Beer Brewing 101 - How To Make Cheap (But Great Tasting) Beer

If you enjoy drinking beer, but don't enjoy the high prices of going to a bar or restaurant for a decent brew, you can brew your own beer in your kitchen. If you are tired of paying a lot of money for beer that you think tastes like cat piss, you should consider brewing it yourself.

Beer brewing is not really a difficult thing to do, if you have a bit of patience, you can really get a great tasting beer the first time you brew. If you want to do a bit of home brewing for the first time, you are probably going to want to get a kit that will help you. Then, invite a few friends to come over and give you a hand. Don't forget that brewing beer isn't an instant process, so you will have to buy a couple of six packs to tide you over until it is ready.

If you can boil water, you can make a delicious beer (and if you can't boil water, don't worry, there are several kits that you can buy, which you don't even need to boil water to make). Don't worry; you don't really need a lot of equipment to get a great tasting beer. You will need at least one large container to store the beer in while it is fermenting (impress your friends by calling it a 'carboy'), a large pan (to boil water and mix ingredients in), a siphon tube, and a hydrometer (which will tell you whether the beer is done or not).

To make your first batch of beer, you are going to follow three basic steps: clean, brew and bottle or keg. If this is your first time brewing, it may take a bit longer, but once you have the hang of it, the cleaning and brewing part of the beer making process should take about 90 minutes for each batch.  

If you want great tasting beer, you need to make sure that you have the best water and clean equipment. If your containers are dirty, it is definitely going to affect the way that your beer tastes. If you don't want to sanitize your stuff, make sure that you delegate the task to someone who will.

Brewing is about as easy as boiling water and stirring in the ingredients. The amount of each ingredient is going to change depending on the type of beer you are brewing, but all you have to do is boil some of the water and add the grains. Follow the instructions for the particular type of beer that you are making. The last step is to add the yeast, which will start the fermentation process.

Then the hard part begins: waiting. It takes at least five days for the beer to be ready for bottling, and depending on the type of beer, it can take a lot more time (which is why you are now glad that you took the advice of buying a couple of six packs to tide you over).

If you want your beer to look as great as it will taste, you can put them in glass bottles. This is the final step, and one that every brew master will like, because the sooner you put the last cap on the bottle, the sooner you can get out the bottle opener and pop open one of your handcrafted beers.