(almost) everyone who drinks beer should learn to make it.
making beer requires a modest investment of startup capital and a slight learning curve. past that point, all it takes is time and ingredients. you can make a super-simple batch of beer that tastes great and costs way less than beer at the store without much effort (see recipe, below). what's more, you have control over all of the ingredients, and crucially, the packaging. very few people harp on this, but let me put it in perspective: a 5-gallon batch of beer, optimally, will yield somewhere around 48 12-ounce bottles. you can wash and reuse those bottles almost forever. if i make 10 batches of beer and reuse the bottles each time, then i've saved 432 bottles or cans from being sold. you can also use "bombers" or other flip-top bottles to save bottle caps, or keg your homebrew.
you can usually get all of the consumable ingredients needed for a 5-gallon batch of beer for about $30, depending on complexity. that's about 62 cents a bottle. you won't get ideal yields every time, and lots of recipes will use larger amounts of (and more expensive types of) ingredients, so as with all things ymmv. what do you need?
- a big pot (at least 7-8 gallons, ideally)
- a long spoon
- at least one big bucket
- something to rapidly chill your wort
- something to hold your finished beer (keg, bottles, etc)
- something to transfer your finished beer into said receptacle
- some manner of airlock
- hoses (at least one small hose for bottling, probably one more for a siphon)
- the means to sanitize all of the above
- crushed malt (malted barley) or malt extract
- hops (whole or pellet)
- yeast
- water
- sugar (unless kegging)
that's it. extract brewing -- using malt extract instead of the raw grain -- is generally how most people get started, because it's easier. if you use grain, you'll need some means to filter it out of the final product.
if you want the world's easiest, no-frills beer recipe, here you go. it won't make great beer, but it'll be better than a can of swill, and probably cheaper.
stupid beginner beer
ingredients:
- 5 pounds of dry malt extract
- 2 ounces of pellet hops
- some yeast
- 5.5 to 6-ish gallons of water (water you'd want to drink -- doesn't have to be filtered)
- some sugar, at the end
- put the water in your pot and heat it on high.
- while the water is coming to a boil, add the malt extract. mix and whisk thoroughly until there are no lumps. congratulations, you have started making wort.
- when the water comes to a boil, add half the hops. let it boil for 45 minutes.
- note: when it's boiling, it might boil over if the pot isn't significantly bigger than the water. this is normal. if it starts to boil over, just shut off the heat and spray some cold water on top until the foaming subsides, then turn the heat back on. it might not happen, it might happen twice. the beer gods are fickle.
- after 45 minutes, add the remaining hops. boil for 15 more minutes.
- while it's boiling, set up some sort of chilling apparatus. the goal is to cool the beer to, ideally, about 70F. the easiest method is to cover the pot and stick it in a big tub full of ice water. if you make beer during winter, you can just take the pot outside (and cover it with snow!), maybe spray the outside of the pot with cold water. you want to get it cold as fast as possible.
- when the wort is at the target temp, stop chilling and dump it in a sanitized bucket.
- once in the bucket, use a sanitized pair of scissors, cut open the yeast and dump it in.
- slap a lid on it and pop on the airlock. put it somewhere cool.
- the next couple of days, check on the airlock. it should be bubbling visibly (not necessarily vigorously).
- forget about it for a couple of weeks.
- from here on, everything that touches beer should be sanitized -- spoons, hoses, siphons, buckets, bottles, bottlecaps, you name it. if you can't remember if it was sanitized, re-sanitize it.
- check on the beer. it should not be bubbling. if you want to be absolutely sure that it's done, you can measure the gravity on consecutive days using the hydrometer. if the gravity is unchanged at the same temperature, then the wort is no longer active (and now, technically, i guess we can call it beer).
- dissolve some sugar (about 3/4 cup) in 2-ish cups of boiling water on the stove. this is priming sugar. when this is added to the beer, it will reactivate some of the yeast and it will ferment a little more in the bottle, making it carbonated. let the priming sugar cool down a bit before adding it to the beer. mix it well with a sanitized spoon. if you don't mix it well, then you'll end up with a couple of sugar-heavy bottles (over-carbonated, will "gush" when opened) and some others that will be nearly flat. ask me how i know.
- bottle it. the easiest method is to get a second bucket with a spigot on the base; with the spigot closed, use a siphon (or just pour it, i don't know your life) to transfer the beer from the fermenting bucket into the bottling bucket. there's going to be a lot of sediment at the bottom, that's called the trub. it's mostly yeast, with bits of hops and other plant/grain matter. you want as little trub as possible in the end product, so when siphoning, look at the hose; when it starts to get cloudy, ease up. if it gets opaque, you've probably salvaged everything you can. i recommend keeping the bottom of the siphon a couple inches off the bottom of the fermenter to avoid as much trub as you can.
- hook a hose up to the spigot. put hose in bottle, open spigot, close spigot when full, repeat (or use a bottling wand).
- if you are using flip-top bottles, just snap them shut. otherwise, you'll need to buy bottlecaps and use a capper.
- let them sit for a while -- at least a week, preferably at least two. congrats! you have beer.
why this schedule? the first ounce of hops added at the beginning will mostly be for bittering. the second, added towards the end, will impart some additional hop flavor. if you like a hoppier beer, you can add them instead at the end of the hour-long boil (or at step 7 you can add them directly to the chilled wort in the fermenting bucket, which will really bring them to the nose, called "dry-hopping"), which will preserve those pine-y, citrus-y hop notes. the ones i linked, saaz, are a fairly mild czech hop. when looking for hops, they will tell you notes about the flavor and aroma, as well as some numbers like alpha and beta acids. the big takeaway is that as those acid numbers get bigger, those distinctly hoppy flavors and aromas will get stronger in your beer. some people are nuts about this, and personally i just tend to wing it.
if you sprung for a wort chiller, just hook the hose end up to a faucet and it'll pump cold water through the coils and warm water out the exhaust (make sure it's clean and sanitized before putting it in the pot). i use a wort chiller attached to a submersible pump that i put in a cooler full of ice water, and the exhaust water gets fed back into the cooler to recirculate. it uses a lot of ice, but it uses a lot less water overall.
optional but highly recommended: use a hydrometer (in a graduated cylinder) to collect a sample. the initial reading is the OG, or original gravity. the final reading is the FG, or final gravity. those two numbers will let you know the ABV of your beer.
don't have an airlock? you'll just need some way to cover the fermenter that will allow gas to escape but nothing to get in. when i make small batches of stuff like kvass, i use an old everclear bottle and my airlock is a balloon with a pinhole poked in it. if you're careful, you could probably get away with a lid that shuts but doesn't form a great seal. whatever you use, just make sure it's clean and sanitized.
if you want to keg it, don't add priming sugar. kegging will force carbonate the beer. you don't want to try and have extra fermentation happening under pressure, unless you like really messy explosions.
about transferring: i've been told that you want to siphon because it will minimize the introduction of oxygen, and that can help to prevent off flavors in the beer. there have been times that i've just poured the whole mess through a sanitized mesh strainer and called it a day, and it still turned out great.