How To Brew Your Own Beer With Malt Extract

Brewing your first beer is quite simple. As long as you brew with clean and sanitized equipment, your beer will be just fine. Below you will find some simple instructions with pictures to help you out for your first time.

When you brew a simple extract batch, if it is your first time it is a good idea to use an ingredient kit, or at least use a recipe that has already been tested by someone else. The most trusted sources to find good recipes is either in a book or a magazine, but you can find many recipes online or from friends who brew. The Internet is a great source, but you need to really look close at some recipes that others have posted to make sure they are worth brewing.

The beer in this example is a Honey Brown Ale. It is a simple recipe with only 1 hop addition. Some recipes have several hop additions at different times, so pay attention to how many hop additions the recipe calls for and the weight (in ounces) of hops to add at those times.

Equipment List(Most of which comes included in a basic brewing equipment kit):

1- 5 gallon (20 quart) stainless steel or aluminum pot
1- Auto siphon and Hose or brewing funnel with strainer
1- 5+ gallon glass carboy or 6.5 gallon brewing bucket with grommet in the lid.
1- Brewing Thermometer (A candy Thermometer will work in a pinch)
1- Large Stainless Steel Spoon, or high temp brewing spoon (Do not use a wooden Spoon)
1- Bucket, Bin, Or Large container for Sanitizing equipment.
1- Hydrometer and Testing Cylinder.
1- Steeping bag for the grains

Ingredient List (in case you want to brew this beer):

3.3lbs (2 jars) of Breiss Golden Light Liquid Extract (Dry extract is also available)
1oz Glacier Hops (7.4AA)
1/4lb each of the following grains to steep: Chocolate, Crystal 120, Dingmanns Biscuit malt, Breiss Special Roast.
1lb Clover Honey
1 Package of Nottingham Yeast
1 Whirlfloc Tablet (Optional)

Step 1: Add your specialty grains to your grain bag and tie it off. Then add 1 gallon of water to your brewing pot and heat to a temperature between 145 and 155 degrees.

Step 2: Once the water is between 145 and 155 degrees turn off the heat and add your grains in the steeping bag to the water, then let them steep for 1/2 hour.

Step 3: Once the grains have steeped for a half hour, remove the grains in the bag and let them drain, then add 2 3/4 gallons of water to your brew pot (you should have a quite a bit of space between your water and the top of the pot, that is OK). Bring that water to a boil.

Step 4:Once the water comes to a boil remove from the heat and add your 2 cans of malt extract (if you soak the cans in warm water prior to adding, they will pour quite easily. I also remove the labels from the cans.). Stir while you add the extract to dissolve in the water. You should have about 5 inches or so to the top of your pot once you are done. This will allow room for the foam to build so you have a chance to avoid a boil over on your stove.

Step 5: Return to heat and bring to a boil. Remember to continue to stir every few minutes during the entire boil to avoid burning the wort (unfermented beer) on the bottom of the pot.

Step 6: Once the beer returns to a boil, add your hops. Do this only if your beer has hop additions with 60 minutes left in the boil. Your recipe will usually give a time, and that time is normally the time "In Boil" so if there is a 60, it means add them with 60 minutes left in the boil. If there is a 30 you add them with 30 minutes left out of a 60 minute boil, and 5 means with 5 minutes left into he boil. You usually boil extract beers for only 60 minutes. Some All Grain beers have a 90 minute boil.

CAUTION: This is the point where the boil over is most likely to happen. After you add the first charge of hops, keep a close eye on the beer. Once the foam forms, blow on it or spray it down with clean water from a spray bottle. If the foam continues to build and gets close to the top, remove the pot from the heat until the foam goes down. Once the foam works itself down, the chances of a boil over go down, but you still need to keep an eye on it.

Step 7: Make sure your beer is at a rolling boil, a soft boil will not drive off undesirable aromas from your beer. A rolling boil will look like this, after the foam subsides.

Then just continue to follow your recipe adding hops or other additives as required by your recipe. In this case I am adding 1 whirlfloc tablet with 15 minutes left in the boil. Instead of Whirlfloc you can add Irish Moss (both of which you can buy at the homebrew store), these items help clarify the beer by attracting proteins to help them drop out of the beer. I then add the 1 pound of honey when I turn off the heat. Once the beer is done boiling, if you have a 5 gallon pot, you can add the cold water to the pot to fill the pot close to the top. This will help cool the wort and the high temps of the wort will help kill any small amount of bacteria that may be in the water. You may also boil and cool water on the side to add to the carboy if you don't want to use the pot method.

Step 8: Now you have to cool your wort as fast as possible. At this point you have 2 choices. You can purchase or build an Immersion Chiller, or you can place your beer in an ice bath in the sink. An immersion chiller will be placed into your pot with 15 minutes left in the boil to help sanitize it. Then when you turn the heat off, you attach one end to a cold water outlet and run cold water through the chiller to cool the wort. An ice bath just cools the wort from the outside by filling the sink with cold water and ice from the outside of the pot. Both methods work well for extract batch's where you don't boil all 5 gallons. If you are going to do a full boil or All Grain beers, you will need an Immersion Chiller. Below from Left to Right is a Home Made Immersion Chiller, A manufactured Immersion Chiller, and what an ice bath would look like.

Step 9: During the cooling phase you want to clean and sanitize all your equipment. A no rinse sanitizer like Star-San, Iodopher, or One-Step work best because you are not risking adding bacteria that may be in your pipes or water back to your sanitized vessels. In the examples below a carboy is filled with a Star-San solution then siphoned into another vessel for storage. Star-San foams and that is normal, plus it's OK to leave that foam in your beer. It is colorless and flavorless.

You should clean and sanitize everything that will come in contact with the cooled wort. This includes anything that may come in indirect contact as well, such as the scissors that will cut the package of yeast open.

Step 10: Now that the wort has cooled to between 70 degrees and 80 degrees, you can siphon it into your cleaned and sanitized carboy or plastic fermentation bucket. Pictured is a carboy, but the bucket with a lid works just as well. Below you see the wort being siphoned into the carboy, and some of the proteins falling out to the bottom already. The other view is inside the pot. If you don't have a siphon and hose, you can pour the wort into the carboy or bucket by filtering it through a brewing funnel that has a strainer attached.

There will be proteins and hops in the bottom of the pot when you are done. This just gets dumped out.

If you need to you can top up your carboy to the full 5 gallon mark.

During the siphoning process, you want to take a sample in the hydrometer cylinder and test the gravity, this final gravity will help you determine the strength of the beer. The second pic is a good one of proteins that settle out, and show how clear the beer can get once they do drop out.

Step 11: Here you can just add the yeast and close up the carboy with the stopper/bung and airlock, or if you have a Stainless Steel aeration stone, like the one below you can aerate the wort for a more health fermentation. This step is optional. You can also just shake the carboy and get some air mixed in to the wort as well, but this method takes a lot of time.

Here the wort is being aerated. One thing to notice is the white filter in the line in the picture below.. This is very important if you are going to aerate with an aquarium pump. This will prevent particles from entering the beer through the air line.

Now just let your beer ferment. After a couple of hours it should look like the picture below. That is the yeast you see there building themselves up and getting ready to feast on the sugars.

After a few more hours it will look like this....

This is all normal and a good sign that your beer is fermenting properly. If after24 hours it does not look like the picture above, or if you are using a bucket and cannot see the beer and the airlock is not bubbling, you should go pick up some more yeast and repitch the yeast.

Now, after 7 to 10 days you will be ready to bottle and consume your beer.

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