How to Ferment Beer at Home

Experiment with the proportions to create your own style of beer.

Unlike distilling hard liquor, fermenting beer at home is safe, legal in most states, and doesn't require complicated equipment. Under federal law, any adult can brew up to 100 gallons of beer per year, or 200 gallons if there's more than one adult in the household, for personal use without paying taxes as a commercial brewer. However, the 21st amendment, which repealed prohibition, left final control of alcohol policy up to the states, so make sure home brewing is legal in your state before you proceed. You can get all the supplies you'll need online or at a local brewer's supply shop.

Things You'll Need

• Stainless steel brew kettle, 4 gallons or more
• 2 cans liquid malt extract, un-hopped
• 2 ounces hops, pellet or "leaf" style
• Package ale yeast
• Glass carboy fermenter
• Chlorine bleach
• Airlock
• Racking cane
• 6 feet vinyl siphoning hose
• Food grade plastic bucket, at least 5 gallons
• 2/3 cup corn sugar
• 2 cases empty beer bottles with crown caps, not twist-off
• Bottle-capper

Instructions

1. Fill the brew kettle about two-thirds with tap water, and place it on the stove over high heat. The taste of your beer will be different depending on the characteristics of your local tap water. If your water smells a little bit like eggs, that means it contains sulfur. In that case, consider using distilled water instead of tap.

2. Boil the water. Stir in the malt extract as the water heats up, stirring until the malt is dissolved. The resulting malt and water mixture is called the "wort."

3. Add approximately an ounce of hops to the boiling wort. You don't need to measure the hops, just estimate based on the amount of hops in the package you bought. Using a lot of hops will result in a more bitter, aromatic beer, and using less will result in a lighter beer.

4. Turn off the heat after the wort has boiled for about an hour, and add about another quarter ounce of hops. This is called the "finishing hops." Because the wort isn't boiling anymore it won't add much flavor, but it will give your beer a nice "hoppy" aroma.

5. Put the lid on the kettle and let the wort cool to room temperature. It may be tempting to leave the lid off so that the wort will cool faster, but you don't want anything undesirable getting into your wort. Place the kettle in an ice bath in the sink, or leave it outside for a few hours if it's a cold day.

6. Sanitize your fermenting equipment with a light bleach solution while the wort is cooling. Boiling has sterilized the wort, but bacteria on your fermenting equipment could still ruin your batch. Pour half a cup of bleach in the fermenter, fill it the rest of the way with water, and let it sit for about 15 minutes. Sterilize the airlock, funnel, drilled stopper and strainer as well by letting them soak in a clean bucket of bleach solution. Rinse everything thoroughly when you're done to get rid of all the bleach.

7. Use the funnel and strainer to pour the cooled wort into the fermenter. Don't bother with the strainer if you used pellet hops instead of whole leaf hops. The pellets will have broken down too much for the strainer to catch. It won't do your beer any harm, you just don't want whole hop flowers floating in it.

8. Aerate the wort by shaking and stirring the fermenter as much as you can without spilling it. The yeast will need oxygen in order to ferment the wort.

9. Pour the whole packet of yeast into the fermenter, and then close it with the stopper and airlock. The airlock is a one-way valve. It will let excess gas and foam escape from the fermenter, but will not let any contaminants in. When the mixture ferments, it will produce a lot of foam that will likely bubble up through the airlock, so leave the fermenter some place where it can get messy.

10. Leave the fermenter undisturbed for about two weeks while the beer ferments. If the production of foam has slowed to a crawl, and the wort looks clearer and deeper colored than it did while it was fermenting, you're done. A day or two before it is finished, move the fermenter onto a table or shelf above ground level. It needs to be elevated for you to siphon out the beer, and moving it beforehand allows the sediment time to settle.

11. Sanitize the bottling bucket, empty beer bottles, caps, racking cane and siphoning hose the same way you previously sanitized the fermenting tools. Remember to thoroughly rinse the bleach solution.

12. Bring a few cups of water to boil in a saucepan and mix in 2/3 cup of corn sugar. Boil it for about 10 minutes, dissolving the sugar and sanitizing the liquid. The sugar solution will provide fuel for a small second fermentation that will take place inside the bottles. When you first fermented the beer, the resulting carbon dioxide was able to escape through the airlock. The bottles are airtight, so the carbon dioxide from the second fermentation will stay in solution with the beer, carbonating it.

13. Pour the sugar solution you just made into the five gallon plastic bucket, called the bottling bucket. Set the bucket down somewhere near the fermenter, but lower to the ground. Don't move the fermenter, or you'll stir up the sediment at the bottom.

14. Slide the siphoning hose over the short end of the racking cane. Wash your hands, then plug up the end of the hose with your thumb and fill the hose and racking cane assembly with water.

15. Invert the racking cane and slide it cleanly into the fermenter. Hold the hose end over a jar or spare bucket, and remove your thumb. As long as you hold the end of the hose lower than the fermenter, liquid will siphon out of the fermenter through the hose. The water will pour out first; catch it in the jar or bucket. Plug the hose with your thumb again when beer starts to come out. Hold the hose over the bottling bucket, and open it to siphon the beer from the fermenter into the bucket. While you're siphoning, gently stir the beer in the bottling bucket to mic the beer and sugar solution. Leave the sediment in the bottom of the fermenter.

16. Siphon the beer from the bottling bucket into the individual bottles using the same method as before. Leave about an inch of space at the top of each bottle, and affix the caps with the bottle-capper.

17. Ferment the beer in the bottles for about ten days to allow it time to carbonate and finish fermenting.

Tips & Warnings

• Don't give up if you're not satisfied with your first product. Take notes of every step in the process to help you experiment and modify your recipe, and find mistakes. If your beer tastes or smells somehow "wrong," the batch probably got infected with undesirable microorganisms and their foul-tasting byproducts. A spoiled batch might taste like dirty leaves, body odor or vinegar. If it doesn't smell like beer, just toss it and try again.

References

• Brew Your Own: New to Brew
• Drink Craft Beer: How to Home Brew Beer in Your Kitchen
• Home Brewer's Association: Legal Status of Homebrewing in the U.S.A.