Making your own beer is a creative experience that will test your skills, knowledge, and patience. To start on a good way you will need to know some basics of beer before you start with your first recipe. Beer has been around us for thousands of years. And the main recipe has not changed much over the centuries.

There are four main ingredients in beer. Water, malted grains, hops, and yeast. Each of these ingredients is part of your homebrewing journey.

Water

You will start each beer recipe with the requested amount of water. As a beginner brewer, you don’t have to know a lot about water chemistry. This is something that you can learn in time. Soon you will notice that different types of beer sometimes require specific water chemistry. And there are things that we can add to the water to make a better quality beer.

For choosing the correct water source, the main thing is to use dechlorinated water. Good water will make a great-tasting beer. I always suggest using store-bought water or spring water. Especially if you don’t have your local water report and you are not sure if your tap water is chlorinated or not. More experienced brewers sometimes use filtered water, but that is an investment you can choose to make later on. Water to make a classic light lager or a dark ale will have different water chemistry. But as I mentioned, this is something you can learn later. The most important thing is to have good-quality spring water that you can easily buy at your local grocery store.

Malted grains

If you are choosing to start with extract brewing, you don’t have to learn much about grains. Your extract malt will come in dry or liquid form, and all you have to do is add it to your water. But knowing about different grains used in beer brewing is a good step in the right direction. Most commonly used grains are barley, wheat, rice, oats, corn, and rye. Barley and wheat must undergo a malting process before they can be used for brewing beer. It’s basically soaking the grains in water and waiting for them to sprout. Just before they start to sprout, grains are then put in a kiln and dried.

Grains will give different colors and flavors to a beer. When you start with your first beer recipe you will see what types of grains you need to use. Now, most homebrewing grains are easily available online or you can buy them in your homebrewing store. Just make sure to store them correctly in a dry place and a closed container so they give you the best result when you are ready to use them.

Hops

Hops are essentially flowers of a perennial vine that are soft, cone-shaped, and green in color. Hops are added to the beer at different stages and they give it its known bitter taste. There are many different varieties of hops that will give beer specific flavors. Some beers require more hops than others and it’s always important to follow the recipe for first-time brewers.

Hops can also be purchased online or in your homebrewing stores. What is important for hops is to learn at least some of the basic varieties, especially the type you will be using in your recipes. Hops are the last ingredient to be added to beer historically. The beer of Ancient times was made without hops since they were not recognized as important at that time. Usage of hops in brewing beer started in the Middle Ages and until now there are hundreds of hop varieties used in beer brewing.

Yeast

It’s important that for brewing beer, we use only brewer’s yeast. It is possible to make beer with regular (bread) yeast, but the result will not be very presentable. Brewer’s yeast can come in two different forms, dry and liquid. For dry yeast, it is favorable if you do a yeast starter before you add it to your wort. This will make sure that there are enough healthy yeast cells in your yeast to create a great-tasting beer.

The role of yeast in making beer is essential. Yeast consumes the sugars from malted grains and creates alcohol and carbon dioxide. There are two main categories of yeast, lager yeast, and ale yeast. When adding your yeast you need to make sure to add it at the correct temperature according to its type and to keep that temperature range during the time your beer will be fermenting.

Lager yeast fermentation temperatures are on the colder side. Typically, lager fermentation is conducted in the range of 48–58°F (9–14°C), and because some lager yeasts can ferment more kinds of sugars than ale yeasts, the final beer is often crisper on the palate. Ale fermentation falls on the warm side of the scale, with yeasts that prefer a general range of 60 to 78°F (16–26°C).