Brewing Beer

Beer, who in their right minds doesn’t love it. The way it tastes, the way it smells, the way it makes you feel after you’ve downed about 20 of em. But what could possibly be better than drinking (craft) beers? Exactly, making it yourself! Just as other types of food or drinks go, homemade always tastes the best.

But how do you brew your own beer? Well it’s actually very simple and with the help of this article and some googling you too can make your own liquid work of art.

In short beer has 4 ingredients. First of all malt, this is a slightly germinated and then dried grain, such as barley or wheat. The malt provides the sugars and protein to create alcohol and a sturdy foam layer. Next in line hops, this is a plant of which the flowering part is used to give different tastes and smells to beer, next to that it also helps in preserving the beer. After hops comes the yeast, the yeast converts the sugars from the malt into the alcohol we love, next to that the yeast gives different aromatics and flavours and also some carbonation. And finally, water. The water, ass you might have guessed is used to combine all these ingredients, extract their good stuff and turn it into a proper beer. Now we know the ingredients and roughly what they do we can move on to the brewing process. The brewing process consists of 5 steps. The steps are as follows: milling the malt, the mashing process, the boil, the fermentation process and finally the bottling.

Milling the malt. Malt is usually sold as whole kernels. To be used in the brewing process you have to “open up” the kernels, this is done by crushing them in a mill. The kernels do not get turned into a fine powder like flour but more a very coarse sand like texture. This keeps the kernels somewhat whole but leaves enough surface area for the goodies to be extracted.

With the kernels milled we can start mashing. Mashing is essentially a boil of the milled malt, during this boil enzymes turn the starches in the malt into simple sugars. The mashing happens at different sub boiling points, a common malting scheme is as follows: 10 minutes at 52 Co, 50 minutes at 63 Co and finally 20 minutes at 72 Co. Different heats have different effect on the malt and of course give different properties to the beer. Different malts may also require a different malting scheme. After the mashing is done the malt needs to filtered out of the beer.

The next step is the boil. During the boil hops are added to preserve and give properties to the beer. There are a lot of different brands/families of hops each with their own properties and flavours. Just like the mashing process the boil is dived into steps. You add the bittering hops at the beginning of the boil, these preserve the beer and give a lot of bitterness to the beer. Later on in the boil you add the aromatic hops, these hops are boiled for a shorter duration so that they don’t give away much bitterness but more of the hoppy flavours. Boil schemes always count down their time, so lets say the total boil takes 60 minutes, then the bittering hops are added at the start of the boil (60 minutes). Other hops will be added later, for example if a hops has to be added at 20 minutes in the boil scheme, this means it has to be added 20 minutes before the boil ends (40 minutes after the boil started). A boil scheme could look as follows: bittering hops at 60 minutes, hop strain A at 15 minutes and hop strain B at 5 minutes. Now that the boil has ended you let the beer cool down and filter out the hops.

The intensive work is now down and we can start waiting. After the beer has cooled down you add the yeast and put it in a fermenting container for up to three weeks. You can do measurements to determine exactly when the beer is done but 3 weeks is a good milestone.

Now that the beer has fermented we can start bottling. Add a bit of sugar water to the beer, this is to allows some post yeasting whilst in the bottle which creates the carbonation. When the sugar water is added just divide the beer into bottles, cap and let it sit for another three weeks. After three weeks you can try the first beer, but the longer it sits the better it gets!

During the entire brewing process its important that everything that touches the beer is *very* well sanitized. You have special products for this but hot water, soap and a proper scrub should do the trick just fine.

I hope this article has given you a nice insight into the world of brewing beer and maybe even convinced you to give it a shot! Anyhow I’m going to drink some homemade beers now, houdoe and keep on brewing.