Homemade Beer Making
Homebrewing, or making beer at home, has recently become a very popular hobby. Brewing at home takes only a few pieces of equipment and a few ingredients and almost always results in a very good-tasting end product. There are a number of online companies, as well as local homebrewing stores, that sell all of the equipment necessary, as well as the ingredients to produce your first five gallons (about two cases) of beer, all for under $150. Ingredients to produce an additional two cases of beer can run approximately $25 to $50 per batch, depending on the style of beer produced. Does this Spark an idea?
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Equipment
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For brewing at home, your equipment should include a pot that will hold at least four gallons, a stove, a bucket for fermenting, a bucket for bottling, an airlock, a siphon with tubing, bottle caps and a capper.
Ingredients
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The four basic ingredients of beer are water, sugar (usually from malted barley), hops and yeast. Most beginning homebrewers use malt extract, which is simply sugar that has already been extracted from malted barley. More advanced homebrewers use malted barley and a controlled temperature extraction, or mash, to get the sugar for their beer.
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Brewing Day (Boiling)
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Brewing day starts by boiling water and adding the malt sugars and any bittering hops. The mixture is then boiled, usually for about an hour, with additional hops added toward the end of the boil for flavor or aroma.
Brewing Day (Cooling and Fermenting)
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The mixture is then cooled (at this stage the unfermented beer is known as wort), and the wort is transferred to a fermenting bucket, topped off to five gallons, and the yeast is added. In a day or so, the yeast will begin fermenting the wort into beer, producing carbon dioxide that bubbles through the airlock.
Transferring and Bottling
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After fermenting for at least a week, the fermentation will stop bubbling through the airlock, and the beer can be transferred to the bottling bucket. At this point, more sugar is added and the beer is bottled. The extra sugar in the bottle is consumed by the yeast, creating carbonation. After at least two weeks of carbonating, the beer is ready to drink.
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