The process to make beer at home is very simple. You can do Home brewing for fun or for the ultimate bragging rights. With this simple step by step recipe process, one can make beer at low cost using common kitchen equipment. Present the finished beer to your friends and collect praises and awe.
A decade ago, there were only a handful of choices- all lagers, with very little differentiation in style. Today there are over 250 microbreweries in India, each having 4-10 beers on the tap. A lot of draught beer and bottled beer startups are also mushrooming. Craft beer is one of the most fiercely competed arena, with people trying to introduce newer styles, newer ingredients, and innovation in every aspect of brewing.
What is Brewing
Brewing is the transformation of a beverage through the application of heat.
http://www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/121/bh-121-005.htm
Beer Brewing is a 5000-year-old craft, which is probably older than our civilization. Hence making a decent beer in one’s kitchen is not as daunting as one might like to imagine. The most complicated of it being the mashing. It is an activity where the brewer performs saccrification (conversion of starch into fermentable sugars a.k.a. maltose and other water-soluble maltodextrins). If you are just getting your feet wet in this hobby, my recommendation is to start with a simple malt extract based beer. It takes about 20-30 minutes to brew and another 10-14 days to ferment.
This recipe uses priming sugar to produce Carbon dioxide CO2 or fizz/head. Also all units are in liters rather than Gallons of water. We don’t want to confuse the readers between American Gallon or British Imperial Gallon. Malt extract is instant fermentable sugar and saves a lot of time in the first brew day.
My First Extract Based Beer
Equipment
- 3 Liter mason jar/glass pickle jar with a tight screw lid/ plug,
- Airlock (or a blow off tube),
- A grommet gasket or food-grade plug with 7-8mm inner diameter (cork or anything else to get a firm grip),
- A steel pot (at least 5 liters),
- A hydrometer or refractometer (optional),
- Swing top glass bottle (6 x 500ml or 3 X 1L),
- Food grade siphon tube (1.5m) preferably one with an automated pump and a steel mesh filter.
Ingredients
- 100-125 gm/liter Dry malt extract 100-125gm per liter. Or liquid malt extract, 120 to 150gm per liter,
- 1 packet Hops about 0.25gm of bittering hops like Cascade, Magnum and 0.5-1gm of aromatic hops like Citra is good for beginners,
- 3 liters Purified water RO or bottled 3 liters,
- 3 gm Beer Brewing Yeast: 0.5-1gm per liter,
- 1 kg Ice made from boiled water which is frozen in aseptic ice trays a night before 1kg,
- 1 gm Gelatin 1/8 teaspoon per liter and Irish moss (0.25gms per liter),
- 8 gm Priming sugar or Sulfur less sugar 1-1.5 teaspoon per liter or brown sugar for carbonation,
- 5 ml Brewing Sanitizer (Anphossan) Iodine solution, hydrogen peroxide, Starsan etc.,
- 2 gm Yeast nutrient 1/2 teaspoon per 3 liters.
Instructions
Step 1: Prepare Wort
- Boil at least 2 kg of water (or 2 liter).
- Add malt extract: stir it to prevent it from sticking to the bottom and caramelizing.
- Add the hops (this is malt extract based simple brewing so we add all of it together. In grain based mashing the bittering hops are added early and aromatic is added just moments before it starts to boil, as described in next chapter).
- Adding Irish moss helps remove the proteins and clear the final beer.
- After 5-10 minutes of continuous boiling (or above 70o temperature), take the vessel out of flame and plunge it in ice bath. You may add ice cubes inside the wort as well to achieve faster pasteurization. All the mashing (starch to malt conversion) happens in the factory where the malt extract is made. Hence, over boiling it will only result in reddish kettle caramelized hue.
- Chill until wort reaches room temperature (less than 30o C).
Step 2: Sanitize
- Use rinse free sanitizer to wash & soak all equipment and surfaces (at least 5 minutes of soaking of the Mason jar). You may also boil the equipment if it is temperature resistant. Your hydrometer, siphon, airlock and everything that will touch the wort should be sanitized.
- Invert and jerk the equipment to shake off any capillary water sticking to the equipment surface. (Optional) Rinse it with sterilized water to remove any residual taste/ color of the disinfectant.
- You might have to use a hot nail to puncture the lid of the Mason jar to insert the grommet gasket & airlock. Use a sealant (glue) to achieve a good seal between the lid and airlock.
