Make Your Own Beer

When you decide to make your own beer you will be participating in an activity that has been going on for thousands of years. People from all cultures have been consuming and brewing beer for millennia. The beer brewing process was perfected long before the dawn of recorded history. Beer is simply an alcoholic beverage made from the fermentation of barley, yeast, water, and hops. Creating an acceptable beverage is in part a product of the quality of the ingredients, but more to the point it is a child of the brewing process, which turns the natural sugars present in the mix into alcohol. The traditional beer brewing process, which varies slightly depending upon the type of beer being brewed, passes through several steps, as described below.

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Step 1. Malting - Barley contains starches which are not soluble in water in their natural state. The malting process conditions the grains to release the starches, making them available for dissolution in water that is added during the upcoming mashing process.

Step 2. Milling - The barley grain husk is a hard shell and needs to be cracked open to allow the grain to absorb the water used in the mashing process. This water is needed to convert the starches into sugar.

Step 3. Mashing - During this step the ground barley is converted into a sweet liquid called mash in which the starches released during malting are converted into sugar. (Home brewers needn’t perform the first three steps. They can buy mash extract, which has already passed through these processes.) The sweet liquid in this mash is drained from the mash to be used in the brewing step. The drained sweet liquid is called wort.

Step 4. Brewing - During this step the wort is boiled for about an hour or so. Hops are added at specific times to alter the flavor and bitterness of the resultant beer.

Step 5. Cooling - After boiling, the wort is filtered to remove the hops and is then cooled in a heat exchanger or cooling tank to a temperature that is optimal for adding yeast during the fermentation process. Cooling is critical as the yeast will not contribute to fermentation is the wort is too hot.

Step 6. Fermentation - The cooled wort is transferred to a fermentation tank, and the yeast is added to turn the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. During this process the wort becomes beer.

Step 7. Racking - During this step the beer is transferred to a new tank to age, improving its flavor. Home brewers often skip this step and let the beer age in the bottles for several weeks.

Step 8. Bottling - The beer is bottled and stored until use.

As with any food or beverage creation, the quality of the beer ingredients, the homebrew recipe used, and the beer making equipment all play an important role in creating a successful outcome. The most important ingredients of all, which are seldom mentioned in the recipe, are your dedication to the project and your attention to detail – to the supervision of the process.

With the right homebrew recipe, excellent beer ingredients and a modicum of skill, you may create great beer using the above simple beer brewing process steps. Offer your delicious beer to your friends and neighbors and word will spread quickly. Soon you’ll become locally famous as the neighborhood’s premier beermeister!