Barley, yeast, hops and water is all you need to make beer either at home or a full blown brewery…
Barley contains starches, which you can think of as long chained complex sugars… those starches are converted into simple sugars like sucrose, maltose, etc…. and those are the sugars we use to make beer…
Brewing beer is nothing more than converting sugar (made from barley) into alcohol… and the way we do that is by adding yeast to our water containing sugars made from barley…
That is the process in essence, but if you want to make your own beer, then you have to decide what method you’ll use to do so…
There are three methods: All-Grain Brewing, Extract Brewing and Kit Brewing…
With All-Grain Brewing you do everything from scratch… you buy malted barley and you soak it in hot water (around 154 °F) until the starches turn into sugar… you then extract that sugar by draining the water and rinsing as much sugar as you can from the grains…
This leaves you with sugar-water, which we like to call ‘wort’…
Since this wort is nothing but water with a bunch of sugars, it is sweet… and since beer is not sweet, we add hops to add bitterness…
Hops have acids known as Alpha Acids which become bitter when boiled… so the wort is boiled for at least that long although usually for at least 60 minutes… that also helps coagulate proteins which add to hazyness of the beer…
Once that is done, everything is cooled down and the yeast is added… yeast will die at very high temperatures (90-95+ °) and will produce off flavors when pitched or fermented at high temperature (above 70-74 °F)… so it’s important to pitch at the right temperatures…
Lager yeast is best fermented at 45 to 55 °F and ale yeast from 60 to 74 °F depending on the yeast strain…
So that is All-Grain in a nutshell… Extract brewing skips the part where you convert starches into sugar from barley… instead you buy Dry Malt extract which is sugar extracted from barley…
You add that to water, mix and boil just like you would with all-grain and follow every step after that as well…
Kit brewing is even easier… there are kits that sell malt extract which has already been hopped and you therefore don’t need to boil for 60 minutes… you simply mix the extract with water and boil for 10 or 15 minutes, cool down and add your yeast…
The drawback of extract brewing is that Dry Malt Extract comes with a pre-determined amount of simple sugars and complex sugars… simple sugars gives your beer more alcohol and makes it dry… complex sugars gives your beers more body and makes them maltier…
With all grain brewing you can produce more simple or complex sugars depending on what you want your beer to be like… with extract you are stuck with the manufacturer’s sugar profile…
Kit brewing is a hit and miss… some kits are well balanced and you don’t need to add anything to them… others are produced with more complex sugars and require the addition of simple sugars…
Most kits will advise to add plain table sugar, which is a simple sugar, but that is not recommended… it is too fermentable and can give your beer a watery feel… instead, you may want to add plain dry malt extract for best results…
If you want to learn how to brew beer I recommend you start with extract brewing and then move up to all grain brewing…
Some will jump right into all-grain, which is fine if you have someone walking you through the process… the secret to brewing good beer is in good fermentation… which is why I recommend extract brewing to keep the sugar profile constant and that will help you master fermentation…
Once you’ve mastered fermentation, you can move up to all grain and add the variable of working with different sugar profiles…
