How to Brew - Beginner's Instructions

This article is a little bit of a work in progress. We will add more pictures of the steps, expand it, cut it down, add links, and other stuff as we develop the tutorials on the site. We can also get into more depth on some of the subjects in other articles and in our Advanced Brewing section. For now, this is to get started.

1. First off clean your kitchen surfaces and workspace. I like to take easily moved appliances and things off the counters when I am brewing to give myself more space. I also make sure the counters have been sprayed down and cleaned with house hold cleaner. I also usually take any dishes out of the sink and give that a rinse as well. The cleaner everything is the less likely things will get infected if they come in contact with those surfaces. Since I've dropped various pieces of equipment on the floor, in the sink and on counters before, this cleaning just gives me a peace of mind that if I drop something thats already been sanitized, I can relax and not worry. (You can always sanitize again if its an option!!! The point is, if your kitchen is filthy you increase the likelihood of accidentally dropping last night's chinese food leftovers into your brewpot).
2. Next thing to do is get the gear you need into your kitchen. To start you will need your pot, a thermometer, a big spoon or something like it to stir, as well as all your ingredients.
3. Take your yeast out of the fridge, smack it if its a smack pack, if its a vial put it your pocket to warm it up, if its dry you need to do a starter perhaps even a few hours in advance (tho I suggest you take those extra hours and go to the nearest homebrew store and buy some liquid yeast instead).
4. Put the pot on the stove. Put 2 gallons of water in it and start heating it up. Put your crushed specialty grains in your grain bag and tie it off. --Specialty grains are the 1-2 pounds of actual grains like Crystal Malt or a dark chocolate malt that you bought as part of your recipe in addition to your extracts. Hopefully you've had them pre-crushed at the store. If not you can roll over them with a baker's rolling pin and crack the shells yourself. That should be sufficient enough. You can also buy a grain mill someday to do this.
5. At this point you have 2 options depending on your recipe probably, but also on your time constraints and tolerance for complication:
   

   Option 1: The easy brewing method that a number of authors propose is to take your specialty grains (you are using specialty grains aren't you?) and put them in the pot while the water is heating up. From here you can just bring the water to a boil. Pull the grains out after it hits 170 degrees. Put it in a separate smaller pot to collect any drippings. Give the bag a few minutes to drain what it can then pour that stuff into the pot. You can discard the grain bag and spent grains. If you used oatmeal you can cut the bag, scoop some into a bowl, mix with some raisins and brown sugar and eat it. Nothings better than Oatmeal Stout Oatmeal. Continue bringing the pot to a boil.

   Option 2: If you are doing a mini-mash, it will take a little while, but you want to heat this pot to around 160. Keep checking it as the temp rises. Try not to go over. We want the mash to stay between 160 and 150 degrees for optimal starch conversion. Usually with a mash+extract type beer you don't go to extravagant lengths with the mash. 30-40 minutes is usually enough time. Just throw your grain bag into the pot when its around 160, put the lid on, turn off the heat and let it sit for the time you choose. The pot should keep the temp unless your kitchen is really cold or something. Towards the end of this process take a small pot and start heating up a half gallon of water. After the 30-40 min mash, take the grain bag out, put it in a strainer across the top of your brew pot-- you can turn up the heat under the brew pot (the big one) to start the boiling process. The smaller pot of water is hopefully at 160 or above now at which point start ladling the warmed water on to the grain bag suspended over the brew pot. Water should work its way through the grains and into the wort. This is called sparging and is usually a little more involved for all grain. For our purposes this works fine. Once all the heated water is back in the brew pot, discard the grain bag, rinse off your strainer, toss the strainer in your sanitizer filled bucket for later, and stop watching the pot so that it can boil.

