Introduction to Home Brewing an English Mild Beer

Series Summary

Beer, and the brewing and drinking thereof, has been around as long as recorded history. Indeed, no sooner had people began writing than they began writing about brewing and drinking beer. The world's oldest and most popular alcoholic beverage, together with the invention of bread, has been considered a major contributing factor in humanity's ability to develop technology and build civilization. Beer, more celebrated and hated than almost any other libation, after being around for 5,000 years, isn't going anywhere soon, and is likely to be here for another 5,000.

In this free video series, our expert Mark Emily will teach you how to brew your own English mild beer at home. mark will tell you all about hops & malt, yeast, water & Irish moss, and brewing equipment. Mark will also tell you about beer styles and recipes, equipment sanitizers, and teach you how to prepare and rinse the grains. Mark will teach you how to add extract, measure hops, cool the wort, rehydrate the yeast, measure the specific gravity, and mix the ingredients. Mark will finally teach you how to ferment and siphon you home-brewed English mild beer into bottles for your personal enjoyment.

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Mark on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'm going to teach you everything you need to know about how to brew a English mild beer. Today we'll be talking about everything you need to home brew this style, which includes the ingredients, the equipment and the different processes you're going to need to take all of your basic ingredients and convert them into tasty beer. I've been a home brewer for about nine years. I've got about 140 different batches under my belt. I'm the president of the Boeing Employees Line of Beer Makers Club. I've even had some of my beers scaled up and produced commercially. There are many different ways to brew beers. Today we're going to be focusing on extract with specialty grades. Our focus will be on doing this as simply as possible with the least amount of equipment investment to start off. We'll recommend the basic equipment that you need and also some equipment that if you want to get a little more into it, you'll appreciate it later. To start off, I'm going to give you an overview of what you'll be expecting during the whole brewing process. To begin, you're going to start on the brewing day. On this day you're going to steep some specialty grains, if you have them, then you're going to add some malt extract and boil all that, add in your hops, and at the end of that, when you're done boiling, you're going to cool it down and add in your yeast. And this usually takes between to to three hours. After the yeast have been added, your wort is now beer, and the yeast will start fermenting away for about three to seven days, and this is called your primary fermentation. Once the yeast starts slowing down, you're going to siphon out of your primary vessel into a secondary vessel. This operation is called racking, and it takes roughly thirty minutes. Once you're in your secondary vessel, you're going to let it sit and finish its remaining fermentation that it has left, and this will take usually seven to fourteen days. At this point, most of your yeast will have fallen out of solution and your beer will be getting very, very clear. Finally you're going to go into the bottling phase, where you're going to siphon one more time into your bottling bucket, add some priming sugar, fill up your bottles and cap them off. And then you're going to put them into a nice, dark area and let them sit for two or so weeks. At this point the beer will start carbonating itself, get up to a nice level, and then you'll be able to chill, and drink your beer. Well this video will be enough to get you started home brewing, I'd like to recommend a couple other resources that you can use to develop your brewing skills. First, the American Home Brewers Association puts out a beginner's guide to home brewing, which you can pick up at your local store or request at their website at www.beertown.org. Next we have a classic book called The Joy of Home Brewing which is going to be everything you really need to get started. For people who want to get a little more advanced, you can pick up How to Brew by John Palmer, which takes you through a little more of the science. And for some other good recipes out there for some beers that you may have already tried and want to reproduce, there's Clone Brews and Beer Captured."