydrometer gets down to this level, however. If you don't check the sugar content of the beer when you transfer it to bottles, you may find that you've transferred it too early and the yeasting wasn't really finished. The result may be that the caps of the bottles fly off due to too much pressure, and you end up with having foaming beer all over the floor.
STORING
6. At the time when your beer has stopped fermenting, you may drink it, although you have to be really thirsty since it will almost certainly taste pretty bad! The brew will still be unclear and a lot of sediments from the fermentation process will be floating about or lying in the bottom of the container. The best idea is to syphon the beer through a plastic hose into a new container, being careful not to stir up the sediments left from the fermentation process which for the most part will be lying on the bottom of the container. This should be left in the first container and washed out instead of being brought on with the brew to the new container (you will have absolutely no use of it!). If you let it stay in the new container (still closed with a yeast lock) for about a week or two, the beer will have cleared up quite a bit, although doing this may make the yeast-culture in the beer die, and the last after-yeasting to be done on the bottles to make the beer fizzy can be quite difficult to do. The best idea will be to not syphon the beer into bottles before it's quite clear though, as this will improve the taste of the beer a lot and at the same time will make the level of sediments in the beer bottles pretty low.
7. When you decide that you've waited long enough for your beer you're ready to bottle it (so, hopefully, is the beer). Both plastic and glass bottles may be used. This is easy enough, only make sure you close the bottles thourougly after you've filled them, and that they are absolutely clean. There should be no spots or s**t in any of them. There are a number of ways to make them clean, from using a lot of special soap to boiling the bottles. To make your beer contain some funny fizzy bubbles, add about half a/whole teaspoon of sugar to each bottle before closing and shake it well so the sugar mixes with the beer. If you add too much sugar, the pressure in the bottles may become too high, and the caps may be flying off and beer floating all over your floor. To make the beer taste a bit better, it's advicable to store it in a cool, dark place for ar least a week, although it may be a good idea to let it stay there for a couple of months. If you have the patience to store the beer for, say a month, the taste will improve quite a bit! This is actually a good idea, since a lot of the homemade beer made in a hurry taste terrible! And you don't want that to happen to your beer, do you?
So, did this sound too hard? Nah! Anyway, if it does, you always have the option of buying a beer kit instead which will make the process of brewing a lot easier and straightforward for you.
If you do like this way and start to get the hang of it, there is quite a lot of equipment that will improve the brewing process, make it a lot easier for yourself, and also highten the quality of the finished brew a lot. There is much information about this on the web, and I can at least recommend this site <http://home.c2i.net/bottomsup/index.htm> as a good page to see a full homebrewing kit. It's possible to make a lot of this equipment yourself or cheaper versions that still work almost just as well, which makes the process even cheaper.
The biggest problem of brewing will most of the time be patience! The longer the beer stays (to a certain degree) before drinking, the better it will taste. And at the same time: the longer you wait, the thirstier you become! So enjoy your finished homebrewed beer at the time when either you or the beer can't keep any longer!
Both of this situations could have been avoided if you had already taken the time and pains to make your own beer at an earlier point in time which by now would have been finished, standing in the cellars just waiting to be drunk!
There are (at least) two ways of making beer:
Option no. 1. Buy a beer kit! In the kit you will find wort (malt extract with hops), that you only have to mix with water, sugar (optional for more alochol) and yeast and then put it to fermentation. Most of the beer kits you can buy will have an instruction booklet which tells you what to do to make the beer. Most of this homebrewing beer kits will make about 20 litres of finished beer. It's much easier using such a beer kit than making it all by yourself, but will cost a bit more as well. This is by far the most normal way of making your own beer, and is increasingly popular.
Option no. 2. Make it yourself from scratch! This includes making the malt, the malt extract/wort and everything. This is a much more complicated process but far more fun in the end when you drink it, and you can only blame a single person in the whole wide world for the terrible hangover you will most likely get the day after, that is yourself! In this way you don't need to go somewhere else to lay the blame on others either. So if you're still not daunted by the rather long and complicated process it requires, here follows a description on how to make your very own beer the hard way.
HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN BEER FROM SCRATCH
This will make about 20 litres of finished beer, all for just a few pennies! And of course, you can make as much or as little beer as you like!
To make the beer in this fasion you will need:
-A plastic/glass container of about 25-30 litres
-A yeastlock
-A plastic hose
-Hydrometer to check the sugar content of the brew(this is optional but it is a very good idea to have one!)
