How to brew your first beer at home

Brewing your first beer at home is about an hour of real work spread across a month, and most of that month is waiting. The brewing part is not difficult, and the things that go wrong are nearly always the same small handful, so if you know what they are before you start you will very likely get a drinkable beer out of your first go.

What follows is the kit method, which means a tin of pre hopped malt extract with a yeast sachet under the lid. It is how most people start and there is no reason to be sniffy about staying there, because a well made kit beer is a good beer. You can read about all of this for an hour, or you can ask us in the shop and be doing it in ten minutes.

What you actually need

• A fermenter with a lid and an airlock. 30 litres is the usual size and it takes a standard 23 litre batch with room above it for the foam.
• A hydrometer and a test jar, which is the only thing that will tell you when fermentation has genuinely finished.
• A thermometer, because the temperature of the beer decides more about how it tastes than anything else you will do.
• No rinse sanitiser.
• A long spoon that reaches the bottom of the fermenter.
• Bottles and caps, and a capper to go with them.

Then a tin of extract, and either a kilo of brewing sugar or a brew enhancer, and the shopping is done. A brew enhancer is dextrose with some dried malt through it, and it gives you body and a head on the beer where plain sugar only gives you alcohol.

Brew day, which takes about an hour

1. Sanitise everything

Anything that touches the beer after this point gets sanitised, so that is the fermenter, the lid, the airlock, the spoon, the hydrometer and the test jar. Wash first and sanitise second, because sanitiser cannot reach through a film of last batch's residue, and that is the real argument against a cheap scratched secondhand fermenter.

2. Mix the wort

Stand the tin in hot water for a few minutes so the extract pours instead of crawling. Tip it into the fermenter with the sugar or the enhancer, add about 2 litres of hot water and stir until none of it is sitting on the bottom, then top up with cold water to 23 litres.

3. Get the temperature right before the yeast goes in

This is the step people skip and then wonder why the beer tastes hot and solventy. Ale yeast wants somewhere around 18 to 22 degrees, and pitching into wort that is well above that gives you fusel alcohols and the sort of headache people blame on homebrew in general. Check it with the thermometer rather than the back of your hand.

4. Pitch the yeast and leave it alone

Sprinkle the yeast across the surface, put the lid on, fill the airlock to the line and put the fermenter somewhere the temperature does not swing much. Fermentation makes its own heat, so a fermenter going hard will sit a few degrees above the room around it, which matters in the warmer months.

The fortnight in the middle

Do not keep opening the lid to have a look, because every time you do it you are letting something in. Take a hydrometer reading when you fill the fermenter and write it down, then leave the beer for a week before you take another one.

Fermentation is finished when the reading has not moved for two or three days in a row, and nothing else tells you that. The airlock certainly does not. A lid that is not quite sealed lets the gas out around the rim and the airlock sits there perfectly still while the beer ferments away underneath, and a fermenter warming up in the afternoon will bubble merrily days after the yeast has finished.

Bottling

Sanitise the bottles and the caps. Put the priming sugar in, either a weighed amount or a carbonation drop that counts itself, fill the bottles from the tap on the fermenter without stirring up the sediment on the bottom, and cap them.

Then they sit somewhere above 18 degrees for about two weeks while the leftover yeast eats that sugar and puts the fizz in. After that, a couple of days in the fridge before you open one, because carbon dioxide stays in solution better when the beer is cold and a warm bottle will gush half itself onto the bench.

The four things that go wrong

• Poor sanitising. Sour or vinegary beer, and it is the commonest fault of the lot.
• Fermenting too warm. Hot, solventy flavours that no amount of conditioning will fix.
• Bottling too early. Over carbonated bottles at best, caps off the bottles at worst, and the hydrometer is what prevents it.
• Not waiting. Young beer tastes thin and a bit yeasty, and a lot of first batches get written off a fortnight before they were ready.

Shop related products

• Coopers Original Draught 1.7kg. The forgiving one to start on, and the yeast under the lid behaves itself.
• Coopers Brew Enhancer 2 1kg. Body and head retention rather than just alcohol.
• Coopers Dextrose 1kg. For priming the bottles, and for the batches where you want it dry and clean.
• Coopers Original Lager 1.7kg. An easy second tin once the first one has come out the way you wanted.

The tins and the malts are in the homebrew collection, and the Coopers range is here.

Did you know we also stock the gear itself in store, including 30 litre and 60 litre fermenter complete systems, a 2 scale hydrometer with the test jar, glass thermometers, airlocks, long handled spoons, hammer and bench cappers, crown seals, PET bottles and caps, and no rinse sanitiser. A fair bit of the homebrew range carries our supplier branding so it does not go up on the website. Give us a ring on (08) 8536 4333 to check what is on the shelf.

If you want to work out a first brew before you come in, Brewhilder is our homebrew helper and it will talk you through it.

More from the brewing bench

• Homebrewing on a budget, what you actually need to start
• What fermentation actually does, and how to keep yeast happy
• Top 5 common homebrewing mistakes and how to fix them

Still learning this one myself, and I am reliably told the hard part is leaving it alone.

Cheers,
Candeece