sorry to hijack the thread that is going on but I had a question?
How much does it cost to start brewing your own beer, and is it farily easy? I have wanted to do it for awhile but have no clue where to start.
Thanks for the input (if there is any):wink:
It's not difficult. If you can make chili, you can make beer (and the two go very nicely together!).
If you're interested in getting started, Beer Crazy in Urbandale (
{ Beer Crazy  Open for Business! }) is the place to go. Mark there can set you up with everything you'll need, and his prices are as cheap as any web site I've found on most things.
Equipment
If you already have a big pot (preferably one that will hold around 7 gallons, but as long as you can boil ~2-3 gallons you should be fine), you'll probably need about 100-150 bucks worth of equipment aside from the pot including ingredients for your first batch.
That includes:
- a Couple of Food Grade Buckets (at least one of which has a spigot on it)
- a lid for one of them (at least)
- an airlock
- some sundry tubing and hoses
- a bottling wand
- A bottle capper
- some caps
- a hydrometer - this allows you to measure how much sugar is in your beer, so you can figure out how much alcohol it is capable of containing, and how much it does contain...not essential, but necessary if you want to know what's going on with your beer
- a racking cane
- some sanitizer.
Ingredients
Once you have the equipment, you need some ingredients. For an extract batch that would include:
- Malt Extract - 6 lbs or so of this stuff. It's the sugar that your yeast will turn into alcohol. Think of it sort of like beer kool-aid
- Hops - Depends totally on the recipe as to how much and when you add it. Anywhere from 1.5-5 oz is typical.
- Yeast - can be either dry or wet. Sometimes comes in a "smack pack" which you smack and it activates the liquid yeast inside. Dry yeast does better if you re-hydrate it first.
Depending on the beer, ingredients will run 20-50 bucks or so per 5 gallon batch.
BREWING
The process is fairly simple, for extract (which is where you'd likely start).
The Boil
You basically just boil some water, toss in the extract (which is either powder, or this gooey liquid stuff), and add the hops at various times during the boil according to the recipe. Most beers need about an hour boil.
After you're done boiling, you need to cool it down (probably in an ice water bath), and then put it in the fermentation bucket (which needs to have been sanitized with the sanitizing solution beforehand), making sure to filter out with a colander or strainer, as much of the gunk in the pot from the boil (hop leaves/residue etc). If you don' have a pot that can hold the full volume of the boil, you'll need to top the bucket off to your desired volume (probably around 5 gallons or so) with some water (preferably boiled first, but it probably won't hurt not to). In fact, some people just toss a bag or two's worth of ice into the bucket along with the hot wort and just cool it down that way. At any rate, the goal is to get the wort (which is the name for unfinished beer) down to around 70 degrees F or so and do so as quickly as possible. Your beer is most vulnerable to infection at this point, since it's not in a sealed container, and it's not going to be sanitized after this point (since it's already been boiled!).
You'll want to take a reading with your hydrometer here, and make a note of it somewhere. This number will be your "Original Gravity". This number, combined with your "Final Gravity" will tell you how much alcohol is in your beer. The denser the solution at this point, the more sugar there is to convert to alcohol.
A quick note on sanitizing:
Sanitizing
The only thing that is a bit of a pain is keeping everything sanitized that comes in contact with your beer. When your wort is finished, you've created a great place for micro-organisms to live. That's great for your yeast, but it's also great for a bunch of other nasties that can really mess up your beer. That's why sanitizing things is important. Anything that wasn't boiled needs to be sanitized before you let it touch your unfinished beer (boiling kills off anything of danger to your beer). This includes the buckets, any spoons or stirring devices, containers (including bottles), bottlecaps, racking canes, tubing and hoses, etc. I recommend starsan or idophor for this, but there are other options out there as well. I personally keep a 5 gallon home depot bucket full of sanitizer around for this task, but if you don't have the room for that, it's nice to have a spray bottle full of the stuff laying around that you can use to sanitize smaller things.
Primary Fermentation
Now that it's in the bucket (or carboy), stir it up really good to get some air back in it, and toss in the yeast. Seal it up, put the airlock on it, and let it sit for about a week or two. After a couple of days, it will bubble like crazy as the yeast start chewing up the sugar in the wort, and creating alcohol and CO2. When they are done eating the sugar, the bubbling will stop. This can take anywhere from a few days to a week or sometimes more, depending on the beer.
Your hydrometer comes in handy here. Taking a reading after fermentation is over will tell you how much of your sugar has been converted to alcohol. If you take a few readings in a row on consecutive days, and they are all the same, you know that your beer is pretty much done fermenting.
Secondary Fermentation
After that, you can optionally rack it (transfer it - racking is the name for that process) into another sanitized bucket for a secondary fermentation (which is basically just clarifying the beer - I'd recommend this, but it isn't strictly necessary), wait another week or so, and then bottle it.
Bottling
Take one last reading with your hydrometer here, and you'll know your final gravity. You can compare this with the OG to determine your alcohol by volume.
When you bottle it, you will add a little bit of "bottling sugar" which will give the residual yeast something to eat in the bottle. This will produce CO2, which will naturally carbonate your beer. This process takes about 10 days minimum, but 2 weeks is probably a better bet.
That's it! It sounds way more complicated than it is now that I've typed that out. Once you get a batch under your belt, it's pretty easy, really.
As you go along, you will probably want to do at least what's known as "partial mash" brewing, which is essentially like making coffee or tea with some hot (150-160 degree) water and some specialty grain in a steeping bag before you start the boil. This allows you to adjust the malt flavors and create much more flavorful and interesting beers. This is where a LOT of people find the sweet spot in brewing. You don't need much equipment to do it (you can do it with the same stuff you do all-extract with), and the beer can turn out just as good as all-grain, without as much of the hassle and the extra equipment (and time!) that all-grain demands.
"All-Grain" brewing is basically just creating all the wort from nothing but malted grain, instead of using extract. Extract is sort of a "shortcut" that someone else has done for you, converting the complex sugars that yeast can't eat in the malt into simple sugars that yeast can eat easily, and then extracting that from the grain, drying (or condensing) it and packaging it.
When you "partial mash", you are doing part of this with just the specialty grains that give the beer flavor and character, but letting someone else do that for the "base" grain, which makes up the bulk of the grain bill, but contributes the least amount to the end character of the beer.
The specialty grains make a stout a stout and a pale ale a pale ale. The base malt for either of them might be exactly the same, but a lot of roasted barely, and chocolate malt might go into a stout, while some caramel 20 and maybe some carapils might go into a pale ale.
