Leaving
commercial beers aside, more and more beer drinkers are experimenting with brewing at
home in our days, quite often by personal impulsion and almost always with successful
results.
Beer production even in our home is a process that its difficulty is eligible. By this we want to say there are means which can make this venture to be particularly easy even for the most novice. First of all we need to see what equipment the amateur brewer will need, which is particularly simple with many items you may have in your kitchen.
Producing homemade beer, what you actually need is a food container that
fits to the amount of beer you want to brew. Though you can buy the equipment partially by purchasing
containers, tubes, densitometer and thermometer from your local tool shop, it
is much easier to buy a ready-made brewing kit. The cost ranges from $50 to $80
and usually includes a plastic bucket with a faucet, a plastic fermentation
bucket with faucet and thermometer, an
air trap, a bottle filler, a plastic mixer, a bottle dispenser, a disinfectant
and a cleaning brush, a densitometer, and a measuring cylinder. Four basic ingredients are necessary for beer production:
- Water: It is about 95% of beer’s composition, and therefore affects its quality.
- Malt: Barley malt is the most common in brewing, but in certain types of beer, wheat malt and other cereals are used.
- Hops: Hops are grown in cold climates and their flower is used in brewing to give bitterness, flavor and aroma to beer, but also as a natural preservative due to its antibiotic properties.
- Yeast: It is the microorganism responsible for the alcoholic fermentation of beer. It consumes the sugars of the wort and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide, thus converting the wort to beer.
The brewing process is very simple and fast. In brief, we place the malt and hops in the fermentation bucket, add the corresponding boiled water, and pour the yeast. After a few hours fermentation will begin, which will last for 5-10 days. Then we proceed to bottling and leave our beer at room temperature for about one month to mature. That's it! Our beer is ready and it will cost us up to $0.40 for each bottle of 500 ml.
For ready-made malt kits the price starts at $15 (to produce 20-23 lt of beer),
while for half a kilo of yeast and hops we need about $3. It goes without
saying that we buy the equipment only once for the first brewing and the next
brewings are only refilled with the desired materials as malts, hops and yeast.