Homebrew Beer Basics for Beginners

Series Summary

Brewing beer at home is surprisingly easy, and that is good news for beer lovers worldwide who have pondered the notion of creating their own ales, lagers and stouts in the comfort of their own homes. Learning how to create wort, choosing the hops and bitters, determine the syrup use and add the yeast are confusing tasks at first, just as is the case with any recipe. Brewing beer at home is no different from the process of perfecting a time-honored recipe: there will be trial and error and many versions, but eventually you can perfect the type of beer you've always wanted to have on hand at all times: your personal favorite beer!

In this instructional video clip series, our expert will walk you through all the beer brewing steps: making wort, fermentation, clarification, conditioning, packaging (jugging) and consumption. Learn about the different types of hops, kits and methods for brewing your own beer at home easily and just like the pros do at your local brewery. Practice the process in the comfort of your home or garage until you find the ideal combination of malt, hops, bitters and grains. Then enjoy!

Video Transcript

"Good morning! My name is John Brack, I go by JB, and I work at Austin Home Brew Supply. This segment of home brewing is brought to you by Expert Village. We’re going to be talking about how to make your own beer at home. Basically, at Austin Home Brew Supply, we have been around since 1991 and we have quite a growing business. I have been brewing sine ’95. I’ve been with Austin Home Brew about three and a half, almost four years now, and I’ve loved it the whole time. Like I said, I’m just happy to here as a part of the deal. Most of our customers go straight into what we’re going to be presenting today, which is called extract with grains. In this segment, we’re going to be covering how to make a extract brew. This is my own recipe so I’m pretty proud of it. The recipe is based upon a new hop variety. Four components of beer, water, barley, hops, and yeast. Basically, the optimum parallel is the recipe that we’ll do today. Once again, optimum is the name of the hop. It’s a fairly new variety of hops from the Pacific Northwest. The very first step is we need to get some water into the brew kettle. If you ever decide to do business with us, our recipes are written in very straightforward fashion to where we’re going to lay it all out step by step. In this step, we’re going to actually put the water into the brew kettle, and then we are going to steep some grains. After we steep the grains, then we’re going to add the malt extract syrup, then the hops, and then we will chill the whole thing down at the very end. The first step is get the water into the brew kettle and get the heat up to around 150 degrees, at which time we will steep the grains. In terms of equipment, what we’ll start out with here is a my brew kettle. We’re doing this outside so I’m going to heat the pan cooker. You could also do it inside on your stove top. You just have make sure that your is stove is strong enough to get a good rolling boil. I personally brewed inside for many years. I really liked the propane cooker. You don’t have a to have it, but it helps that. I have premeasured two and a half gallons of water, and we’re going to put this into the brew kettle. This happens to be tap water. Since I live in Austin, I’m blessed with pretty good water here. Different parts of the country it will certainly vary. You’re only actually boiling two and a half gallons of the water. The additional two and a half gallons will come at the end in the top up."