Home brewing started for me as an after-thought of wine making.  I had lived in Sacramento, California for some time and took visitors to Napa Valley on occasion and was fascinated by things fermentable.  I never got the nerve to buy the equipment and learn how.  The "know-how" was the limiting factor.  Years later, I was driving by a new beer brew supply store in Tucson and decided to stop in.  Big mistake, I came home with a book (Charlie Papazian's) and enough stuff to get in trouble with.  Here's the first axiom:

"Give a man a beer, and he will waste an hour.  Teach a man to brew beer, and he will waste a lifetime."

I never stopped brewing.  I think the great thing about brewing is its connection with history, the infinite spectrum of taste, the wonderful companionship with fellow brewers (somehow they are always smiling...), and besides the process is fun.  So this space is dedicated to the art and science of brewing.  To the beginner I hope to inspire and to the experienced, I hope to say something you can use as well.  At the end of this article is a way to communicate your brewing experience to me, and in that way we keep the tradition flowing.  Prosit!

How do you brew beer?  The knowledge.

You need to become familiar with barley, yeast, hops, and water chemistry.  Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria in 1516 was motivated to get it right.  The beer made in the kingdom varied in desirability, and as the leader, he decided  to do something about it.  A new law called Rheinheitsgebot was laid down (actually it was built on an earlier decree).  In essence it says, "Only make beer from barley grain, hops, and water - nothing else."  At the time they didn't know about the biology of yeast; but we will give Wilhelm the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant to include the yeast. Everything else is known as an "adjunct" to a brewer. Adjuncts can be useful and many great beers use them successfully; but following Rheinheitsgebot does not disappoint.

Barley

The basics are: the best barley is the two-row variety.  Okay, what's two-row mean?  The grain kernels lay symmetrically on either side and centered on the stem.  There is also four-row and six-row barley.  The grain head is more and more crowded as the kernels wrap around the stem.  They work, but the protein, enzymes, and starch levels are not as optimum as with the two-row.  The various countries around the world grow barley much the same; but some areas are special.  For instance most people find the barley from Moravia especially light and mellow in flavor and probably the best for making the mellow lagers known as Pilsners.

The trick with Barley is the grain kernel has to be converted from starch to maltose sugar, and thus malted barley.  This is done essentially by moistening and warming the grain to allow the seed to germinate.  The enzymes within the grain convert the starch to sugar.  The skill is in controlling this process and stopping the germination just at the right moment.  This process is a book in itself and the book was written by George Fix (see my library list).  Now you have the opportunity to extend the variety of the product by roasting.  You can roast the un-converted barley, and you can roast the converted barley, over a large range; and thus you get Cara-pils, Carmel, chocolate, roast, patent(black) and everything in-between.  You can have the heating done in the present of smoke to add yet another layer of flavor (and still meet Rheinheitsgebot!).  Every good German knows about Rauchbier or smoke-beer.  And any previous member of Alcoholics of America knows Scotch is made from Peat smoked barley beer that has been distilled.  Now you can see the variation in beer flavor is wide.  If we consider the various yeast strains, the various hops flavors, and the affect that water chemistry has, you can see beer is at least as infinite in flavor as music is with its measly 12 tone scale.

