Beer Making Tools

It takes hard work and the right tools to make a great beer.

Beer brewing is a hobby that utilizes tools both simple and complex, homemade and custom ordered, cheap and expensive. It doesn't take much to get started. Some of the necessary items are sitting around the house and others can be fashioned at home or ordered from a home brew supplier.

Mash Tun

The mash tun is often a converted cooler, sometimes a big metal vat, and other times a recycled keg. A mash tun holds malted barley at a warm temperature so that the natural starches convert to sugar. The easiest improvised mash tun for beginners is an old picnic cooler.

Brew Pot

The brew pot is exactly what it sounds like. It is a big pot used for boiling water and what is called the wort -- or the barley and hops combination which later ferments and is turned to beer. Any beginning brewer needs at least a 2.5 gallon pot. However, an all-grain brewer often brews in 15 gallon batches. These brewers often employ a used keg with the top chopped off. Some serious brewers use even larger containers.

A Long Spoon

A long plastic spoon is easy to sanitize and can keep the malt sugars stirred-up so that the sugars do not burn on the bottom of the brew pot.

Hydrometer

This handy little glass device is for sampling the density of your beer. Sugary malt solution is thicker than water. Alcohol is thinner than water. When the yeast produces alcohol and makes beer, your beverage becomes thinner. A hydrometer will float at a different level based on a liquids density and thus informs you when your beer is ready.

Carboy or Brewers Bucket

A clean carboy or brewers bucket are the perfect vessels to seal your beer away from impurities in the air and let the yeast do its work. It is good for the yeast to work in a safe environment to produce alcohol. You don't want contaminants to get in and spoil your brew. Glass Carboys are nice because you can see the fascinating fermentation process in action, and have a better idea of when the beer is ready.

Bottling Bucket and Bottling Wand

This handy bucket with a spigot on the bottom, works well with an attached bottling wand. Open the Spigot and the wand will fill the bottles with ease, just place a sanitary bottle flush underneath and fill to the top, then repeat until all the beer has been bottled.

Used Bottles & a Bottle Jet

Used pry top bottles can be purchased from a home brew supply store or scavenged from almost anywhere. So long as they are sanitary they are good storage containers for your beer. A jet washer hooks to your faucet or a hose bib and shoots a powerful stream of water to blast the gunk off your bottles.

Bottle Capper

Bottle cappers come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They do exactly what it sounds like, secure the top on your beer bottle to keep beer safe and sanitary. They also seal in CO2 gas to allow beer carbonation.

References

• BYO: Projects and Equipment

Resources

• BYO: Project Gallery