Beer is one of the most popular alcoholic beverages around the World. There are many brands of beers out there. In fact, every country seems to have their own commercial beer brands and you can also find even more craft beers from local breweries or home brewers. If you have all the ingredients to make your own beer and all the needed equipments, you too can start brewing your own beer right at home.
The basic ingredients used in making your own beer:
Here is the list of the basic ingredients you would need to make your own beer. Beer needs malt, hops and of course, yeast. Looks pretty simple, right? But they all come in various types so you can mix and match different malts, hops and yeast to get different kinds of produced beer. You also need to calculate the right amount of each of these ingredients so you would end up with a beer that you won’t toss away because the mixture tastes really bad.
First is the malt and this is a very important and main ingredient in beer-making. Usually, barley is used to be malted for beer-making but you can also experiment with other types of grain. You can buy malted barley or other grains or you can malt your grains yourself. The process of malting requires you to germinate your grains and then halt the process of germination by drying. Malting is very important because without this process, the grain will not have the enzyme needed to modify the starch from the grain into the sugar that is needed for the beer-making process.
Now, for the hops, hops give the beer its bitter taste. Beer won’t taste good if you don’t add some hops in the beer-making process. There are dozens upon dozens of choices of hops and each gives a different type of flavor as well as stability to the beer. As you go along in your beer-making, you will eventually know what type of flavor each of these hops give. You can start with following the type of hops used by many beer-makers or follow simple beer recipes especially when you are just starting. So you won’t end up with an awful tasting brew.
Then, the yeast. Yeast is used to convert starch into carbohydrates, alcohols and also carbon dioxide when it’s used in the fermentation process. The yeast that is usually used for fermentation is the Saccharomyces cerevisiae species. Don’t mistake this yeast with the baker’s yeast that is being used for baking as this one is more specifically used to give a better result in beer fermentation.
Now that you have all the ingredients, you would then need to follow the different processes in making a beer. First, you need to steep your grain so you could extract all the goodness from the malt you are using. After steeping the grain you would then boil it together with the hops. After which, you would then start the fermentation process when the wort had already cooled up. Fermentation lasts for several weeks so you have to be patient. Once fermentation is done, you could then bottle the beer but you would want to carbonate it first. You can choose between forced carbonation or natural carbonation wherever would be best for you.
In forced carbonation, you force the CO2 into your fermented beer before bottling or kegging. With natural fermentation, you add sugar to the bottle or keg (corn syrup is usually used) and the remaining yeast would consume this sugar and convert it further into carbon dioxide. This process takes several days but it’s the most natural method that doesn’t require additional tools so it’s cost effective.
Making your own beer looks quite simple but it’s hard to master. Once you get the right tasting beer, you can fully enjoy your beer whenever or wherever because now you know how to do it yourself.