Making your first batch of beer can be stressful and this simple guide will make it easy and fun. Be ready to make mistakes since we have all been there. Making beer is supposed to be a fun and interesting hobby so don’t worry too much. There are things that you should and shouldn’t do. But making your own beer is more than following a recipe. Soon with time, you will get the experience and skills that will make all the difference in how your final product will taste.

Getting started

The best way to brew your first batch of beer is to simply pick up an ingredient kit from your local homebrew supply store. It will have all the ingredients you will need and most importantly it will come with detailed instructions. But there are still some things that don’t usually come in manuals.

In your ingredient kit you will find

• Malted extract
• A bag of crushed specialty grains
• A bag of hops that might be vacuum sealed
• A package with muslin bags for steeping the hops
• A package of yeast for fermenting the beer
• A set of instructions

Brewing time

The first step is to steep your specialty grains to add a specific malt character. You can use any range of specialty grains to get different characters in your beer. If you prefer to do pure extract brewing, you can skip this step and move on. But this will make a lot of difference in the color and taste of your beer. Steep your grains tied up in a bag in hot water in the 5-gallon kettle. It is the ideal size to use. Stainless steel pots are less corrosive and easier to take care of than other metals.

First, check that your water is approximately 150-170 degrees F (65-76°C) using a simple stainless steel thermometer. Place crushed specialty grains in a muslin bag. When your water is at the correct temperature, put the bag in. If you have a flame on your pot, you will want to turn it off at this point. So when your grains sink to the bottom of the pot, they won’t get scorched against the flame. Stir the grains periodically. You will soon notice how much color and flavor will steep out of it.

After approximately 30 minutes remove the grains from the water. Place the bag on a strainer and rinse the extra flavors and sugars from those grains with a small amount of hot water. Once you rinse the grains you won’t need them again.

The next step is to add the malt extract to the water which is extracted fermentable sugars from malted barley. Malt extract is quite concentrated and very thick and syrupy. Stir the pot very thoroughly and make sure that you mix everything in. Once you add the malt extract to water it’s commonly referred to as wort which is a brewer’s word for unfermented beer.

The boil and pitching the yeast

When the malt extract is successfully added it is time to bring everything to a boil. This can be done on your kitchen stove at home. When the wort is approaching a boil it’s important to watch the pot and nurse the boil to a calm boil carefully without allowing it to surge up and boil over.

For bittering place hops in the muslin bag and add them to the boiling wort and begin your 60 minutes to boil. It is important here to add that not all beer recipes require a 60 minutes boil. Some brewers will use 45 minutes or even 30 minutes boil. This is something you would want to experiment with each time when making beer to notice and learn how long of a boil is best for your beer. The same goes for the time when you will add your hops. The time will vary from brewer to brewer. Boiling hops for 60 minutes will extract more bitterness to counter the sweetness of the malt. But you also can experiment with the duration of the hops boiling in your wort to see the level of bitterness and flavors from the hops that are best suited for your liking. This is what makes brewing beer so personal because you can adjust it to your creativity and instinct. Your recipe may call for flavoring or an aroma addition of hops in the last 15 minutes of the boil.

At the end of the boil, you need to chill down the wort to a temperature that won’t harm your yeast as quickly as possible. At home, you can submerge your pot in an ice bath in your sink. But the most commonly used tool is a wort chiller. This piece of equipment you can purchase online or in your local homebrewer supply store.

Once the boil is finished it’s important to properly sanitize any equipment that might come in contact with your beer. These sanitizers are readily available at any local homebrewing store and most of them are no-rinse sanitizers.

Remove your hop bag from the wort and add your wort to the fermenter. Top the wort up to 5 gallons with cold water. Once it’s topped up to 5 gallons and about room temperature, it’s time to add the yeast. There is no stirring necessary. The yeast rehydrates themselves and starts the fermentation process.

Main things to consider

It is a good practice that after pitching the yeast to your wort you give everything a good shake. This will incorporate oxygen into your wort which will result in a healthy fermentation. Introducing oxygen to wort is necessary before the fermentation starts. But after the first signs of fermentation, you don’t want to expose your beer to oxygen. So make sure not the shake the fermenter again.

Attach an airlock with a rubber stopper to your fermenter. It will allow gas from the fermentation out of the fermenter but stop airborne bacteria from getting in. Also during fermentation, you need to keep your fermenter in a dark place away from sunlight. Beer will need to ferment for at least 2 weeks before you can move on to bottling or kegging your beer.

One of the signs that fermentation is starting is that you will hear a bubbling sign from your airlock. After a couple of weeks, the bubbling will stop and it will be the first notice that the fermentation process is finishing. It is normal if the beer in your fermenter starts to foam up releasing all the gas so it is nothing to worry about.

Bottling or kegging?

As a starting brewer, the cheapest and easiest way would be to bottle your beer. You will carefully transfer it from your fermenter to a bottling bucket using a siphon. You will need to add sugar (the best would be a solution of dissolved sugar in warm water) to your bottling bucket. This sugar will start the second fermentation of your beer in the bottle to create carbonation.

For bottling it’s important to use fermentation-grade bottles. You will siphon the beer from the bottling bucket to your individual sanitized bottles. Placing a sanitized bottle cap on top of the bottle you need to push it in with a bottle capper to seal it. Bottled beer will need to ferment for additional 2 weeks in a dark dry place and then you will have your beer ready to drink.

For kegging, your investment will be a little more equipment. You will need to purchase a keg and a tank of CO2 to force carbonation into your beer. You will transfer the beer to a purged keg and force carbonate it. This way your beer will be ready sooner. For more in depth details on both techniques check How To Package Your Beer – Bottle Or Keg?

No matter which technique you decide to use the result will be the same. Your first batch of beer.