‘Home Brew: The Art of Creating Delicious Beer at Home.’
Brewing beer at home is becoming increasingly common among craft beer enthusiasts, with more and more hopefuls taking the plunge into the wonderful world of homebrewing.
For the amateur and experienced brewmaster alike, home brewing offers a great opportunity to craft something special, and taste the fruits of your labours in the form of a delicious beverage.
Whether it’s a thirst-quenching pale ale, a delightful stout, or a fruity sour beer, home brewing kits are widely available and make it straightforward to start your own homebrewing.
More than just making your own beer, homebrewing is pushing the boundaries of brewing, with countless new and innovative styles now being explored at home, bringing a new level of creativity to beer-making.
In this blog post, we’ll be taking a closer look at home brewing, exploring the different ingredients and equipment used, the different types of beer you can brew, and the different methods used to brew them. Whether you’re a beginner wanting to give homebrewing a go, or an experienced brewer looking for a refresher on techniques, we’re going to cover a range of fundamentals that will help you to get started.
What You Need To Get Started With Home Brewing
Brewing beer, unlike wine, cider and spirits, is relatively easy to set up and get going at home, with just a few pieces of equipment and ingredients needed.
Ingredients for Home Brewing
At its most basic, beer is brewed from four key ingredients; malt, water, yeast and hops.
Malt
Malt is the foundation of any beer, providing sweetness, colour and much of the flavour. Malted barley is the most commonly used malt in beer, but wheat, oats, rye and other grains are also used in certain styles.
Malted barley is created by taking barley grain, moistening and then germinating it, and then drying it. This process makes the starches within the grain more accessible, making them more able to ferment.
Hops
Hops are an essential component of beer, and provide bitterness, flavour and aroma. There are a huge variety of commercial hop varieties available, ranging from English Goldings to the citrusy US Cascade and the more tropical varieties likes US Mosaic and US Citra.
The hop floral compounds are responsible for much of the bold aromas often associated with modern beer styles.
Yeast
Yeast is another essential component of beer, and plays a key role in fermentation. There is a wide variety of yeasts available for home brewing, with two main categories; ale yeast and lager yeast.
Ale yeast likes higher fermentation temperatures and ferments quickly to give beer a sweet, fruity and estery flavour. Lager yeast prefers cooler temperatures and ferments slowly, giving beer a crisp, clean taste.
Water
Water is however an overlooked component of beer, but is key to producing a balanced, flavourful beer. A lack of minerals can cause beer to become flavourless and dull, while too many minerals can contribute off-flavours.
Many brewers blend conductivity of their brewing water, to give it the right mineral balance.
Equipment for Home Brewing
Once you’ve got the ingredients, there’s a need for some equipment. Generally speaking, you will need a vessel to hold the malt extract and a vessel to hold the hot brewing liquor.
Mash tun
The mash tun is where the milled grains are extracted of their sweet, malty goodness. They’re typically stainless steel and insulated for best results.
Boil kettle
The boil kettle is the vessel used to bring the wort to a rolling boil. Boiling the wort changes the flavour of the beer, and also processes the hops.
Fermenter
The fermenter is the vessel used to ferment the wort and create beer! To get the best results, look for one with an airlock, which prevents contamination by atmosphere or wild yeast.
Optional Extras
You don’t necessarily need to use all of the equipment mentioned above, but there are several accessories which can make your homebrewing experience even easier and more enjoyable.
Wort chiller
The wort chiller is great for cooling wort quickly after the boil in a safe, efficient manner. This is especially useful on hot summer days.
Gyle Valve
A gyle valve allows you to use the same fermenter to make multiple batches of beer, and can be useful if you want to make a number of different recipes at once.
Bottling Kits
Bottling kits make it straightforward to transfer beer from the fermenter to a bottle. These often come in combination with a capper or crown capper, for applying the caps.
Different Types of Beer
Once you’ve got the ingredients and equipment, you can start to explore the different types of beer you can brew. Here’s a brief introduction to some of the most popular.
Pale Ales
Pale ales are the most popular style of homebrew, with a range of different bitterness, hops, and malt character, to enjoy. They can range from light and fruity session beers, to hoppy and robust American pale ales.
Stouts and Porters
These dark, malty beers have become increasingly popular among homebrewers. Stouts and porters are usually brewed with dark specialty malts, usually roasted barley, to create a deep, intense flavour.
Experimentation is the name of the game when it comes to stouts and porters, and there are a huge number of variations on the traditional style, with some brewers even brewing barrel-aged stouts or fruit-infused porters.
Session Beers
Session beers are perfect for summer drinking, with a lower ABV and a light and crisp flavour. This means that they’re easy to enjoy by the pint, without overwhelming the palate.
Wheat Beers
Wheat beers are brewed using wheat, using either wheat malt or unmalted wheat. This is responsible for much of their characteristic light, tangy, spicy flavour, and often gives them a slightly hazy appearance.
There are a huge range of wheat beers available, including the traditional German Hefeweiss, the USA-style pale wheat, belgian witbiers, and the fruity berliner weisse.
Fruit Beers
Fruit beers are becoming increasingly popular, and range from lightly tart fruited sours, to enjoyably sweet fruit beers. Fruit can be added to the fermenter, or during the secondary fermentation, and adaptations can be made to further adapt the beer to the brewers taste and preferences.
Sour Beers
Sour beers are a style of beer which has been widely celebrated in recent years, and is becoming more and more popular among homebrewers.
Sour beers are created when wild yeasts and bacteria ferment the beer, giving it a tart, sour flavour. These beers are even more complex than regular beers, and require a little extra effort to brew.
Methods for Home Brewing
There are a number of different methods used in home brewing. Here’s a brief introduction to some of the most popular.
Extract Brewing
Extract brewing is the simplest method of home-brewing and is a great way to familiarise yourself with the process, before moving onto all grain brewing.
Extract brewing is a three-step process, where malt extract is added to water, boiled and cooled, and then the yeast is added to ferment.
Partial Mash Brewing
Partial Mash brewing (also known as mini-mash brewing) is an offshoot of extract brewing. Instead of using only dried malt extracts, which is used in extract brewing, partial mash brewing involves mashing a small amount of grains yourself to supplement the amount of malt extracts used.
All Grain Brewing
All Grain brewing is the most popular method among advanced home brewers. In this method, the brewer mashes all their own grains beforehand, and then boils and ferments like in any other process.
All grain brewing can require a little more investment in terms of equipment and technical know-how, but the rewards can be great for those willing to put the effort in.
Brew-In-A-Bag
Brew-in-a-bag (BIAB) method is similar to all grain brewing, but is often seen as a simpler and less expensive method.
BIAB involves a single vessel approach to all grain brewing, where all the inputs (cracked grain, hops and water) are added to a large mesh bag, and the whole lot is re-circulated and brought to a boil before being cooled.
No Sparge Brewing
No Sparge brewing is similar to brew-in-a-bagmethod, but in this method the water is pre-boiled, and the grains are steeped in the hot water for a few hours, before the wort is drawn and cooled.
This is a simpler and faster approach, but can produce beer with some astringent flavours, due to the high temperatures used.
Conclusion
Homebrewing is an incredibly rewarding experience, and there’s nothing better than cracking open the first bottle of beer made from the fruits of your labour.
Whether you’re a beginner looking to get into homebrewing or an experienced brewer wanting to push the boundaries of their brewing with beautiful beers and exciting flavour profiles, home brewing is the perfect way to create something that is truly unique, and truly yours.
So, why not take the plunge and start your very own homebrewing journey today!