Yeast

There are two major categories of yeast.  Those that ferment on the top and those that ferment on the bottom of a vat of beer making ingredients.  The top feeders produce what the world knows as ales, and the bottom feeders produce lagers.  Other distinctions are that ale yeasts are the most active in a temperature range of 65 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit and lager yeasts are more comfortable at 45 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit.  Also the ale yeast convert sugar to alcohol very fast and their submerged cousins take their sweet time.  The word lager in deutsch means storage or "put away".  It takes ales about four or five days to do their thing and lager yeast about six months.  Usually there is a clearing time after the initial fermentation of a week or two for both, and then the lagers mellow for months and the ales head for the tap room.  The story of yeast is wonderful and rich.  For some odd 10,000 years of brewing man had not a clue why fermentation took place.  And taken as a group, all the wild yeast around provided for variation that was not always pleasing (accept to Belgians... more on this later).  It is important at this point to say that there are only a couple of hundred really good beer producing yeast varieties; but this is very subtle.  Most major breweries secretly guard the yeast they use.  Even though the sellers of yeast claim they are giving you the exact yeast used in Munich, Prague, or London, I don't believe it.  If you have the privilege to visit the premiere breweries of the world, you will note how special their product is, and the yeast have a great deal to do with that.  You can copy the water chemistry very close and use the same barley and never get close to matching the best these breweries have to offer.  Of course, close to some people is only measured in the level of alcohol buzz that you get.  But to the discerning palette, you can tell.  Yeast are the little chemical factories that are breaking up very complex organic molecules into alcohol, CO2, and a vast array of other proteins, dextrins, and "stuff".  I said it was complex (see the reference library list - read anything by George Fix).

Hops

Hops is a vine that produces a funny looking green flower that resembles a soft pinecone.  Buried inside (the female variety) these cones are lupulin glands that produce a bitter yellow oily substance that has some wonderful properties.  First it is a preservative, because bacteria don't like it.  Second it has proven to be the optimum balancing agent against the sweet taste of maltose in beer.  Third it has a wonderful aroma that adds a finish to a beer that is received by the beer drinker as a little zephyr from heaven.  Balancing the malt in beer is important, because malt overpowers the flavor towards sweetness.  The depth of character can only be tasted, if a balance is achieved.  Most American microbreweries are so impressed by hops that they haven't gotten around to making "beer" yet.  They tend to over-hop everything leaving the balance somewhere pegged over to the left.  Once again experience is the best teacher.  Go to Europe.  Get it right, please.  (sorry about the speech...).  In the mid-1800s beer drinkers of the world weighed in by choosing lager beer as their favorite.  Why haven't American microbreweries, who make only ales, made this association yet.  I think the greed of making the fast buck has stepped in front of starting a tradition that could last forever here in the home land.  Watch, the microbrewer fad will fade to some low level, but not be as big a business as it should, because of this. The real irritant is just lying about the product being sold - selling ale and calling it lager. It is probably ignorance most than malicious.

Water

So what?  Well, since it is about 90% of what your drinking in a beer, it counts.  Of course, it really isn't a heavy hitter in the flavor category, but it has an influence on the yeast and the other substances that do make up the flavor.  If certain minerals are exaggerated, then the water does start to become the whole beer.  It's not a pretty sight, and we will leave it at that.  Chorine in beer water sucks.  Certain beers have gained a following, because the local water used to produce them has given them "that special distinction", but we're talking about natural water, not processed.   Frankly I have not been impressed by Burton water (one of the most famous), because is causes the beer to be bitter.  It is basically hard water.  Well, in England drinking a bitter is what you do.   I have enjoyed a few pints of same, but it is not my favorite.  At the other end of the spectrum is the very soft water of Pilzn in the Czech Republic.  Added to the mellow grains of Moravia and the spicy taste of the Saaz hops, and you get the classic Pislner lager, which is the basis for most of the commercial beers of the world.  To the home brewer water chemistry is a bit much; but it can be accomplished to a good degree, rather simply.  More on how to do that later.  And if you are trying to emulate the taste of the world's great beers, you must do the chemistry.

The Process - boiling

A few definitions are in order so we can talk.  Wort - another German word for the sweet maltose sugar sweated out of the barley during the mashing process.  The vessel used for this process is a lauter-tun.  You guess it - more German.  Basically this is a insulated vessel that holds the grain while hot water is gently run through it (called sparging) that dissolves the maltose from the grain husk.  The vessel has a strainer built into the bottom to keep the grain husks from leaving, while passing the wort onto the next step in the process.  This sounds simple enough.  Get the grain wet, add enough water to get the grain suspended and then open the valve on the bottom, start a drain, and sparge at the same time.  Okay, when do we stop.  How hot is the water?  Is temperature control during the process important.  If you run too much water, you get thin wort and it takes forever to boil it down to the specific gravity desired.  The water temperature influences the enzymes in the grain to optimize the breaking down of sugar molecules so that the yeast can easily consume them.  Too hot and you kill off the enzymes and you start to leach out tannin in the husks.  This makes your beer start to taste like grass.  So there is a temperature profile to follow, during the mashing and sparging phase of our project.  It turns out that with a simply thermometer and some simple techniques, we can avoid complex equipment set ups and measuring devises.  After all, we are probably going to be do this in the kitchen.

