Malt, hops and yeast mixed together makes beer… on a grand scale, brewing beer is nothing more than taking sugar from barley and turning it into alcohol…

… and this can be done at home in three different ways: kit brewing, extract brewing and all-grain brewing…

So which one is the best way to begin brewing beer at home?

Well, 9 times out of ten it will be extract brewing… and here’s why… extract brewing will let you master the absolute most important details that will allow you to brew the tastiest batches of beer…

Watch this video which explains all three brewing methods…

… as you can see, all-grain is the most involved and has many more steps to follow…. that means there are far greater chances to make mistakes…

I said at the beginning that beer is turning sugar from barley and turning that into alcohol… kit brewing allows you to mix the sugar with water, add yeast and ferment (turn sugar into alcohol)… it’s by far the easiest, but it has limitations… you can’t create your own recipes…

Extract brewing on the other hand, is similar to kit brewing because you just mix the sugar with water, add yeast and ferment, except you can create pretty much every recipe out there…

All-grain brewing is advanced brewing because barley doesn’t have sugar… it has starches… and those starches need to be converted into sugar… that is the extra step that you take and when I say sugar, I’m not talking about a simple sugar like table sugar… what you create is a range of different sugars which all have different characteristics and ferment differently… some ferment more than others…

The first thing every brewer should learn is how to properly ferment a beer… most brewers think that mixing ingredients together is the key to brewing, but advanced brewers know that it’s all in how you ferment your beer…

Temperature control, time, yeast amount added among other things will have the greatest effect on your beer… which is why extract brewing is the best way to begin brewing beer at home…

With extract brewing you remove a variable out of your brew… converting the starches into sugars… when you buy dry malt extract, the conversion has already been done for you and you can rest assured that it was done properly… therefore, fermenting the beer will have the greatest impact on how the beer turns out…

When you move up to all-grain, you will add that variable back into brewing… if you produce too many fermentable sugars you may get a cidery or alcoholic beer… if you don’t convert enough fermentable sugars, you will get a beer that is too sweet… cloying undrinkable sweet…

All-grain brewing also involves knowing and understanding water chemistry… how much calcium, sulfate, carbonates, etc., is in your water?

The ingredients you use change the pH levels of your water and that has an effect on the end product…

If you start with all-grain and have yet to master fermentation it will be extremely difficult to troubleshoot your beer because you won’t know if you are messing up the fermentation side of it or the starch to sugar conversion side of it…

Some brewers (especially all-grain brewers) see extract brewing as inferior to all-grain… but experience brewers can brew the same beers using both all-grain and extract and many times extract beers can be better than all-grain beers if the brewer has not mastered converting starches into sugars, water chemistry, and everything else involved with all-grain brewing…

It’s hard enough to begin brewing just because of the amount of brewing lingo that’s used… which is yet another reason to begin brewing with extract…

When I started, I read all kinds of books, and spent time on forums, but it wasn’t until I reworded all home brewing instructions and tips I got into normal people language…

I took terms like ‘yeast pitching’ and changed it into ‘pour yeast into brew’… or ‘hop alpha acid isomerization’ into ‘get bitterness out of hops’…

… and by making brewing terms simple to read and easy to understand, I was able to pick up brewing faster and move into more advanced brewing…

I took all my notes and put them together into a training program, which you can check out at the bottom of this page…