Now that you know what equipment you need in order to brew great beer at home, we’ll be taking a look at what ingredients are required. At its most basic, beer is comprised of 4 ingredients; water, malted barley, hops, & yeast. As I am focusing on first-time homebrewers, and as I suggested in part 1 of this blog series, I HIGHLY recommend starting with an extract-based brew for your first attempt. It is far simpler, and much less costly for someone who is trying to brew their first batch of beer. We’ll be proceeding under the assumption that you are doing an extract brew, but we will talk about all-grain brewing in a later blog about homebrewing.
There are a few ways to go about getting the ingredients you need for your first batch, and the specific ingredients needed obviously vary based on the style of beer that you intend to brew, but the general ingredients and suggestions I’ll be making apply to all beer styles. The simplest, and most cost-effective means of brewing your first batch of beer is to get a pre-made homebrew kit for the specific style that you want to brew. As with the homebrewing equipment itself, you can readily, and easily find beer recipe kits online for most styles you may want to try to brew. I recommend going this route for your first time, as it’s super simple, but if you want to piece together the ingredients yourself, we will cover them all, so you can certainly choose that path as well. As for ready-to-go beer recipe kits, you can get them on Amazon, or on any number of other homebrewing websites. You can usually get kits from the same store that has the equipment you bought. Several easy-to-find brands are Mr. Beer, Brewers Best, & Northern Brewers. The recipe kits are often referred to as brew-in-a-box kits, as they come in a box, and have all of the ingredients you need to make that specific style. All 3 of those brands sell kits on Amazon, and you can also go to their websites, or to a homebrew supply website as well. If you live in a larger metro area, chances are likely that you have at least 1 local homebrew supply shop, and the vast majority of those sell beer recipe kits.
For an extract-based brew day, you will need both liquid and dry malt extract. The specific malts used are based on the beer style you’re brewing. Pre-made kits have these selected for you so that your first batch tastes and smells as the style should. The malt extract is the primary source of color, malt flavor, and sugars in your beer. Each beer style has different types of malt required, so each kit will contain different volumes and types of both LME (liquid malt extract) & DME (dry malt extract). One pro-tip for the LME is to run it under hot water for 5 -10 minutes before you need to add it to the water during the brew phase, as it is very viscous, and it pours much more easily when heated up. Don’t microwave it or anything like that, just run the container itself under hot water, or fill a bucket with hot water and put the container in it. By hot water, I mean tap hot, not boiling. In addition to LME & DME, most ready-made beer kits will also have some dry grains of some sort and a muslin bag (kind of a cheesecloth like material). Most recipe kits will have you start by steeping the grains in the muslin bag first before any of the LME & DME is added to the recipe. If your kit doesn’t have any dry grains and a muslin bag, don’t worry, they don’t all have them, but it is more common than not.
The next major ingredient you’ll need/have in your kit are your hops. Make sure to read the instructions before starting the brewing process, as you want to have a clear understanding of the order of operations before you begin. This is particularly important when speaking of hops, as depending upon the beer style, all hops may be added to the boil at the same time, or they could be staged at various points of the boil. The staging is done to control the temperature and volume of hops added for alpha acid extraction (primarily) into the beer. Depending on your beer style, you may also have additional hops that are supposed to be added during the secondary fermentation phase, or for dry hopping. Dry hopping is a bit of a misnomer, as the hops are very much wet, they just are added after the beer has been brewed and fermented with yeast. Dry hopping is done during the secondary fermentation phase, after the beer is transferred from the primary fermenter (bucket, carboy, etc.) and into the secondary vessel. After the beer is transferred, the additional hops are added into that beer while it ferments and clarifies during the secondary phase. This phase doesn’t draw additional alpha acids into the beer, but adds additional layers of hop flavor, and aroma. Dry hopping is most often seen in IPAs as a way to impart additional aromas onto the beer.
The third ingredient involved in making your beer is arguably the most important, as without it, beer wouldn’t be beer, it would just be wort. We are referring to yeast of course, and specifically, ale yeast. How do I know that your first beer is an ale and not a lager? Ale is the oldest type of beer, and by a vast margin the simplest to brew, and the cheapest to brew. Lagers require expensive, more specialist equipment to brew, and are really not beginner-friendly, so most beer-in-a-box kits will be for some form of an ale style beer. Ale yeast has a much larger range of temperatures at which it functions and ferments your wort into beer, and as such, it is much more suitable to the vast majority of climates in the average home. The main key is to not leave your fermenter near a heat source. As hardy as ale yeast is, it still needs to be kept out of direct sunlight, away from warm appliances, etc. I recommend putting your fermenter in a dark closet away from light and heat sources. Ale yeast can impart a very large range of flavors into your beer, including complex esters and phenols that can produce a range of fruity characteristics in the beer’s flavor profile. Your specific beer kit may prompt you to pitch the dry yeast right on top of your beer to start fermenting, or it may have you dissolve the yeast in water, and pitch that yeast solution into your beer. Both methods achieve the same goal, and you should follow whatever instructions your kit calls for.
Lastly, we arrive at the final ingredient, and that which makes up the bulk of your beer recipe; water. The importance of water is often overlooked by a homebrewer, particularly those brewing their first batch at home. The type of water used can have a dramatic impact on the final product, and as such, I recommend steering clear of tap water. Using a high quality spring water or drinking water (bottled water) is the best practice for homebrewing. You will want to ensure that you have more than enough required for your batch of beer. If you’re brewing a standard 5 gallon batch, I’d make sure to have at least 7 gallons on-hand for brew day, as the volume will decrease during the boil due to evaporation, and you will be adding water back to the wort before you pitch your yeast. In addition to liquid water for the actual beer recipe, you’re also going to need ice, and a lot of it. If you have an ice-maker in your fridge, that’s great, but don’t expect that to be anywhere near enough for the brewing process. On my brew days (for 5 gallon batches) I completely use all of my ice maker’s ice as well as at minimum 4-6 additional bags of ice. Ice is needed to quickly cool the beer down to the needed temperature after the boil, and before you pitch the yeast. You can thrown your brew kettle into a bathtub filled with cold water and ice, or into your sink, whatever works for you, but it needs to be ice-cold to quickly drop the temperature. Warm temperatures are a bacteria breeding ground, and you don’t want skunky beer, so the quicker this is done, the better.
That is the basic ingredients needed for an extract-based brew day. If you buy a beer-in-a-box kit, it will come with everything you need except for water and ice. An important ingredient note is that if you don’t get a brew-in-a-box kit, you will also need priming sugar (this is for bottling your beer). Check that your kit comes with priming sugar, and if you buy ingredients piecemeal, be sure to add priming sugar to your ingredients list. In the next homebrewing blog we’ll be talking about the actual process of brewing your beer from step-to-step, and we’ll also give you some pointers and things learned from trial and error after many successful batches brewed. Until then, grab a beer from the fridge, and start planning what you want to brew on brew day. Cheers!
The Craft Beer Corner 