Your First Brew!

Welcome back everyone!! Now that we had the chance to talk about equipment last week, and types of beer prior to that, let’s talk about actually brewing a beer!

Brewing beer can be a very labor intensive process and it will take up about 5 hours of your day. Most of your time will be spent waiting for the beer to “cook.” During this time, you will be cleaning equipment and preparing for the next step(s). When brewing, it is important to have patience and not rush anything. This is how mistakes are made, and how your beer will become contaminated. Due to the high amount of yeast sugars in your beer, it is easy for bacteria to attack them and ruin all of your hard work! Below I have included some of the steps you can expect while brewing:

• ·      Sanitize everything
• ·         Crush grains
• ·         Heat water to 160 degrees
• ·         Sparge grains
• ·         Heat wort to a boil
• ·         Add hops at given time
• ·         Cool wort with wort chiller
• ·         Transfer to sanitized growler
• ·         Pitch yeast
• ·         Hide in dark cool place and patiently wait
• ·         Drink beer and enjoy your hard work

As you can see it is very many steps, and that isn’t even everything! Those are just the basics! If brewing is a hobby you would like to get into, prepare for a lot of learning! There are so many different ways to brew, and so many creative steps you can follow. Here is a link to some brewing basics! YouTube

Once you have had a chance to review this handy YouTube video, which covers a lot of what I have taught you, you are probably ready to get started with brewing! Here is an easy IPA recipe you can make: Recipe. I personally like this recipe because he is very detailed and in depth!!

Let me know how you like brewing!  I hope your first beer turns out to be a good one! Cheers!