Your first beer
Brewing beer is easier than it looks. Here is everything you need to get started.
What you need
For your first beer you only need a large pot, a thermometer, scales, a large sieve or grain bag for lautering, hop bags (so the hops don’t float around in the wort), a fermenter with airlock, bottles and sanitiser. As ingredients, malt or malt extract, hops, yeast and water are enough. The easiest way to start is a ready-made brewing kit. With malt extract, mashing and lautering are skipped (steps 2 and 3 below).
How beer is made in 8 steps
- Prepare the water: measure the amount and adjust it with the brewing-water calculator if needed.
- Mash: stir crushed malt into warm water and hold it at set temperatures. Enzymes turn starch into sugar.
- Lauter: separate the sweet wort from the grain and rinse with hot water.
- Boil: boil for 60–90 min and add the hops. They bring bitterness and aroma.
- Chill: cool the wort quickly to fermentation temperature.
- Ferment: add the yeast. In 1–2 weeks it turns sugar into alcohol and CO₂.
- Bottle: add a little sugar to the bottles so carbonation can develop.
- Condition: wait 2–4 weeks. Then your beer is ready.
The 5 most common beginner mistakes
- Not sanitising enough: everything that touches the wort after the boil must be clean and sanitised.
- Fermenting too warm: every yeast has its temperature range. Fermenting too warm gives off-flavours such as solvent or fusel notes. Fermentation produces heat itself, the beer is often 2–3 °C (36–37 °F) warmer than the room.
- Bottling too early: only bottle when the hydrometer shows the same reading for 2–3 days. Otherwise too much pressure builds up and bottles can burst.
- Too much priming sugar: work out the amount with the carbonation calculator and weigh it carefully.
- Too impatient: beer needs time to mature. After 4 weeks it usually tastes much better than after 2.
Which recipe first?
The Hefeweizen and the American Pale Ale are good first beers: they ferment at a cool room temperature of around 18–20 °C (64–68 °F) and forgive small mistakes. The Munich Helles needs a cool fermentation around 10 °C (50 °F), so it is better suited as your second or third beer. Every recipe can be scaled to your batch size.
How the calculators help
The water volume calculator tells you step by step how much water you need and how hot the mash water has to be. The brewing-water calculator adjusts your tap water. The final-beer calculator shows alcohol, colour and bitterness. And the carbonation calculator tells you how much sugar goes into each bottle.
Questions?
In the forum other homebrewers are happy to help. Just ask your question under “Troubleshooting”.