We now have hot sticky sweet wort.  We need to boil that and add the hops.  Why?  Boiling sanitizes the brew.  It breaks up long molecule chains.  Yeast consume only the short ones.  It emulsifies the lupulin from the hops.  Remember that was an oil.  It takes about an hour minimum.  Some recipes use 90 minutes.  A few recipes, longer.  Also, the amount of hops and time in the boil, adjusts the bittering balance.  At this point you can see the recipe is the process controller as well as the list of ingredients.  The big problem here is the volume of wort and the huge amount of heat required.  All-grain brewing results in the whole fermentable amount of liquid being boiled.  This could be 5, 10, 15 or more gallons.  The heat to boil that is big.  An alternative is to use barley extract, which is like orange juice concentrate.  It is a thick dehydrated wort that you can buy and dilute with approximately half the total water, and now the volume is manageable in the average kitchen assuming your just going to make 5 gallons.  After boiling you add the remaining water to add up to 5 gallons in the fermenter, which is probably best done with a large glass carboy. Well, more insight.  What if you want to make 10 gallon batches of all grain?  Then you go outside and use a fish fryer cooking burner of about 175,000 BTUs and a 12 gallon kettle.  Must make room for the vigorous boil.  This may be how witches got started.  But handling the weight, and storing that much liquid, becomes a logistic issue.  More later on recipes and the what, when, and how much to put in the pot as you go along.

We are now finished boiling.  Here is an important fact.  You need to cool the wort down fast to a temperature below  90F and better yet to about 70F, so that you can "pitch the yeast".  Above this temperature, you kill the yeast.  You want the yeast to get active as soon as possible to "take over the beer" and establish dominance by producing alcohol, because every living "gebersite" in the world loves beer.  This way you avoid off-flavored beer.  There is a more complex thing that happens with a quick chill - the "cold break".  

This means that a goodly portion of insoluble dextrin molecules will crash and settle to the bottom of the kettle.  This enhances the removal of them.  If your kettle is rigged to do a whirlpool or other such schemes to separate this material out, all the better.  The home brewer usually forgoes this step and just strains the cooled wort as he places it in the carboy.  Most of the gunk is caught. So what have you lost here?  This material is "okay" to remain in the wort.  The taste is benign. It may fall out during fermentation and, since the most common way to transfer beer is a siphon, it is a minimal situation.  So what's the problem?  This material can cause a cloudiness, and in extremes, show up as stringing looking suspensions after the beer is cooled down to refrigerator temps.  It is known as "chill haze".  I can tell you it is not as big a deal as all the books tell you it is, because I have never seen it my beers and I don't have a fancy rig at all.  A good boil, excellent yeast and good clean equipment are the real factors to success, and of course, some attempt to strain it out.  One more biggy.  Later I will tell you oxygen is a bad thing, because it starts the spoiling process and has to be avoided.  But right now it is important to pump it up in the wort.  The boiling process drives the O2 out of the wort.  The yeast require an oxygen hit to get started.  Otherwise they don't develop right.  The yeast go through what is known as the aerobic build up of their numbers before going to work on the maltose.  In this process they use up the O2.  The wort is a hard environment for the yeast, because it is concentrated.  In nature they usually don't have this much fun.  The O2 is consumed totally by the yeast build up, so you should froth the heck out of the wort right here at the start of the beer making or bubble O2 through the wort.  I have found by pouring the wort from waist height through a strainer sitting on a catch pot really whips up the wort nicely.  Others just shake up the wort, once it is in the fermenter.  The techno-brewers bubble O2 through a porous stone placed in the fermenter on the end a hollow rod.