-a big kettle of about 25-30 litres (at least) for boiling
-A container that can keep a steady temperature for at least an hour for the mashing process, of about 25-30 litres
-Bottles (and caps for your bottles. You may have to buy a bottling-machine to put on the caps if you're not using plastic bottles). While both glass and plastic bottles are usable for storing, many people feel the beer tastes better if stored on glass bottles
-About 5 kilos of cereals, most used are barley. This will give about 4 kilos of finished malt
-about 70-90 grams of hops, although you may increase or decrease the amount after you're own preferences. Some of this (everything from 5-20+ grams) should be used as aroma-hops. The difference between this and normal hops is described later in the article
-About 10 grams of beer yeast. Although fluid beer yeast usually holds a much higher quality, and it's advisable to try to find this
-Varying amount of sugar, usually something like 500 grams-2 kilos will be enough
A very important thing to remember is that all the equipment need to be absolutely clean! This is extremely inmportant to make the beer a success. And be careful that all soap or products used for cleaning the equipment are completely rinsed off after cleaning as it will very easily put a horrible bi-taste on your finished beer.
MAKING THE MALT
1 Malt is made from cereals, mostly from barley and some from wheat. Although one never or very seldom hear of beers made from other kinds of cereals, it's probably possible as well. To make the malt needed for 20 litres of beer, take the cereals (about 5 kilos), clean it thourougly with and rinse it afterwards with water of any dust, dirt and similar things that may have stuck to it. After this you place it to soak in fresh water. The first three or so days you should change the water at least a couple of times a day and take away everything that floats up to the top of the container. When the cereals are soft all the way through, remove the it from the water, and let it out on a board of some kind in a layer of about 8 to 10 centimteres thick. The temperatue in the barley should be monitored, and should not rise above 20 degrees Celsius. The ideal temperature are said to be around 15-17 degrees Celsius. If the temperature is too low, collect the barley in a heap instead of actually laying it out in as thin a layer as 8-10 centimeters. The board should be clean. Let it stay in the water until the it has spouted green buds at least one and a half the length of the cereal itself (this will take about 7 days). At this time, you will be ready to make the malt.
2. When the cereals have spouted green buds of about the same length as the cereal or a bit longer, you take it out, dry off most of the water, and roast it. This will finish the malting process. You can use a normal oven, at about (80-130 degrees Celsius), for about (5-7 hours), at which time it's supposed to be finished. The more heat you use, the darker the malt, and of course the darker the finished beer. So here you will be able to choose between the different types of beer and make the one you like the best. However, it may be very difficult to make sure that the malt will be either dark or light, since it is not possible to keep a constant temperature in a normal kitchen oven, which will influence the malting process. Actually, the making of the malt is the absolutely most difficult part of making the beer. It's said to be an art, and to make good malt yourself may take a lot of practice.
TO MAKE THE WORT
3. When this is done, you're ready to make the wort. To make about 20 litres of beer, you will normally need 4 kilos of malt (about 5 kilos of cereals). More malt will give the beer a stronger taste while less will make the beer taste watery. Roughly crush or open the malt first. The main point with the crushing of the malt is to make the interior core in the malt to open up and give out its sugar and taste contents. The best way to crush the malt is to use a malt mill but much simpler equipment may do the trick. You then take the crushed malt and add boiling water (at least 2 litres of water for every kg. of malt). Let the mix of water and malt stay at about 55-60 degrees Celsius and stir occasionally. It is supposed to stay like this for about 1 hour at a steady temperature. After this period, sift off the water from the malt, and add more water and sift it off also, to get as much of the malts taste and sugar content out and into the malt juice. If you may, you can do this more than twice by adding even more water to the malt. After you've done this, you can throw away the malt. Add water to the malt-juice so that you boil as much as possible of what will later be the wort you will set for yeasting. The most ideal is that you will boil about 205 litres for a 20 litre brew. Heat the malt-juice you've got out of the mash so it boils well, it's not supposed to only simmer. After about 10-15 minutes, add hops to give bitterness to the beer (this hops is the bitter-hops). The more hops you add the more bitter the beer will be. The malt juice is supposed to boil for about an hour to make the wort. If you want, you can put more hops just some minutes before the boiling of the malt-juice is finished. This is said to give the finished beer a more fresher taste of hops, and more aroma (therefore the name aroma-hops). You should take out all the small bits and pieces floating on the top while boiling the malt juice. When you have finished boiling the wort, sift it a couple of times so that all the leftovers from the malt and hops are removed from the wort. After this, cool it down as quick as possible. The longer you let it stay cooling and in contact with air, the bigger the chance of an infection of bacterias may infest the brew and destroy the brew. You're now almost ready to set the beer for fermentation.
