HOMEBREW!
If you are not of legal drinking age in your country of residence then you are not allowed to visit this site. You are trespassing and are not allowed to read even one word after this paragraph. Not one word you understand? I said, not one word... Now if you're too darned young to read this, go to your room and have a 10 minute time-out.
G'wan now... Scoot! I'm watching you! 
:)
Now back to the show:
Homebrew. Sounds great, eh? There's something wonderful about making homebrew in the sanctity of your home and not having to pay someone to make it for you, or even worse, have the government come knocking on your door trying to arrest or extort a tax from you because you made beer for yourself & your friends. Once prohibition was lifted, winemaking up to 200 gallons/year was made legal for private consumption. Due to lobbying by special interest groups back then, beer remained illegal to make except by commercial breweries.
Thanks to President Jimmy Carter rescinding that legislation in the early 70's, home brewing beer up to 200 gallons/year by an individual & 400 gallons/year per household is now legit in the USA.
I have been home brewing since 1976.
Before you start reading this home brewing page I need to explain something important: If you think this brewing page will tell you everything you need to know about brewing you're right in a sense. Everything that's offered in here is important and you really are better off knowing it if you want to brew nice beers. I've sort of scratched the tip of iceberg here though & there's so much more you really should know. Most everyone reading this already knows about brewing to some degree & some visitors are looking to compare what they know to that which I have written. That makes me very happy because it's by doing that very thing that I have learned so much about home brewing myself. There will be some people coming here who really have no idea about home brewing and are searching for how to start and there will also be those who have started brewing but realized they need to know more. It's these last two groups I'm especially hoping that will find the information & links provided will get them on the road to the answers they're looking for.
It's a pretty amazing series of events that allow this to happen. The short story goes like this: Grain has starch within it and enzymes break the starch into sugars. Yeast eats sugar and gives off alcohol and carbon dioxide as a by-product of its respiration. That's it! Now you know all there is that needs to be known to join in the hobby & make your own beer!
OK, there are details that explain this a bit better, so if you want I'll fill in some of the blanks...
Most grains are pretty much composed of only starch and have a fibrous husk surrounding the starch; there are some grains like wheat which have no husk. Yeast can not eat starch because the molecule of starch is too big for it to chew into, rather like one trying to eat a watermelon with one bite. Yeast can eat sugar but starch is made up of sugar molecules connected end to end making a long, necklace-like chain. These chains join together like branches on a bush and become a very large molecule. Enzymes (starch-loving enzymes are called Amylase) are small proteins that move along these necklaces of connected sugars and do only one thing: run along the starch molecule cutting it into regular sized smaller sections of five sugars in a row. Some enzymes break the necklaces where they join to other necklaces and still other amylase enzymes run along these now separated smaller chains of sugars and liberate each sugar resulting in single sugars. It is this single sugar that the yeast loves to eat. Some sugars are left in groups of 2 and some in groups of 3 but it's the single sugar that makes yeast happy & happy yeast makes home brewers happy as you'll read more about below.
For example; if you put a piece of bread in your mouth and don't swallow it, soon you will taste sweetness. That is because the amylase enzymes in your mouth's moisture (saliva) have converted the starch in the bread to sugar!
When a grain comes into contact with water and in just the right environment it will start to grow & this is called germination. Once germination starts enzymes are created and this is the source of those enzymes we use in home brewing. Following germination the grain is immediately dried and sold to those who make beer and the person who does this is called a Malter or maltster. Depending on certain characteristics desired of the grain, different types of malting are performed by the maltster, giving the brewer more brewing options. These varieties of malted grain help create different colors, flavors, mouth-feel and fermentability, to name a few different uses. One other thing about enzymes is they only do their job in the presence of water and at very specific temperatures. Keeping a dry grain from water will cause it to never have its starches converted to sugar.
Depending on the style and how you make your beer, there will be varying amounts of unfermented sugars left behind after mashing. These unfermented sugars do not taste sweet but rather add to the thickness & "mouth-feel" of the beer. The brewer adds the malted grain with water in a kettle (called a mash-Tun), keeping the temperature constant and specific to direct the actions of the enzymes. This is called mashing. If the temperature is too high or low, you will not get the desired results and if the temperature is too high too soon you may even ruin the enzymes themselves, for they are very fragile little critters and have no sense of humor. You know you have released all the the sugars by putting a drop of iodine in a sample of mash. If the drop turns blue, there is starch present & you must continue the mashing process until finally when you put iodine in a sample and it remains red. This indicates the final conversion of starch to sugar.