Fermentation

The wort is handled easiest for the home brewer with a big glass carboy or a large food grade plastic bucket, that can be sealed for this phase of the beer making process.  You need an air lock made by placing a stopper on the loaded carboy or bucket lid with a devise that allows the fermentation gasses  to escape through a small amount of liquid that acts like a sink trap preventing the outside air from getting in.  Once you visit your first brew supply store or Website, you will know what I'm talking about.  If you used an extract and/or partial grain recipe, about half your water is waiting in the carboy for the boiled part to join it.  This also helps in cooling the wort down, because you can have that part prechilled.  At any rate the whole enchilada is now in the carboy, so if you are doing 5 gallons you can handle that much weight easily.  As the volume goes up, you need special equipment.  For a while, I suggest 5 gallon batches is where you should start.  Place the carboy in a dark place.  Yeast are photosensitive.  They create the classic "skunky-beer" taste you hear about on TV, when zapped with light.  This is why beer in green bottles is dumb, if it hasn't been pasteurized and highly filtered to remove the yeast.  Even so, Heinekens can have a skunky smell just when you first open it.  The brown bottles block the UV rays much better.  I digress.  Your next job is to keep the temperature steady during fermentation, and then transfer the beer to another clean carboy called the secondary fermenter to let the beer clear out before bottling.  This step gets the beer off the rather skuzzy initial fermentation byproducts and dead yeast.  Some people don't bother, others are reaching for cleaner tasting beer.  My experience is to transfer to the secondary just as the krausen (another German word meaning curly actually; but here means the foamy bunch of crud that caps the beer during fermentation) starts to fall.  I get more yeast settling out in secondary than if I waited until the primary completed; but I notice that it is all clean healthy yeast, so I figure that's okay.  In the commercial world brewers use a stainless steel container with a conical bottom portion holding several hundred gallons.  The cone on the bottom of the cylinder collects the yeast that can then easily be removed through a valve at the apex of the cone leaving the clearing beer above.  The yeast is then use for the next batch.  The yeast really go through hell during fermentation, because of the high concentration of maltose.  They grow so fast that many burst, and the chance for mutation is great.  To many close cousins to party with.  It's like Jimmy Hendricks at a hemp farm, the yeast are just having too good a time.  This limits the number of times you can use the same yeast to make new batches.  The pros go about 20 times max.  They watch for mutation along the way, and then start a new culture based on the original (stored secretly in a yeast bank in an Alpen cave).  Now this brings up a whole new thing.  Culturing yeast and isolating the preferred beasts.  Yet another book.  It is sufficient to say the home brewers usually just get a new pack of yeast, and waste the opportunity of reusing the process yeast.  Of course, hard core party types that brew continuously, can take advantage of all that wonderful yeast they have produced.

Bottling

How do you know when your done?  You measure where you are, in term of the specific gravity of the wort, when you started the fermentation process, and compare that to the specific gravity when your fermentation ends.  By that I mean you need to take a specific gravity reading at the point you pitched the yeast in the primary fermentation process as a baseline.  After you see that nothing is going on in the carboy and the liquid looks black as the yeast have fallen (flocculated - another beer term).  The clear liquid fails to reflect light off the yeast, and in a dark place, looks black.  Now take another SG measurement.  It should be around 1.010.  1.000 is pure water.  You start with levels between 1.038 to 1.060 or higher depending on how much alcohol your poor yeast are being forced to live with.  All of this is recipe dependent, so don't get hung up on these values given here.  If specific gravity sounds a little technical, get real.  It is the same device we used to check car batteries, when men were men and batteries were a mess, and no one teased us about doing that.  The "techy" stuff is what makes this fun. We are now ready to bottle. The precise amount of alcohol can be calculated from a math formula from knowing the actual specific gravity delta from start to finish.

