Maybe brewing beer is not as easy as boiling water, but it is pretty close. But really, how hard can it be to add a couple ingredients to water and boil it?… I’d say it’s as easy as boiling water…

Well, if I was to summarize the steps required to brew, I’d say there are 5 steps to successfully coming up with a batch that is sure to beat commercial brew… it’s like grilling a better burger than Mickey D’s…

So here they are…

1. The Absolute First Step In Brewing Beer Is Planning?
   Now this may sound like “uhh yeah, duh” common sense stuff, but the top reason why I see most home brewers screw up their I-boil-water hobby, is because they don’t plan. Now this isn’t the personal development stuff of “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will lead you there” or other good words of wisdom, but it kind of applies.

   So you know what type of beer you are using, but have you figured out what the expected Original Gravity is going to be? Do you have enough yeast to pitch know if you’ll need a starter?

   These are questions to be asked prior to starting and in many cases will prevent many screw ups and save you the wasted brew, money and embarrasment when your friends find out you failed to brew the batch they were waiting for…

2. Now That You’ve Ran Through Your Checklist, You’ll Want To Extract The Sugars From The Malt…
   This is done during the mash. There are many ways to influence the mash to get the desired amount and quality of fermentables out of the malt. This is often the hardest part of brewing, and should be something done only by experienced brewers or those lucky enough to have a mentor do it with them…

   If neither of those applies, then you could do extract brewing until you gain experience and then move into all grain brewing.

   With extract brewing, you simply buy Dry Malt Extract or Liquid Malt Extract and use that as your base malt instead of mashing the malt yourself. These malts are obviously plain, but you can create award winning brews just by adding specialty grains to your base malt and create your Wort.

3. Boiling The Wort And Adding The Hops…
   When you mash your grains or steep grains you have what is referred to as sweet wort. The next step is to boil the wort and add hops to get what’s referred to as bitter wort. How much hops, what type and at what time you’ll add the hops depends on the beer you are brewing.

   If you are extract brewing or all grain brewing, you should have a recipe which tells you when to add the ingredients. If you are using a kit, then you get to skip this step as well because kits have the malt and hops already mixed so that you just add water and ferment.

4. Cooling your wort, Pitching Your Yeast And Fermenting Your Beer
   After you cook up your wort and add your hops, you’ll need to cool the wort as soon as possible and get it ready to pitch the yeast. The yeast and temperature will depend on whether you are brewing an ale or a lager. The beer will take about 4-6 days to ferment, and about 4-6 more days to condition and clean up.
5. Bottle or Keg Your Beer, And The Best Part….. Drink It!
   Some beers just taste better when you bottle condition and others are better when you keg your beer. If the difference is not that significant, kegging will allow to drink it faster…

These are the steps to basic home brewing. As you get more advanced and start creating more complex beers you’ll want to learn how to use hop backs, krausen hop, re-use yeast, use secondary fermenters, dry hop, and more advanced stuff…