Basic beer brewing

So you have decided to make some beer? Great! It's fun, easy and rewarding. I will give you the basics here so you will be able to start your own batch of beer quickly. I will assume that you are using malt and mash/leach it yourself. If you are buying it premade then you can just skip that step. I will begin to give you all the steps in one go and then later explain them one by one. There are of course different ways of doing things and you might think to yourself: is all this really necessary? Let me put it this way: if you can get sugar out of the malt and get things to start fermenting it works! If you find another way to do it and it works for you that's terriffic. In medieval times people did it at home in many, many different ways. Keep in mind that brewing beer at home was considered the same as cooking and baking bread, now try and ask your mother/grandmother for a recipe for a bread that she has done for many years (you are lucky if you can get a description..). Now take it and compare it to someone else's, are they exactly the same? No, but they are still bread. Same applies here so keep that in mind when you are experimenting and making your own things.

The steps to make beer:
1. Mashing/leaching.
2. Boiling (possibly adding hops or other things for flavour).
3. Cool it down.
4. Filter out the hops and other big stuff.
5. Pour it into the container for fermenting.
6. Add yeast.
7. Let it ferment.
8. Rack it once, sometimes twice.
9. Bottle it and let it rest a week.
10. Taste and be amazed.

Doesn't sound too hard now does it? Let me give some more details on the different steps, I sometimes will give a different method on how to do things so you can pick and chose whichever suits you the best.

1. Mashing/leaching.
This step will get the sugar and other nourishments for the yeast and also some nice flavour. What needs to be done is let the malt be in water of a certain temperature for an hour, now it needs to sit in two different temperatures one hour each. The reason being that the malt will release sugar and starch at different temperatures and both are needed in the brewing process. First the water needs to be between 64-68°C and the second 72-76°C. I usually aim for 65°C and 74°C and so far it has worked perfectly. I have found two ways to do this and through experiments I haven't found a big difference between them.

Method 1A:
Put the malt in a cooler box with a tap, heat up the water, pour it in and let it sit for an hour. Then get it out through the tap, heat it up again at a higher temperature and pour it in. Second time you take it out you should take one liter at the time, pour it back into the cooler box until it becomes clear and then you pour it into your boiling pot.

Method 1B (the one I prefer nowadays):
Cover the inside of the pot with a dense linen cloth, add water and malt and heat it up first to 64°C, let it sit for an hour while you make sure it doesn't go below 64°C. Then raise the temperature to 74°C and let it sit for an hour, again making sure not to let it drop too far. When that is done you simply take out the linen cloth with the malt inside it and voilá, it gets filtered at the same time. The drawbacks here are that you need to check it more often and it requires more work. The benefits are that you use one container less and thus reducing the risk of contamination. And you also get it filtered.

2. Boiling.
When you boil it you will see something called hot break, this is when you break down the sugar strings into smaller and more easily used parts so the yeast will have an easier time fermenting. It needs to be boiled for about an hour to make sure it's ready, that is also the time hops need to be boiled in order to get the alphaacid you want for that bitter taste. You usually have hops with a high percentage for this and at the end (say 15 minutes) you add another hops for aroma. Here you can play around with time and different hops, say adding one at 15 minutes, one at 10 etc. Your imagination is the limit.

3. Cool it down.
After it has boiled it is very sensitive for contamination so you will want to cool it down quickly. Filling a bath tub with cold water and ice works very nice, make sure you measure the temperature so it doesn't go too far for your yeast.

4. Filter out hops and other big stuff.
For this you will need a strainer and another pot. Simply pour the liquid through the strainer into the other pot, the finer the holes the better.

5. Pour it into the container for fermenting.
When you pour it in make sure it splashes around to get as much oxygen into it as possible so the yeast will grow faster.

6. Add yeast.
Depending on what kind of yeast you are using you might have to make it grow before you pour it in, if it's a dry yeast you might have to add water to it etc. etc. so this will need preparation, i.e. sometimes you need to start with the yeast. But after you have added your yeast to your soon-to-be-beer you seal it with a waterlock, shake it and just put it away.

7. Let it ferment.
This is the step where you can't do much really, you nervously have to wait until you hear it start bubbling. Usually it starts pretty quickly but it can take a day or two before you see the first signs. It comes down, mostly, to the amount of yeast cells that you had to begin with. But patience is a good thing to have. There are actually two stages to this but we do not need to get into details, you can just leave it be until it is done. Although it can be good to know that the yeast will take a short, short break and then go into stage two after about a week and then ferment a few more days.

8. Rack it once, sometimes twice.
In order to get rid of the yeast you will need to rack it, meaning you pour it over into another container of the same size. Here is the first occassion where you will use a siphon, and make sure you leave some at the bottom because you do not want to move that. Also you should let the container stand still for a day and not disturb it in order to let it settle. This process needs to be done once but sometimes even twice, if done correctly you should not need to filter the beer but if you really want to, this is the stage you do it at. If you want to save the yeast and re-use it then save what's at the bottom the first time you rack it because there you will have the yeast.

9. Bottle it and let it rest a week.
Use the siphon and bottle your beer and even though it is difficult you should let it rest for a week before drinking it. You can sample it if you want to but don't start drinking it straight away.

10. Taste and be amazed.
After a long week it is finally time to taste it, a piece of a advice is to taste it yourself first before you let others do it so you know if you really dare to share it. Even if it didn't taste that good take notes of what you want to change for the next time around and start planning.