Homebrewing Guest Blogger: You’re Going to Brew Dammit

Welcome to the second weekly installment of "Ian J Barker's Kosher Brewing Funtime Extravaganza For Adults, Mazeltov!" This week I'll give a brief rundown of the brewing types and go over the equipment you'll need to make your first batch.

Types of Brewing

Let's get right down to it. For homebrewers, there are generally only two methods of brewing beer: extract brewing and all-grain brewing. Extract brewing uses malt extract while all-grain brewing uses actual malted grain. The difference you ask? While malt extract brewing is easier and more consistent, all-grain brewing is considered by most to be the true brewing experience.

Malt extract consists of the dehydrated sugar collected from cooking malted grain and some hops. It comes in cans, jugs, or bags in different roast levels and, like I mentioned earlier, results in a more consistent brew, primarily because the extract is pre-prepared. All-grain brewing on the other hand allows the brewmaster (that's right, call yourself a brewmaster) to customize the sugars and starches that come out in the cooked wort. By cooking the grain yourself, you will have infinitely more control over what your beer tastes like.

Equipment

Now, for your first batch I recommend buying a brewing kit. The 1 gallon brewing kits at Brooklyn Brew Shop are what I began with and I swear by them. They give you all the instructions, equipment, and, most importantly, confidence to really get your feet wet. Furthermore, the size of the kit makes it easier (and less costly) to experiment.

The kit comes with a few items: a 1 gallon glass carboy (jug), a 3-piece airlock, a rubber stopper with a hole in it, a lab thermometer, some plastic tubing, a tubing clamp, a racking cane, and a packet of sanitizer, along with the grain, hops, and sugars needed for brewing whatever beer you choose. If you choose not to purchase a kit with equipment, then these are the essential pieces you need to purchase (though not many retailers sell one-gallon sized equipment and five gallon brewing is simply too much until you know what you're doing).

However, I do recommend that, no matter how excited you are, whether you purchase your equipment independently or not, that you at least purchase an ingeredient kit with pre-measured grain, hops, and sugars. Frankly, I don't even know how to make successful recipes yet!

So you're thinking, "what do I do now, oh Guru of the Grain, with all these dohickeys, thingamajigs, and WTFs?" Well, children, that story will begin to unfold...

Next week.

Cheers!


Note:
Now, at times I may be throwing a lot of information at you all at once. I promise it will all be cleared up. Some of the information in the coming weeks may get a little technical, but I promise I'll do my best to give you the know-how you need to become a real brewmaster. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments section or drop me an email at barker.ianjohn@gmail.com. As an unemployed college graduate, I have nothing better to do, I assure you.


Note from Brian:
I’ve got a lot of readers in Des Moines and wanted to give a little info for those in the area. Homebrewing supplies in the area are available from Heartland Homebrew Supply or Beer Crazy. Right now the Heartland Homebrew site is under construction and the Beer Crazy site is pretty weak. Both of the stores are pretty good though, go in and check them out.

Many other readers are around Fort Worth. Around there check out the American Firehouse Brewing Supply, Brewhaus, and Brew-Monkey. I haven’t been to any of those so I can’t vouch for them, but please let me know if you’ve been there.

If you have any other suggestions for homebrew shops in your area feel free to post them in a comment!