FERMENTATION
4. Take the wort and mix it with water until you have the intended number of litres (about 20 litres of wort and water for this recipe). If you've been boiling 20 litres, some will have disappeared as steam and you will need to add more. You will need a big container either made from plastic or glass. Don't use a metal container. Mix it with cold water, so that it will not kill the yeast from heat. You may check the beer for its sugar-content (the more sugar, the more alcohol the beer will contain since the yeast makes alcohol out of the sugar in the brew). This is done by using a hydrometer. Add more sugar if you think the beer will be too weak. The sugar content in the brew will both come from the malt and the extra sugar you may have added. To find out what sugar-contents your beer have, you will have to use a hydrometer. The hydrometer is also useful to check at what time your beer has finished fermenting.
5. When you've added as much sugar as you want and stirred it in thourougly so that it has mixed well with the beer (instead of just lying at the bottom of the container) you're now ready to add the yeast. You may use normal yeast for baking, although not the dry yeast, or normal beer yeast which is also possible to buy. Stir it in, and close the container thorougly, put on a yeastlock to let the gases produced in the fermentation proces out of the container, at the same time as air will not be allowed into the container. The normal thing to do is to let the beer ferment at room temperature, but if you let it ferment at a somewhat lower tempereature (about 6-10 Celsius), it's supposed to get a better taste but the fermentation will take longer as well. Only certain types of beer, like ale, are supposed to be fermented at room temperature. At room tempereature, a beer with about 4,5% alcohol will require something like a week to finish its fermentation process, although this may vary a bit. After about a week, transfer the brew into a new contianer for a second round of yeasting, removing all the sediments at the bottom of the first container in the process.
If you have a hydrometer (a very useful tool for brewing), you may find out when the beer has stopped fermenting. The hydrometer will most probably have a chart which tells you when your beer has finished fermenting, but a reading of something around 1002-1004 indicates that the beer has finished fermentation. Sometimes the beer will finish fermenting before the hydrometer gets down to this level, however. If you don't check the sugar content of the beer when you transfer it to bottles, you may find that you've transferred it too early and the yeasting wasn't really finished. The result may be that the caps of the bottles fly off due to too much pressure, and you end up with having foaming beer all over the floor.
STORING
6. At the time when your beer has stopped fermenting, you may drink it, although you have to be really thirsty since it will almost certainly taste pretty bad! The brew will still be unclear and a lot of sediments from the fermentation process will be floating about or lying in the bottom of the container. The best idea is to syphon the beer through a plastic hose into a new container, being careful not to stir up the sediments left from the fermentation process which for the most part will be lying on the bottom of the container. This should be left in the first container and washed out instead of being brought on with the brew to the new container (you will have absolutely no use of it!). If you let it stay in the new container (still closed with a yeast lock) for about a week or two, the beer will have cleared up quite a bit, although doing this may make the yeast-culture in the beer die, and the last after-yeasting to be done on the bottles to make the beer fizzy can be quite difficult to do. The best idea will be to not syphon the beer into bottles before it's quite clear though, as this will improve the taste of the beer a lot and at the same time will make the level of sediments in the beer bottles pretty low.
7. When you decide that you've waited long enough for your beer you're ready to bottle it (so, hopefully, is the beer). Both plastic and glass bottles may be used. This is easy enough, only make sure you close the bottles thourougly after you've filled them, and that they are absolutely clean. There should be no spots or s**t in any of them. There are a number of ways to make them clean, from using a lot of special soap to boiling the bottles. To make your beer contain some funny fizzy bubbles, add about half a/whole teaspoon of sugar to each bottle before closing and shake it well so the sugar mixes with the beer. If you add too much sugar, the pressure in the bottles may become too high, and the caps may be flying off and beer floating all over your floor. To make the beer taste a bit better, it's advicable to store it in a cool, dark place for ar least a week, although it may be a good idea to let it stay there for a couple of months. If you have the patience to store the beer for, say a month, the taste will improve quite a bit! This is actually a good idea, since a lot of the homemade beer made in a hurry taste terrible! And you don't want that to happen to your beer, do you?
So, did this sound too hard? Nah! Anyway, if it does, you always have the option of buying a beer kit instead which will make the process of brewing a lot easier and straightforward for you.
If you do like this way and start to get the hang of it, there is quite a lot of equipment that will improve the brewing process, make it a lot easier for yourself, and also highten the quality of the finished brew a lot. There is much information about this on the web, and I can at least recommend this site <http://home.c2i.net/bottomsup/index.htm> as a good page to see a full homebrewing kit. It's possible to make a lot of this equipment yourself or cheaper versions that still work almost just as well, which makes the process even cheaper.
The biggest problem of brewing will most of the time be patience! The longer the beer stays (to a certain degree) before drinking, the better it will taste. And at the same time: the longer you wait, the thirstier you become! So enjoy your finished homebrewed beer at the time when either you or the beer can't keep any longer!
