Beginning a Homebrew

[rbeau30]

If you are pretty sure that you are going to make this a hobby, I would probably start with a little bit of extract brewing to get most of the process down. (you can also start with smaller batches).

Then to prevent you from wasting any money on buying stuff you won't use when you are really into it, buy used stuff. Because Now that I am to the point of all grain, and not bottle-conditioning, I don't ever bottle anymore (I fill up growlers for folks) and I don't brew with extracts anymore.

You are going to need a lot of things:

Cleanliness/sanitation is the key in getting a good product (unless you like sours LOL). I use star-san for santitizing.
Space to do the whole thing. (Mashing, Lautering, boiling, chilling, Primary fermentation (cool dark place), Secondary (transferring 5 gallons of wort and young beer around). Bottling/Conditioning. Then drinking!


With extract brewing you basically need the less amount of stuff. You will typically get an ingredient kit with all the extract and specialty grains yeast and hops. All pre-measured.

Then you really just need a kettle or large pot if you are doing it in small (<5 gallon ) batches.
A way of cooling the wort (wort chiller or floating the pot in a larger vessel of ice) to get it to the temp where you don't kill the yeast.
a Primary fermenter (usually a plastic bucket with an airlock on top of the lid).
Secondary fermenter (carboy with airlock on top) tubes to siphon the wort or beer from one to the other.
Bottles (you can reuse the non-twist topped bottles from beer you drink) clean and sanitized.
Bottling bucket to fill bottles.
Crown caps and bottle capper.


Once you get to the point where you want to make 5 gallons of it at a time, and get into more involved recipes.

You will need a mash tun (I use a round 10 gallon drink cooler converted into a mash tun.) to develop and extract the sugars from your grains.
Large enough kettle to boil 5 gallons of wort
Wort chiller to quickly cool 200 degree worth down to 70
Fermenter vessel (hopefully you bought a 6 gallon one from above)
Carboy for secondary fermentation (some people use these for primary some don't even use a secondary fermenter)
5 gallon corny (old soft drink ) kegs (because bottling is not lame) and CO2 tank and tubes for carbonating a place to chill your corny kegs


One bad thing about jumping right into the whole thing is the possibility of brewing something undrinkable (through either a miscalculation in grains like when I put too much peated grain into a scotch ale I was trying to doctor up or through poor sanitation). When you get into all-grain brewing you have many many variables, and if you have not got a system down many things can go wrong and loosing a batch of beer can get expensive. A 5 gallo batch of my dark milk stout or dark IPA can get upwards of 120 -150 dollars. I have a Cream ale that I can get as cheap as 30 dollars for a 5 gallon batch.