6. Now we are back on track with the regular brewing process. At this point the grains should be gone and the wort (water in the pot that now has a bit of sugar and color in it from the gains) should be boiling. Once it is boiling remove it from the heat source and pour in your extract. Do this a little at a time while stirring the wort to dissolve. (Keeping it on your burner may/will caramelize the extract sugars in your wort--making the beer darker and perhaps adding unintended--but perhaps delicious--flavors.) When you've dissolved all your extract, put the pot back over the heat and return to a boil while stirring.
7. When its boiling again add your first round of hops. In the recipe these might be labeled with 60 min to denote when you should add them. These are for bittering. Give the pot a stir.
8. At this point you will kinda be waiting around. Things to do while you wait. Sanitize your fermenter, air lock parts, funnel, strainer, any thing you might need that would touch the wort after its done boiling. You can also take this time to record everything in your brewing log.
9. The next hop addition is usually labeled 15 min or 10 min. These are flavoring/aroma hops. So 45 to 50 minutes into the boil add these hops.
10. If you have final finishing aroma hops add those at about the 55 minute mark.
11. At 60 minutes, turn off the heat. Fill your sink with an inch of water, and place your brew pot into the sink. Putting the lid on is probably a good idea at this point as this is where infection can happen. Add ice to the sink surrounding the pot and put in more cold water to maximize contact with the pot. Some experts say to stir the pot to draw warmer liquid to the edges and continue the cooling process but you need to do this very carefully minimizing dust getting into the pot, or even breathing on the wort. I just put the lid on and forget about it for an hour, and check on it later. When its just warm to the touch, its probably cool enough for yeast pitching.
12. At this point you probably have about 2 gallons of wort for your 5 gallon batch. Add 2 gallons of cold water to your sanitized primary fermenter. Now slowly pour your wort into the fermenter. I have a glass primary with a small opening at the top, so I use a sanitized funnel to pour my wort in. I also put my sanitized strainer in the funnel to filter out hop pellet goop and leaves. You may have to dump out your strainer a few times while pouring to keep the flow going.
13. Once the wort is in the fermenter add more water to top it off to 5 gallons. It helps to draw a line with a marker ahead of time on your fermenter so you know how high to fill it.
14. Put a bung in the top of the fermenter, or put the lid on your buck it and rock the wort side to side a bunch of times. Get it good and frothy as you want to aerate the wort for the yeast.
15. Take the bung out or the lid off. At this point you could take a hydrometer reading. If you have a bucket for fermenter that just means taking your hydrometer vial and sanitizing it, then filling it with wort from the bucket. If you have a glass carboy its a little trickier. Use a racking cane and siphon tube to pull out some of the wort and fill the hydrometer's sample vial. Sanitize the racking cane and tube first.
16. Pour your yeast into the fermenter. Put the lid back or the bung back in and put the airlock in place. Now store your fermenter in a dark part of your place--no sunlight unless you relish the flavor of skunk. Also it really needs to be under 70 degrees in your home if you want optimal fermentation temperatures. If its too hot: turn down the heat/put on the air conditioner. If its too cold do the reverse. Under 65 degrees and you will have slow/non existent fermenting for an Ale. Too hot and you can get weird off flavors from the yeast. Temperature can be regulated with your thermostat, by creating a waterbath to cool the fermenter down, and even by using equipment to heat or cool it for you. (More on that later.)
17. If all goes well, fermentation should start in 24-48 hours. Bubbles of CO2 will come up through the air lock and a thick layer of foamy year will form on the top of the fermenting wort in the fermenter. Leaving it for a week or two to let it ferment out completely. After the foam inside the fermenter drops you can transfer the wort to a secondary fermenter which will help clear the finished product and prevent off flavors from having the beer sit on the old yeast for too long.
18. At this point you can take some wort out check the gravity with your hydrometer. If it falls around 1.006 to 1.018 you should be done fermenting.
19. When your wort is finished fermenting you can start calling it beer. Time to bottle. Get all your bottles together and a bucket of sanitizer/water mix. Sanitize all your bottles and rinse them thoroughly. Put the bottle caps in some water in a pot on the stove and boil them to sanitize.
20. Transfer the beer to a clean sanitized bucket. (siphon or pouring) Heat a small amount of water on the stove and dissolve the priming sugar in it. Then add the priming sugar water to the bucket and stir it up with a sanitized spoon.
21. Start filling the bottles from the spicket or with a bottle filler. Cap them and mark them. Put them back in the closet at the same fermentation temperatures. After about two weeks they will be carbonated. Then you can toss them in the fridge to lager them a little or for however long the recipe might call for. You can also age them in your closet longer if the recipe call for it.
22. Drink.