The first order of business is to create some more CO2 to give the beer some zing.  Flat beer is no fun - well except in England and it still has some CO2 streaming up.  The yeast are happily sleeping at the bottom of your carboy.  Many are still in suspension.  Your need to boil about a pint of water and add about a cup of corn sugar or malt to that.  The boiling sanitizes the liquid and yes, now you have to cool it down, not to scald the yeast.  This amount of sugar is typical to match a 5 gallon amount of beer. You'll need more for bigger projects. At some point your equipment is so elaborate to handle large quantities, it is easier to use a CO2 pressure bottle and place the pressurized gas on the beer in a sealed tank for a specific amount of time at cold temperature. You achieve the same result, but that is like being a pro. Gently pour the sugar water into a bottling bucket and siphon the beer onto that, trying not to get air into the beer.  Remember O2 now signals the start of spoilage.  At this point oxygen in the enemy.  It combines with material in the beer to produce off flavors.  Since I own a CO2 bottle, I run a few seconds of CO2 into the bucket and cover it, then add the beer slowly by a small tube.  This may be overkill.  It is more kin to keeping out evil spirits .  The mixture has to be uniform, so gentle stirring is required.  If the concentration of sugar is too high in any one bottle you could get an explosion as the CO2 pressure gets too high.  Once again the recipe should steer you to correct amount of sugar in the mix.  The easiest way to get the beer into the bottles is have a spigot on the bottom of the bottling bucket to which you attach a plastic tube. Connect the other end of the tube to a hollow rod with a push valve on the end.  Don't worry, all the supply houses sell these.  That way when you place the rod in an empty bottle and press, the valve opens and the bottle fills.  The real benefit comes when the bottle is full.  You just lift out the tube, and that stops the flow.  Otherwise you spray beer all over the place going from bottle to bottle.  Fill the bottles to about 3/4 of an inch from the top and cap.  The filler rod technique has another great side effect, when the rod is pulled out, the right level of beer is left in the bottle when you fill right to the top. Hand cappers work great.  Most home brewers place the cap on loosely for a few minutes to let the CO2 time to push out any air, and then cap it tightly.  You can buy all kinds of fancy cappers, but the simpler the better.

Storage

Initially you need to keep the beer at about 65 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit to let the CO2 build up.  It takes a week or more.  Then  cool the beer down in a good place (no light) to hold it near 54F.  The yeast are very happy there, and they will continue to mellow the beer out.  It just keeps on getting better.  Somewhere after your taste buds say this is good as it gets, you can go on down to refrigerator temps at 40F.  This will drop any swimming yeast to the bottom.  They go dormant.

Marketing

Don't forget to make a great looking label.  With all the home computers and color printers, there is no excuse.  You will immediately see your friends light up at the label first, then the clear pour, if you did it right, and then the beautiful color and perfect head, the aroma of a noble hop, and a taste to die for.  I have to go now.  I just had a powerful erg  to have a home brew!

Some Final Notes

Certain equipment is needed to make home beer making enjoyable.  I would not recommend the bare minimum.  Check out a few other people's rigs and go from there.  Here is what I use and I am a bottom end brewer.

1.  I have two 16 quart stainless steel pots.  I can't remember where the second one came from, but I use both of them mainly because I happen to have a two burner Chinese cooking stove design to use woks.  This is neat, because the burners are big.  I place it on a picnic table in the back yard for the boil.  I use malt extract and boil about half the water (2.5 gallons), so the SG is initially twice as thick as it will be, once the wort is in the carboy with rest of the 5 gallons of water.  A nice trick is to use the second pot to caramelize about 1 gallon of wort.  This makes Scottish Ales come out great - my favorite.  I also use the second pot to strain the wort into after chill down.  The strainer creates a lot of foam, so I get the oxygen boost needed.  I go back and forth this way until I'm satisfied there is enough oxygen in the liquid.  The strainer collects a lot of hop residue and dextrin fall out as well.  That is discarded.

