Home Brewing: The Art of Making Your Own Beer

Drinking beer is very popular around the world. In Germany where the oldest and grandest beer festival is held in late September and the first week October, hundreds of home brewing enthusiasts bring their home brew beer into the city of Munich. Home brew beer competitions are one of the highlights of Octoberfest. For lots of people in Germany and the United Kingdom, the yearly home brew beer competition is part of a great tradition where the art of brewing beer at home is passed on from generation to generation.

The process when you home brew beer isn’t as difficult as you might think, but it does require some special ingredients and processes. The first step is to make the wort, which is the magic liquid that will eventually become your beer. Wort is made when you boil a large amount of water with a small amount of grains or malt that are combined in a mesh bag. This is just like making coffee or tea – you steep them in a filter or bag instead of adding them to the water. The grains you use are important when you home brew beer, because different types of grains will produce a different flavor or type of beer. You can find your grains or malt are easily available online or at your local home brewing retailer.

The next step when you home brew beer is to take out the grains and continue to boil this wort with more water added. Then you add some hops. Hops will add the flavor and aroma to your beer. When you add the hops to your home brew beer, you want to do it exactly according to what your recipe calls for. When you boil the hops too long, your beer will taste bitter, and if you boil too short a time, it will be too sweet.

When your wort has finished boiling and has cooled, you put this into a fermenting container. When you home brew beer, you will need two fermenting containers because later you will transfer this liquid from one container to the other. You will also add a beer yeast to this mixture; the yeast will react to the sugars you produced when you boiled your grains or malt, this is what becomes alcohol. This mixture when allowed to sit for a few days or a full week then produces your great tasting beer.

Obviously when you home brew beer there are some other small steps and additional ingredients and additives you will porobably need, but this is the basic process. Boiling flavored water, add yeast to it and allow it to sit for a time in order to steep properly and produce alcohol. If you think that it sounds easy to home brew beer, you’re right. And once you get the process down, you may find that this is probably the most enjoyable hobby you’ve ever taken up.

Source: ArticleCube.com – Beer


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