“Below Is Your First Home Brewing Video….”

You can view the next video here: How To Steep The Grains

In real estate you hear the words “location, location, location”. In brewland, the happiest place on earth, you’ll hear “sanitize, sanitize, sanitize”.

Before you decide to do anything, including opening up a cold one while you work, you should clean your brewing work area and your grown up toys we like to refer to as brewing equipment. If you are like me, then you’ll sanitize everything, but I guess there’s only a few things you really need to worry about. Let me start by explaining what I mean by cleaning and sanitizing.

When I talk about cleaning, I basically mean to remove dirt, stains and anything that is visible. Basically, what your wife (or girlfriend) would call a lazy man’s job. In other words, just because something looks clean it doesn’t mean it actually is clean. Assuming you used the right tools to clean it should pretty much be clean as far as any visible stuff goes.

Now to sanitize, you must take your cleaning a step up and use a ninja-like bacteria-killer such as bleach and water to do most of your sanitizing job. You could essentially do with just water and bleach but I like to use idophor which is a sanitizer you can get at your local brew shop. Again, it’s very important you keep everything clean as you work. You should sanitize your fermenter with idophor by filling it up completely and keep that solution to sanitize your hands and utensils as you work on your wort.

I use two buckets. One as a fermenter and the other as a bottling bucket. Once I’m ready to place the wort on my fermenter I simply transfer the idophor solution from the fermenter to the bottling bucket using a syphon. This serves a double purpose. One, I don’t have to lift 5+ gallons of water and two, the syphon gets sanitized. Yet another lazy man’s job… Works great for me…

Now if there’s one thing I’m going to pound into your precious gray matter today, is that you need to sanitize. Now that the wort is going into the fermenter, it is even more so important to make sure that anything that is coming near or into contact with the wort in the fermenter is sanitized with the idophor solution. You don’t want any kind of nasty thing going into the wort right when it’s getting ready to be fermented.

Now, just for for the heck of it, in case you are wondering, there is another step up from sanitizing known as sterilizing. To sterilize means to kill any kind of living thing or microorganism (which hopefully is not too big of a word to use on this blog… we’ve got enough with words like wort and krausen). This is an extreme case and for the purposes of home brewing, it is not necessary. Sanitizing kills most bacteria and nasty things that could potentially spoil the beer. Once the yeast goes into the wort and it begins to ferment, the ethyl alcohol will kill anything that was left over (if any).

Well, this pretty much does it for the most important step you’ll take when you brew your own beer at home…

“sanitize, sanitize, sanitize”…

Next Step Is To Steep The Grains… (Click the link to watch the next video… after you tweet and share this with your friends on facebook of course!)