2.  I use a partial mash, so about 2 to 4 pound of grain are mashed in one of the pots.  I put the grain in a nylon sack, and put about 2 gallons of water in at 160F - attempting to hit about 154F, when the grain gets saturated with water.  Then I put the whole thing in the oven set on "warm" with a lid on the pot.  It stays right at 154F for about an hour.  That dissolves the maltose from the grain.  You pull the sack out of the pot and let the wort drain back into the pot.  Add the extract and bring the water level up to 2.5 gallon and start the boil.

3.  A portion of hops goes in early to allow one hour in the boil.  This is called the bittering hops.  About half way through the boil I add a second portion of hops.  This is called the flavoring hops.  About 10 minute before the end of the boil, I add the final portion of hops.  This is the aroma hops.  The boil needs to be a vigorous one, but this comes at a price.  Early in the boil the large dextrin molecules break down an tend to produce a flare up of frothy wort that can easily boil over.  Not good.  Hot sticky burnt sugar is very hard to clean up.  I usually wait about 10 to 15 minutes into the boil, after the froth goes down, to add the hops.  Hops really makes the break more exaggerated.  After that it is smooth sailing.  Another note on hopping.  Some brewers add the aroma hops after the boil either inline as the kettle is drained (using a thing called a "hop back") or in between primary and secondary fermentation directly into the secondary container.  The alcohol level is high now, and the chance of infecting the brew is minimized.  In general the later the hops is added the more of the essential fragrant oils is imparted to the beer, which allows for a wonderful aroma.

4.  I use a big copper coil of 3/4 inch tubing that is rolled into a coil that just fits inside the pot and reaches up to the top.  The two ends come out over the lip of the pot and have plastic tubing attached to each one that will hook up to my cooling scheme discussed later.  About 10 minutes before the boil ends, I place the coil into the wort to sanitize it.  After the boil, I carry the pot with the coil to the kitchen sink, and place it in one side of the sink.  The other side has a water bath in it, and a pump from an evaporative air conditioner.  I hook up the pump to one of the coil tubes and run water from the faucet into that sink and let the pump pick it up and send it through the coil.  I expel the water coming out the other end down the sink until the temperature is the same as the water from the tap.  Then I place the lose end in the bath of water with the pump to create a closed cycle.  Now I add ice to the bath.  You have to stop the tap water coming in now or the bath water rises too much.  At the same time I am stirring the wort and watching the temperature fall using a dial thermometer.  I've tried all kinds of thermometers and this one works best.  I have broken every glass one I owned.  You will be surprise how fast the wort chills down.  I can get to 65F in about 15 minutes.  Now I pull the coils, lid the wort and head for the garage.

5.  The other pot has been preposition in the garage with the strainer across it.  I pour the wort from a height into the other pot on the floor and get a good froth.  I discard the stuff in the strainer and reverse the process back into the first pot.  A couple of times and the oxygen boost is definitely accomplished.

6.  A 6.5 gallon carboy is sitting there with about 2 gallons of cold water in it and a big funnel stuck in the top.  Once the wort is in the carboy I top it off to about 5.5 gallons.  There is a mark on the carboy for that I made with a grease pencil.  The 1/2 gallon will be lost during siphoning.  Why a bigger tank than liquid.  Foam or Krausen as it should be called.  You need to allow room for this stuff that will grow to about six inches in height.  Now I take the original specific gravity measurement using a hydrometer.  I tap into the carboy using a wine thief.  This is a gizmo with a tilt valve in the end and slender enough to enter the carboy neck and long enough to reach the bottom easily.  This puts enough wort into the tube to float the hydrometer and get a reading.  Then touch the tilt valve to the inside of the carboy neck and the wort drains back into the carboy.

7.  I place the air lock on the carboy and haul it into a little refrigerator I have in the garage just for beer making.  Its guts have been removed and only a low shelf is built in it to support the carboy.  There is plenty of room for it to fit.  There is a Johnson Controller on the outside that the frig electric plug fits into.  Then that plug is plugged into the wall.  The frig is set on max cool and the external controller detects the temperature with a thermocouple stuck inside that slips through the door seal easily.  The controller turns on and off the whole refrigerator to keep the temp within the setting of plus or minus 1 1/2 degrees. This is a must for lager making unless you have an ice cave handy.   This devise is also a standard item in brewing catalogs.  You'll have to rig a little frig yourself.

