Get a Brew on!

I've been making homebrew for about 6 years. For the last 4 years it has been a continous process. Meaning I've not been in a situation without some beers I've made ready to go. Over the years a few people ask me how it's done so I thought I'd write the process up. For this I'm going to be using a Coopers Stout kit. Coopers are an Australian brewery and have a selection of kits. Their Stout and Australian Pale Ale are two staples of my homebrew cupboard. In addition to the kit itself I need two other things for the recipe: -Brewing Sugar. (I could use normal sugar, but for reasons I'll go into in a future post brewing sugar is better.) -Dried Malt Extract (also known as DME). This is also additional and replaces some sugar 1:1.

Beer Kits, Sugar, DME

There are some bits of kit I'll also need: -a fermenting bucket. This is a 40 pint white bucket that the beer is put in to, er, ferment. -a kettle. -a spoon. I have a 'brewing spoon' but a wooden spoon will do. -access to clean water. You probably have this. -a Campden tablet. Again you don't need this, it's used for neutralizing the taste of chlorine in tap water. -Hydrometer and testing flask. Only needed if you want to know how alcoholic your beer is.
-Some sort of sterilizer. A good cheap one is called VWP. There are better ones, but VWP is a good start.

So, the first and most important thing is to clean and sanitize everything that will come into contact with the beer. It's also good to clean everything in the surrounding area. At some point you'll need to put your nice clean and sanitized spoon down, it's good to have a clean place to put it.
Now is probably a good time to discuss the difference between 'clean' and 'sanitized'. Clean means it looks clean. Sanitized means you've killed all the bacteria. When I'm brewing I clean with water and a sponge. I then sanitize with Star San, which is a 'no-rinse' acid cleaner. I just spray it on the item to be sanitized and leave it. It is the single best product I use for Homebrewing and I'll write a post about it in the future.

Cleaning

At this point I stick the kettle on. I need about 2 - 3 liters of boiling water. Then I pour the beer kit, 500g of Sugar and 500g of DME into the fermenting bucket.

Sugar, DME and Beer Kit

Once the beer kit is mostly poured into the bucket (it's pretty gloopy) I pour the kettle into the can. This dissolves the last of the extract.

Delicious Malty Drink

..and pour that into the bucket (I do this twice, wearing oven gloves as the tin gets hot!)

Bucket full of goo.

Then I stir. I stir a lot. DME takes some effort to dissolve. Stir, Stir, Stir. About 5 minutes of stiring. Once my arm is tired I top the bucket up to about 20 litres using cold water (beer kits advised topping up to 23 litres, but brewing short makes a stronger beer). Then I add a campden tablet.

Once it's topped up I take a sample for measuring the alcoholic content (ABV).

About 1.044 OG

And then sprinkle yeast over the top...

Finally, put the lid on and hide it in a cupboard for a couple of weeks...

It lives here to ferment. After a day or so it will kick off into really vigorous fermentation, and then settle down. I usually leave it for 14 days but anywhere between 7 and 14 days is good. Once it's fermented it will be bottled or kegged. So come back soon for a breakdown of the next bit of the process.