HopDog

Brewing is easy. If you can make mac and cheese from a box without help, you can make beer. 

The 4 Basic Steps:

1. Prepare
2. Brew
3. Ferment
4. Bottle

Step 1: Prepare

1. Gather your brewing equipment. You’ll need:

• Kettle 
• Fermenter + Air Lock
• Funnel (optional)
• Sanitizer
• Auto-Siphon
• Stir Spoon
• Recipe Kit (or individual ingredients)

If gathering all of that sounds like too much work, simply choose a beer making kit that has everything you need to brew, all in one box.

2. Sanitize, Sanitize, Sanitize. Your success will rely on how clean your equipment is. Anything that comes in contact with your beer after the boil process should be sanitized. PBW and Star San are great santizers.

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Step 2: Brew

1. Steep Grains. Fill your 5-gallon brew kettle with 2.5 gallons of water. As you heat your water, steep your grains for 20 minutes, or until your water reaches 170 degrees.  When you remove your grains, let the water drip out of the grain bag and into the kettle.  Don’t squeeze your grain bag as you don’t want to extract tannins, which may give your beer unwanted flavors.

2. Bring kettle to a boil, remove from heat, and add malt extracts. Be careful not to boil over. Hops are added at various intervals. Refer to your exact recipe as to when you need to add hops to your boil.

3. You now have wort – sugar water. Cool your wort by bringing the temperature down as quickly as possible. This can be done one of two ways: 

• Set your pot in a sink filled with ice water.
• Use a wort chiller: Insert chiller into your wort. Run cold water from your tap through the chiller and out to the sink.  A wort chiller is the most effective way, but either will get you the desired results.

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Step 3: Ferment

Don’t forget to sanitize all your supplies! Then…

1. Pour cooled wort into fermenter. Some pots even have a valve for easy transportation from your kettle to your fermenter.

2. Add water to bring the level to 5 gallons.

3. Aerate wort by splashing it around in its container. Yeast need oxygen, and splashing your wort will help.

4. Add yeast. Dry yeast is the easiest, as you don’t have to prepare it beforehand. Sanitize the yeast pack + scissors, cut the corner off the yeast pack, and pour the yeast into the fermenter.

5. Seal your fermenter, add an air lock, and store in a dark, cool place.  Ales should stay at 68 degrees to ferment properly.

Everything you need to ferment:

Siphonless Big Mouth Bubbler

Fermentation Kit with ThermoStar®

Bubbler Airlock

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Step 4: Bottle

After fermentation is complete, typically within two weeks, it’s time to bottle your beer.

1. Cleanse everything: bottles, bottle filler, bottle caps, bottling bucket, and any transfer hoses used. Use a bottle brush on your bottles. 

3. Boil your priming sugar in 16 oz of water. After it cools, add it directly to the bottling bucket.

4. Transfer your beer. Siphon the beer out of your fermenter and into your bottling bucket. Leave as much sediment in the fermenter as possible.

5. Fill the bottles. Attach bottle filler to hose, and hose to bottling bucket spigot. Open the bottling bucket spigot and push the bottle filler to the bottom of the bottle.

NOTE: Fill each bottle right to the top. When you remove the bottle filler, it will leave the perfect amount of space at the top of the bottle.

6. Cap the bottles with caps and a capper.

7. Store the bottles at room temperature for roughly two weeks. This gives your beer time to carbonate.

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The Final Step: Enjoy!

You did it. You made beer. All that’s left to do is..

1. Refrigerate.

2. Enjoy.

The most effective method to Brew

Disinfect

It has been said that 75% of blending is great sanitation. To begin with, clean all gear with warm, gently foamy water. Wash well to evacuate cleanser buildup. At that point clean utilizing family unit fade at an amount of 1 tablespoon/gallon of water. Or on the other hand you can buy a no-wash corrosive sanitizer, for example, StarSan, which is compelling and leaves no lingering flavor.

Mix

Pour 10 liters of crisp, cold water into the 10 gallon plastic bucket (carboy). In the event that the bucket is new, wash it out first with a blend of water and preparing soft drink to evacuate the plastic smell.

In your biggest pot, heat seven liters of water to the point of boiling.

Include one container of malt separate. Mix and cook revealed for 20 minutes.

Add the sugar and mix to break down.

When the sugar is broken up, empty substance into the carboy. Pour, or ‘sprinkle’, the substance rapidly, which adds air to the blend. The more air the yeast gets at first, the better. It enables them to quickly develop and get things moving.

Top up with packaged drinking water or faucet water until temperature is nonpartisan. (In the case of utilizing faucet water, it is prescribed to bubble first to eliminate microbes.) Test utilizing a perfect, cleaned thermometer. The carboy will presently be somewhat more than half full.

Sprinkle in the yeast and mix well. Spread with top. (Set top on freely; whenever topped too firmly, a carboy can detonate from the carbon dioxide gas that is delivered.)

Keep secured and stay away from superfluous opening. The lager will be prepared to bottle in 6-10 days, contingent upon encompassing temperature of the room and measure of sugar utilized in the blending. Room temperature ought to be 68-75 Fahrenheit (20-24 Celsius) at the most noteworthy; 61-68 Fahrenheit (16-20 Celsius) is better however it will take the brew a day or two longer to age.

Test for preparation with a hydrometer. Set hydrometer into the brew and turn it once to discharge bubbles, which can stick to it and give a bogus perusing. The “prepared to bottle” perusing ought to be about 1.008 for dull brews and 1.010-1.015 for light lagers. In the event that you don’t have a hydrometer, you can pass judgment on availability by tasting an example: it ought not be sweet tasting. There ought to be practically no gurgling activity in the brew.