8.  I have a second carboy to siphon the wort into after fermentation.  If the brew is a lager, it will take about a month to settle out.  If it is an ale, then a week or so is enough.  I take the final gravity reading and siphon the beer into a 6 gallon food grade bucket with a spigot on the bottom side for bottling.  The fill rod and tubing are in place, so after placing the pint of sugar water into the bucket with the beer, the bottling begins.

9.  I use a hand capper that fits over the bottle with a cap held in place by a magnet.  Gentle pressure downward and whala, it's done.  I like to use the 500 ml bottle of the German style.  They are a nice size, and it only takes 32 of them to bottle 5 gallons of beer.  It takes 54, 12 ounce bottles, to do the same thing.

10. After a week at 75F, I try one.  If the yeast was a medium flocculator, it will be about the right amount of CO2.  If the yeast was a high flocculate, I wait two weeks.  Otherwise you open a flat beer, but a mighty clear one.  At some point things are just right, and then I put the whole batch at 54F and wait as long as I can stand it to open one.  During this time you will notice beer after beer it seems to improve.  There is a compound in beer called diacetyl that has a funky butterscotch taste.  The yeast slowly work on this stuff until it is gone.  At that point you have great beer.  My experience has been that it take about a month's time.  So four days for primary (were are talking ales here), a week in secondary or two, bottled for a week or two, and aged for a month - we have about two months from start to peak flavor.  Many folks I know want to start drinking during the frothy foaming primary fermentation stage, but believe me the wait is worth it.  Making lagers is a dedicated task, but has even a bigger reward in the end.  At this point if you have any beer left, it can go down to 40F, which will definitely make the beer crystal clear. Any yeast still in the bottle, and there will be some, are in a small circle stuck to the bottom of the bottle. If you pour slowly, they stay there.

11. This process is incomplete without mentioning cleanliness.  Your equipment has to be clean and sanitized.  There is not enough alcohol in beer to do the job by itself.  One good thing is, so far, no microbe that can harm you, can live in beer, but the sour little bugger known as lactobacillus can.  It is the bugger that sours milk.  The Belgians love the stuff.  Wild yeast have a lot of it associated with them.  The Belgians never got into the science of separating them out, so their beer known as Lambics (pronounced "Lam-beaks) is sour.  This can be a great disappointment to a home brewer.  Most folks will think your trying to poison them.  Five Star is a company that produces superior sanitizers and cleaners.  All the rest are okay, but I think a waste of time.  I could explain what's wrong with many of the others, but this page is long enough as it is.  Read the magazines and articles on the Internet and you will see many stories about various sanitizers that do more harm that good, if you throw in the off flavors they can cause.  Five Star makes primo products.

There you have it.  Beer making 101.  There are many approaches and many ways to arrive at the same results.  I found the temp controlled frig necessary to avoid off flavored beer.  Yeast are no longer your friend, if the temp gets off, and they will get even with you by generating ugly flavors.  The commercial breweries get around any problems with the yeast at this point by filtering them out and pasteurizing the beer. Don't do that. What you have in your hand is a perishable product of much enhanced flavor and mouth feel that all commercial beers lack. That's why you worked so hard to get a great beer not just a good beer.

You can bag the hops during boiling to more easily remove the residue and junk left behind.  I recommend that practice.  You can add Irish Moss to the end of the boil to congeal dextrins in the chill down process so they're easier to strain off.  You can add gypsum to harden up the water and give a more authentic British twang to your brew or blend your own special water from bottled water to some chemical formula to match famous water from around the world.  So many variations, that at this point you need to read all the books in the library section of this website at least once.  Read the history.  Go to the breweries.  Join a brew club.  Above all - relax and have a home brew.

Jack Wolf
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Give me some feedback on your brewing experience.

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