Things You'll Need:
- 5-gallon stock pot, stainless steel or enamel
- Long-handled wooden or stainless steel spoon
- 6 to 7 gallon food-grade plastic bucket with tight-fitting lid
- Racking tube and bottle filler
- Plastic hose to fit racking tube, 5-feet long
- 5-gallon glass carboy with airlock and rubber stopper
- Thermometer such as a candy thermometer
- Hydrometer
- Glass bottles or a keg
- Cleaning brushes for bottles and the carboy
- Bottle capper and caps if using bottles
- Sanitizing compound or bleach
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Step 1
Choose your supplies for cooking wort, the cooked grain mixture that is prepared first in brewing. You need a five-gallon stock pot made of stainless steel or enamel-coated aluminum. Aluminum by itself is a reactive metal and not recommended for brewing since it can adversely influence the taste of the beer. For this same reason your stirring spoon should be wood or stainless steel and long enough to allow you to stir to the bottom of the stock pot.
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Step 2
Select a primary fermenter. For this first stage most brewers use a five-gallon plastic bucket. The bucket must be food grade because it will be filled with highly reactive fermenting wort for days at a time. It needs a lid that fits securely to prevent contamination.
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Step 3
Ready a secondary fermenter, which is usually a five-gallon glass carboy. This looks like a large water jug but is glass, not plastic. The carboy needs a rubber stopper with a hole in the center into which you will place the airlock. The airlock allows carbon dioxide to escape from the carboy during active fermentation, while keeping out contaminants from the surrounding air.
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Step 4
Decide how you will store your beer when it comes out of the secondary fermenter. Your options are bottles or a keg. The five-gallon batch of beer will fill 54 bottles, and for bottling you will need not only the bottles but caps and a capper to clamp them in place. Alternatively, you can put your brew in a five-gallon keg.
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Step 5
Lay in the supplies for transferring the beer from one container to another. Transferring from one fermenter to another is called "racking" the beer. For this you need a hose and a siphon starter, called a racking tube. When you move the beer from the secondary fermenter to the bottles or the keg, use a bottle filler in order to fill from the bottom of the container and minimize the amount of air that gets mixed into the beer.
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Step 6
Get your test instruments in order. The two main test instruments are the thermometer and the hydrometer. Use the thermometer to monitor the cooking temperature of the wort according to the recipe, and to know when it is cooled down enough for you to add the yeast. The hydrometer measures the specific gravity of the fermenting beer, and you use this number to monitor the activity of the yeast.
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Step 7
Sanitize the components used at each stage just prior to using them. This applies to the fermentation containers and the racking equipment particularly, as well as the bottles or the keg. Use a bleach solution or one of the sanitizing compounds sold by home brew suppliers.
