Home brewing beer can be very exciting and at the same very challenging. Yes, home brewing beer may take time and effort but once you really get the hang of it, you will have so much fun doing it that you will not really pay much attention to how much time and effort you put into producing a few bottles of beer. Besides, the satisfaction that you get when you finally get your bottles of beer is really something.

Getting Started

When you do decide to brew your own beer, you must make sure that you get the right equipments and ingredients. For your ingredients, you will need water, malt, hops and yeast. If you like you beer to appear light and taste light, you will need to buy some light colored malt and hops with a low alpha number.

Malts and hops with high alpha number gives out stronger flavor, so avoid that one if you have no desire of producing strong beer. On the other hand, if you are interested in getting a more assertive type of beer, go for hops with higher number but use only less than 2 ounces at the beginning of the boiling process otherwise your beer will taste too bitter. Always remember that timing and proper measurement is very important when home brewing beer. If you put in too much stuff into your concoction, you will ruin the taste of your beer.

The first thing that you will need to do when home brewing beer is to boil your malt extract for 30 minutes. Stir the liquid occasionally and then add the hop pellets 5 to 10 minutes before you finish the boiling process. Make sure that you do not over boil your liquid or else your beer will not really taste as good as it should.

When home brewing beer, it is very important to pay close attention to cleaning and sanitizing of equipments especially the ones that you use for fermenting and storing your beer. Always remember that cleaning is different from sanitizing. Just because you have washed the utensils and containers with soap and water, that doesn’t mean that these things are already sanitized.

After cleaning your utensils and containers, you need to apply some bleaching or sanitizing solutions to your equipments to kill whatever bacteria that may be in them. Since bleaching agents and sanitizers often leave some odors in the equipments, you will need to rinse the utensils and containers thoroughly. In case you don’t want to use sanitizers or bleaching agents, you can sterilize your containers and utensils by boiling them for about 15 minutes.