An Introduction to Home Brewing

I’m sitting in the garage on a beautiful, spring Saturday afternoon brewing five gallons of beer while drinking a schwartzbier. Schwartzbier is a German black lager that is almost impossible to find in the U.S. I brewed it myself a few months ago.

Sound like fun? Brewing is no more difficult than making macaroni and cheese, and $100 in equipment will get you started. With a few practice brews under your belt, you can branch out and make beers you can’t buy. Can’t get Pliny on the East Coast? Brew it. Want Dogfish Head’s 120 min IPA in CA? Brew it. Schwartzbier? Altbier? Geuze? Gose? Unskunked Czech pils? Brew them!

Before we get started, let me address a few of the biggest home brewing misconceptions:

• Home brewing is illegal – One of the few good things Carter did was to sign the bill legalizing home brewing. Since then, we have been able allowed make beer, wine, or hard cider at home to the limit of 100 gallons per year, per adult, or 200 gallons per household.

• Home brew will make you go blind – Home brews are as safe as any commercial beer. Malts produce virtually none of the methanol that made Prohibition hooch dangerous. The distilling that further concentrated those problems is illegal at home.

• Home brew is cheap – You will not save money. This is a hobby. Nobody expects to save money when taking up golf or stamp collecting. Try brewing for the fun of it, not because you expect to save money.

• All home brew sucks - Chances are that there are some of you who have tasted home brew before and consider yourselves lucky to have survived. My beers are as good as anything you can buy in a brewpub – or better – and yours can be too.

• All home brewers are drunks - Alcoholics do not bother with home brewing, vodka is too cheap and easy to get. Most beers take at least six weeks to ferment and condition before they are ready to drink. However, brewers do tend to have a lot of beer around, so make friends with one even if you do not brew yourself.

In fact, home brewing is a very rewarding hobby. Beyond the joys of drinking beer you made yourself, home brewing also offers several interesting directions to grow the hobby as you get more involved. Alpha personalities can enter the hundreds of contests held each year by the American Homebrew Association (AHA), eventually becoming beer judges themselves. Tinkerers and DIYers can have great fun designing and building brewing gadgets and chasing the “perfect” brewing system. Social types can join one of the local homebrew clubs that meet in most towns, or connect with a rich on-line community through forums and message boards. Right-brainers can measure and control everything; lefties can fly by the seat of their pants. Dreamers can take that final step toward making their living as a brewer by opening a brewpub or craft brewery. There is room for everybody, and the only prerequisite is that you like beer.

I have loved beer since I first snuck sips of my Dad’s PBR at age four. I had been interested in home brewing for several years, but I had no idea where to start learning about the process. My wife gave me the nudge by buying me an extract kit for Father’s Day two years ago. She jokes that she regrets that gift now, as that one kit was the start of what she calls an obsession. Truth be told, I did ramp up rather quickly at first, neglecting my other hobbies and eventually turning our garage into a brewery. Currently, I have replaced the kits with recipes of my own creation. I use whole grains and have around 120 pounds of barley out in the garage now, along with five or six pounds of various hops. Bottles have been replaced by a keggerator whose four taps are almost always full of different styles of beer. Don’t worry, though, there is no need to have all that equipment to make great beer. It truly can be done – easily – with little more than a big pot and a plastic bucket. I will show you how to do it.

Hopefully I have piqued your interest in home brewing enough to keep you coming back. Over the next few articles, I will describe the equipment, recipes, and the basic stove-top brewing process. Stick with me and you will be ready to brew your first batch by my third article, and be drinking your own beer six weeks after that. Start saving those bottles now! (No screw-tops, please.) If you can not wait, check out www.howtobrew.com to get a head start.

George Schmidt