Brewing beer at home can be very exciting and at the same very challenging.
No Doubt, home brewing beer may take time more and effort than driving to the store but once you really get the hang of it, you will have so much fun doing it that you will not really pay much attention to how much time and effort you put into producing a few bottles of beer.
Besides, home brewing beer gives you a satisfaction that you can only get when you finally savor your bottles of beer that you personally made.
Quick Start To Home Brewing Beer
If you do decide to brew your own beer, you must make sure that you get the proper equipments and ingredients. For your ingredients, you will need water (I like to carbon filter my water), malt, hops and yeast. If you like you beer to appear light and taste light, you will need to buy some light colored malt and hops with a low alpha number.
Using malts and hops with a high alpha number will give out a stronger flavor, so avoid that one if you have no desire of producing strong beer. On the other hand, if you are interested in getting a more aggressive type of beer, go for hops with higher number but use only less than 2 ounces at the beginning of the boiling process otherwise your beer will taste too bitter. You need to keep in mind that timing and proper measurement is very important when home brewing beer. If you put in too many ingredients into your mix, you could ruin the taste of an otherwise good beer.
What you will need to do first when start home brewing beer is to boil your malt extract for about 30 minutes. Stir the liquid occasionally and then add the hop pellets. Do this 5-10 minutes before you finish the boiling process. Make sure that you do not over boil your liquid or else you will spoil the taste of your beer.
When home brewing beer, it is very important to pay close attention to cleaning and sanitizing of equipments especially the ones that you use for fermenting and storing your beer. Always remember that cleaning is different than sanitizing. Just because you have washed the utensils and containers with soap and water, that doesn’t mean that these things are already sanitized.
After cleaning your utensils and containers, you need to apply some bleaching or sanitizing solutions to your equipments to kill whatever bacteria that may be in them. Since bleaching agents and sanitizers often leave some odors in the equipments, you will need to rinse the utensils and containers thoroughly. In case you don’t want to use sanitizers or bleaching agents, you can sterilize your containers and utensils by boiling them for about 15 - 20 minutes. Always clean and sanitize your home brewing beer equipment well.
