The Process (Brewing Your Own Beer)

This is the third time that I have brewed on my own, and I chose to do a Porter from a kit that I bought at Strange Brew.

To start, clean and sanitize all of your equipment.  Each pre-packaged recipe kit yields 5 gallons.  Once I have sanitized everything, I put 5 gallons of water in the stockpot and bring it out to the propane burner.

For most recipes, you start off putting all your crushed grain in a muslin bag (comes with kit), you heat the water to 160 degrees, and then steep the bag into the hot water.  Meanwhile, try to hold the temperature to 160 degrees for at least 10 minutes.

 Afterwards, throw the grains out and then add the malt.

 Once it dissolves, bring everything to a boil and add your hops.  In this recipe I chose the bittering hops boil for 30 minutes, the flavor hops boil for 20 minutes, and the aroma hops boil for almost 10 minutes (refer to times in recipe you have purchased).

Once all the boiling is done, shut the burner off, and prepare to cool down the beer (called the wort at this point in time).  For the cooling process I use two buckets, the auto-siphon, the plastic tubing, and the copper tubing.  Place one bucket of cool water at the highest level (such as on a table) with the auto-siphon, leave the stockpot on the burner with the beer and place the coiled copper tubing inside (to be at the middle level), and leave the empty bucket on the ground at the lowest level.  The auto-siphon should be connected to the copper tubing with a 5 foot piece of plastic tubing, then another 5 foot piece of plastic tubing is connected to the outlet side of the copper tubing, and drains into the empty bucket.  So by siphoning this cool water from the bucket on the table, through the copper tubing, you will in turn lower the temperature of the beer.  As water goes through the siphon and gets warmer, replace it with cooler water until you get the desired temperature of approximately 70-75 degrees Fahrenheit. *

Now you can drain the wort into the fermenter bucket, and then you add the yeast.

Usually you let it set for about 10 minutes and then you can put the lid on with the airlock and store it at room temperature.

After a few days, you'll see less activity (bubbling) in the airlock, and this is when you can siphon the beer from the first stage to the second stage of fermentation.  Depending on the recipe you chose, the fermenting stages could take longer (refer to recipe).  Ideally it will take about two weeks just to ferment.

Once fully fermented, siphon the beer from the fermenter to the bottling bucket where you will add carbonation.  All of the recipes I have done so far I have used priming sugar for this process (refer to recipe for mixing instructions).  Then you are ready to bottle!

*I have to thank my brother-in-law for showing me this cooling process and helping me get started on my way to home brewing.