Now the sugar water called "sweet Liquor" is boiled in the "boil kettle" and hops are added at this time. Hops grow on vines and add to the taste and aroma of beer. Hops added in the beginning of the boil lose all their aroma but add to the hoppy flavor. This is called "bittering." Bitter in homebrew terms does not mean "bitter like a grapefruit" but instead refers to an olde English term whereby bitter was another name for beer. Hops added in the middle of the boil add some aroma and some bittering. Hops added at the end are strictly for aroma. Depending on your chosen style of beer, you will plan for the proper amount of fermented and yes, unfermented sugars along with the right amount of bittering & hop aroma that you will get in the finished result.
Did I mention the minerals in the water are important? You really need to find out from your water supplier what your mineral content is because that is important if you wish to match a style of beer to what you are creating. The minerals get added during mashing. If you have too much of one variety of mineral you can add distilled water to get the excess minerals to match the expected number and then add more of what's deficient to make all the minerals proper for that style. Most people only add what is missing and accept the excesses of one mineral or the other though. pH (acid/base ratio) is very important because the enzymes are not only affected by temperature but by the pH level as well. Correcting the pH is done early in mashing and is easy to do using pH test strips & adding the proper acid/base to the water as needed to make the test strip happy for the style of beer you want to make. Some people use pH meters instead of strips. Both work fine. The meter satiates the geek in us...
The boiled sugar water/hop mixture (called sweet liquor even though there's no alcohol in it at all) now has to be cooled immediately so no bacteria can get in & spoil the party. To do this you use something called a "wort chiller". This is a device which comes into contact with the hot liquid and cools the boiling wort so when it exits the "chiller" it's cooled enough to add actively fermenting yeast. There are many kinds of wort chillers but they all have the same goal which is to drop the wort temperature enough that you can add yeast to the mash that's been transferred to your fermenter. You want to add large amounts of already active yeast so the yeast can overwhelm any bacteria your horrific sanitizing of the fermenter & siphon tubing might have left behind. This hoppy mash usually has no problems during fermentation because of its actively fermenting high yeast content. Interestingly, a high yeast content will overwhelm & kill off lesser colonies of bacteria. Conversely, an established bacteria colony will overwhelm and kill your desired yeast colony which will ruin your beer. Anything lesser than a clean fermentation will result in a ruined batch of beer so adequate sanitation is paramount.
Do it right & use the right sanitizing technique & ingredients & you'll be fine with 99.9% of your batches of beer. Everyone screws up once in awhile but once you accept the need for & learn the drill, it's really simple & fast to sanitize properly.
What you have just read is a brief synopsis of brewing. To read a little more I have made a web page about fermentation and the equipment I use. Also, I have created a separate web page demonstrating my brewery. The links are immediately below. You're highly encouraged to check them out. I did not include them on this page because it would take too long for people with slower connections to get it all at once. I put a fair amount of time into these pages to try & give you as clear an idea as I can as to how to brew and some of the avenues you can take as well. Every brewery is different and mine is more elaborate than some and some people with lesser equipment are making better beer than I do.
Lastly, there is much more information to read which is found below these links to my web pages. Please don't miss on seeing & reading this nifty stuff below by clicking, surfing away & not coming back here to see the rest.
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What I use to brew is called a RIMS brewery. RIMS
Commercial suppliers Of Homebrew Related EquipmentBeer Gear: Brew
source: Five
Star Chemicals How to Brew booklet: How to Brew your own magazine: More Beer:
Northern Brewer:
Promash: *****This has an absolutely Five Star rating out of five *****.
St Pats: A remarkably well stocked supply house for homebrew equipment. They have about anything you need. They are phasing out some product lines so do be sure to check them out ASAP.
Toledo Metal Spinning Company: They make Stainless Steel conical hoppers and matching lids of many shapes and sizes from .1 to 51 gallons. These hoppers are perfect for people who want to harvest yeast and want to ferment in the same way the commercial breweries ferment. ( When used in brewing the name gets changed to "Conical Fermenter" A quick search of this term on Google will show you many examples of Conical fermenters.) If you place a ball valve at the apex of the bottom and place this hopper on a rack, the yeast falls to the bottom. This way the Trub and yeast can be easily extracted and the yeast recovered to use in the next brewing. Once the yeast is salvaged, what remains is beer and this can be released by the ball valve at the bottom. Toledo soon will be offering a Conical fermenter which is in it's final design stages as of November 2003. I firmly believe it will be something better than what's currently available to home brewers and will be a new benchmark for the competition. I'll put a photo of it up when it's released to the public. For the many of us who prefer to build their own equipment and
wish to have the ultimate fermenter, checking with the Toledo Metal
Spinning Company: will be an excellent place to start.
Just a few of the Commercial Breweries I've visited & enjoyed
Back Road
Brewery:
Cottrells Brewery:
Estes Park Brewery:
Fullers Brewery:
Laphroaig: Three Floyds:
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