Homebrew 101

The first written record of beer belongs to the Sumerians who fermented their bread in a watery mush to create an exhilarating and intoxicating beverage. Extolled by the ancient Greeks, beer fell out of favor with the Romans whose warm climates were better suited for growing grapes and making wine. Further north, the Teutonic peoples championed the glory of beer. Trappist Monks produced homebrew as a nutritious form of liquid bread to be consumed with meals or during a fast. Copious amounts of beer have sustained many a monk during a prolonged fast. It was not unheard of for the monks to consume as much as five liters of homebrew a day. But it was the Germans, who in 1516 passed the purity law called Reinheitsgebot, which limited beer’s ingredients to water, barley and hops. Later, this law changed to include yeast among the four ingredients of beer. The beginning homebrewer will find that s/he will use a few extras to help along the way.

Why brew your own beer? Surely, it is quicker and easier to journey to the corner store for a six-pack than to sojourn in the land of homebrew, but the rewards of brewing your own delicious beer expand beyond our collective beer belly. Brewing is a fun and engrossing activity that can be done alone, but is better shared with a good friend or two. It is certain that your friends will all be eager to taste the finished product, so it is only fair to enlist a few to help with the set-up and clean-up involved in the brewing process.

Brewing your own beer is a surefire way to develop and refine your beer palette. After your first batch of homebrew is in the works, the brewer will find him/herself passing by the king of beers, driven by an intense desire to discover the unknown. Each pint of exotic beer becomes research for your next batch, drinking not only with your mouth, but with your brewer’s brain. You will finally be able to appreciate microbrew and understand why it is not the same as the champagne of beers. There lives a beer snob in all of us; homebrew just awakens this beast.

An all too often overlooked byproduct of brewing, spent yeast is one of nature’s best hangover cures. Perhaps you are not the type to spend a small fortune on brewer’s yeast at your local health food store, but the spent yeast from your homebrew has an optimal combination of minerals and B vitamins that are depleted when drinking. Keep some of this brownish sludge in a jar to stave off hangovers before going out to drink or as a morning-after tonic.

To brew your own beer, you’ll need a few items found easily in most kitchens and a couple of items from a local homebrew shop or online store. From your kitchen, you will need a large pot big enough to hold 2-3 gallons of water, a stirring spoon, a stove and plenty of water. You will eventually need many empty beer bottles so start saving your empties! The best kinds are brown glass pop tops, no twist offs. Green bottles are also acceptable, but clear glass lets in too much light and will spoil the beer. The other necessary materials not commonly found in a kitchen are a five-gallon fermenting bucket (any food-grade bucket will work, glass carboys are also great if you can find one); several feet of rubber tubing (clear vinyl is the best); an airlock (you can make one by leading a rubber tube down into a bowl of water, but it is better to buy one from a homebrew shop); a bottle capper and caps (found at a homebrew shop). Later on, a homebrewer will want to acquire a good thermometer and hydrometer to better craft his/her beer, but these are not strictly necessary for the first batch. It is easy to get all of these materials plus ingredients in a homebrew kit available for under $100 at any homebrew shop. Don’t go overboard to get the deluxe kit right at the beginning since it will have more equipment and gadgetry than the beginner will know what to do with.

Water, malted barley, hops and yeast. These four items are the mainstay of any beer brewing, lest we forget the Reinheitsgebot. But you will also want some sweetener like sugar or corn syrup to add bubbles to the beer. And no, Nutrasweet or Splenda is not a viable alternative. For the beginner, one can substitute malt syrup for malted barley. This will simplify the process and is generally recommended.

To make beer, one begins by making wort. Wort is essentially a tea made out of the malted barley. One cooks the barley to release all the sugars into the water. These sugars will become food for the yeast and consequently turn into alcohol. After the wort is good and sweet, one adds the hops for flavor. The wort is cooled to room temperature and transferred into the fermentation vessel (aka bucket) and usually diluted with water. Be sure that the vessel is clean and sterile before you add the wort. Now there is nothing left to do except to add the yeast, close the bucket and put on the airlock. If you are using a dried yeast, as opposed to the fancier liquid yeasts, it is a good idea to proof the yeast first by letting it sit in some warm water with a spoonful of sugar to give the yeast the right idea. If the yeast begins to froth up, then it’s ready to go into the wort. The wort should begin to bubble in about 24 hours; this is a good sign that the little yeast are doing their work. Once the wort seems to have stopped bubbling, in about two weeks, you are ready to move onto the next step: bottling your beer.

Begin by making sure your bottles, caps and siphoning tube are clean and sterile. Some brewers advocate a solution of bleach and water to sterilize their implements, but this can leave a residue. Some mild soap and good hot water should suffice to sterilize the materials. Mix up 2/3 cup of cane sugar with two cups of warm water and stir gently into the fermented wort so as not to disturb any residue collected on the bottom. This extra sugar boost gives enough food to the yeast for them to carbonate the beer in the bottle. Now you can begin to siphon the solution into the bottles. Make sure you don’t contaminate the tube when you start to siphon by rinsing your mouth with 100 proof vodka. After you’ve filled the bottles, cap them, and set them aside in a dark cool place. How long you’ll wait before sampling the fruit of your labor depends on the recipe used, but at least two weeks is a safe bet.

There is a rich resource of brewing information out there so explore different opinions and recipes. Remember that it’s all well and good to buy somebody a drink. But to invite someone to share a homebrewed beer is a whole other level of classy.