Container

Set the carboy on a tough table and the 12 two-liter bottles on the floor, with paper underneath to get dribbles or floods. Utilizing a pipe, put two level teaspoons of sugar in each container.

Siphon the brew into the jugs, making an effort not to upset the dregs on the base of the carboy. (One strategy is to tape a plastic straw nearby the base end of the siphon hose with 1″ anticipating past the end. The tip of the straw can contact the base of the carboy without the siphon drawing up dregs.) Tip the carboy as you close to the base.

It is imperative to not sprinkle or upset the lager an excess of while packaging as any oxygen acquainted can lead with oxidation and a “cardboard” taste.

As you fill the containers, keep the finish of the siphon tube close to the base of the jug to abstain from foaming. It is fundamental that the jugs are not totally filled: leave an airspace. Screw the tops on firmly. Reverse each jug and shake to break down sugar on the base. Set bottles in a warm territory for the initial scarcely any days, at that point store in a dim, cool spot. You can drink the brew inside a couple of long stretches of packaging, however it will improve with age.

Lager Enhancements

When you’ve made a couple of bunches of your own custom made lager, it’s amusing to explore different avenues regarding diverse ‘improvements’. While including your very own touch, be that as it may, alert is constantly a smart thought; attempt things in limited quantities so as not to try too hard.

Here are barely any proposals:

Bounces

Put entire bounces (dried) or jump chips into a cheesecloth sack and add to the cooking malt. A bunch is bounty. This will give an unmistakable bounce flavor to the lager and will help save the last item. Actually lager made without jumps is known as beer.

Molasses

Include a cup or two of molasses to the malt while it’s cooking. Cut back a piece on the sugar. This will give a darker, all the more full-bodied taste to the lager. Blackstrap molasses is darker and more extravagant; extravagant molasses is lighter.

Licorice

Toss a couple of sticks of licorice into the malt while it’s cooking. Leave in for 5 – 10 minutes, at that point evacuate any unmelted pieces before emptying the blend into the carboy.

Herb Teas

Have a go at including 3 or 4 teabags of Celestial Seasonings “Bengal Spice” tea, or “Apple Cinnamon Spice” tea. Add to the cooking malt and expel following 10 minutes. This will add a touch of zest to the flavor of the brew, a fascinating flavor.

Herbs

When not utilizing jumps, numerous individuals utilize a mix of herbs to adjust the sweetness of the malt (a readiness known as ‘gruit’). Normal herbs incorporate sweet storm, yarrow, Labrador tea, juniper, annoy, mugwort, aniseed, or caraway. These arrangements are generally included during cooking and aging.

Appreciate!

Pour your brew cautiously to abstain from upsetting the silt. Re-topped, mostly full containers will hold their “bubble” for as long as about fourteen days, so don’t feel you need to discharge the jug (except if you’re searching for a reason!). Following two weeks, incomplete containers ought to be discharged.

You may find that bunches of custom made lager can fluctuate in quality. Darker lagers will work best with this formula for the most reliable outcomes. On the off chance that your lager is somewhat short on “bubble” or falls somewhat shy of your desires, have a go at blending it 50/50 with business brew.

On the off chance that the unfilled jugs are flushed out promptly, washing them later will be simple. Just wash with warm, gently lathery water. Wash well to expel cleanser buildup. A gentle blanch arrangement can likewise be utilized to clean the jugs.

Keep in mind, your brew will keep on improving for quite a long time. It’s a smart thought to begin a subsequent cluster immediately so you can stretch all around ok beyond to appreciate completely developed lager.

Miniaturized scale Brewery Homebrew Kits

Miniaturized scale distillery packs are currently accessible from malt extricate providers to make it simpler for individuals to begin with home beermaking. These packs accompany all that you have to mix your very own lager. For more data, converse with your neighborhood provider to discover the pack that is directly for you.

While most of us love beer, few of us know exactly how it’s made. Global brewing company SABMiller released a super informative animated video that breaks down the brewing process into its most basic components.

The company says it has released the three-and-a-half minute motion graphic video with the goal of explaining a “technically complex process correctly, simply, and without fuss.” We think they did a pretty damn good job.

To make it even easier for you, we’ve put together a series of GIFs (created from the video) that highlight the main steps of the brewing process.

Step 1: Milling the grain

Beginning In the brew house, different types of malt are crushed together to break up the grain kernels in order to extract fermentable sugars to produce a milled product called grist.

Step 2: Mash Conversion

The grist is then transferred into a mash tun, where it is mixed with heated water in a process called mash conversion. The conversion process uses natural enzymes in the malt to break the malt’s starch down into sugars.

Step 3: Lautering

The mash is then pumped into the lauter tun, where a sweet liquid (known as wort) is separated from the grain husks.

Step 4: The boil

The wort is then collected in a vessel called a kettle, where it is brought to a controlled boil before the hops are added.

Step 5: Wort separation and cooling

After boiling, the wort is transferred into a whirlpool for the wort separation stage. During this stage, any malt or hop particles are removed to leave a liquid that is ready to be cooled and fermented.

Step 6: Fermentation

To start the fermentation, yeast is added during the filling of the vessel. Yeast converts the sugary wort into beer by producing alcohol, a wide range of flavors, and carbon dioxide (used later in the process to give the beer its sparkle).

Step 7: Maturation

After fermentation, the young “green” beer needs to be matured in order to allow both a full development of flavors and a smooth finish.

Step 8: Filtration, carbonation, and cellaring

After reaching its full potential, the beer is filtered, carbonated, and transferred to the bright beer tank, where it goes through a cellaring process that takes 3-4 weeks to complete. Once completed, the beer is ready to be packaged (and that’s a whole other fascinating process explained in the video).

Watch the SBAMiller video below if you’d like to see the process in full, narrated by a British man with an incredibly soothing accent.