Step 3: Kick starting fermentation
- Pour wort in the Mason jar and take the hydrometer reading. I typically aim for 1.055 S.G. but based on the desired alcoholic strength of the beer, we may add or reduce the malt.
- (Optional): Oxygenation of the wort is more important in larger batches. In smaller batches (less than 10 liters), pouring from a height is sufficient to infuse oxygen back. Use a hand blender (or) manually shake the wort vigorously to oxygenate. Compressed air is pumped in commercial breweries to increase the oxygen levels.
- Hydrate the yeast in 10 parts of water (10ml per liter) and add yeast nutrients. Mix them well and wait for about 15 minutes. If yeast is alive, we should see the yeast foam (bubbles) being formed. This is the most crucial step and dead/ inactive yeast can ruin any batch.
- Seal the lid and attach the airlock. It should start bubbling in 4-12 hours. (Diagnostics): Press the plastic lid gently to induce bubbling. If there is a leakage in the seal, the airlock will not bubble and one can add a sealant in the gap.
- Store it away from sunlight in a cool dark place and check specific gravity periodically over next 7 days or until bubbling has stopped.
- Please take the hydrometer/ refractometer reading. You can refer the original & final gravity in a Plato table (Percentage of malt in the solution). This will help measure the alcohol content.
- Not all beer styles are supposed to be clear. If we prefer clarity, keep the fermenter at 4oC for 48 hours for turbidity to settle down. Dissolving 1/4 a teaspoon of gelatin in ½ a cup of warm water (not boiling) and mixing it with the beer will aid in suspended yeast settling down. It takes 48-72 hours for the process to show results. You will get a thick yellow yeast cake at the bottom and a clear beer.
Step 4: Bottling
- Sanitize the glass bottles & rinse off the disinfectant with water. (Like we cleaned the mason jars during wine making).
- Use a siphon tube to pour beer into the Bottle & add 1-2 teaspoon of sugar for natural carbonation.
- Seal the crown cap/ swing top cap tight and store the bottles in a cool dark place for three days for CO2 formation.
- Serve chilled in a glass mug. (Home brew is never drunk from the bottle directly because of the yeast deposits at the bottom).
Notes
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This is a simple recipe to get beer brewing hobby started. Once we get a hang of it, we can move to the next step using malted grains.
Brewed my first batch of Wheat beer using the same recipe with Idaho 7 hops & M20 Bavarian Wheat Beer Yeast (all purchased in wheat beer kit by Arishtam), however in the recipe, it’s mentioned boiled 2 liters of the bottle but it’s supposed to be for 3-liter beer, I assumed that we first heat 2-liter water and mix DME in it and then top it with 1 more liter of water and then boil, have followed this and the first batch is being fermented, the wort after boiling smelled something like a malty drink (Bournvita/Horlicks) with a hint of sour candy (sour candy notes from Idaho 7), however hoping to be the final beer to have nice banana & clove hints and zesty flavor a little close to a Hefeweizen 🙂
Utkarsh Welcome to the beer brewing club. Next time do add some orange zest in your beer to get some citrus notes. https://www.arishtam.com/orange-zest-for-brewing/home-brew-tutorials/
For sure, looking forward to fermentation to complete going to take some learnings for the next batch and will add orange zest the next time, it’s 4th-day fermentation is still happening, can see bubbles popping up slowly 😀
maximum capacity of beer i can brew at home?
https://www.arishtam.com/legal-home-brewing-india/ this should have state wise restrictions on home brew beer
Hey – For how long can you store this beer before it starts going bad?
3-6 months but wheat beer loses flavors faster
Hi Ankur,
Your recipe calls for 3 to 4 days of carbonation but most internet videos say min 2 weeks. Is your recommendation based on Indian conditions with warmer temperatures leading to faster fermentation or something else?
Thanks
Harsha
sir indian temperatures are higher hence faster carbonation
Thanks for the prompt response
I tried 2 times so far, every time the beer is becoming bitter, I tried with less hops even then it is bitter….where might I be going wrong?
https://www.hopsteiner.com/ibu-calculator/ try using aromatic hops and less or no bitter hops. also use the IBU calculator to find out a beer that has the right level of beer hops for you
Sir
If we are using Dry malt extract 100-125gm per liter. Than how much milled malted grain can be used per liter to make wort.
“Not all beer styles are supposed to be clear. If we prefer clarity, keep the fermenter at 4oC for 48 hours for turbidity to settle down” In the sentence is it 4 degree Celsius for 48 hours?
4 degrees Celsius. I will correct the typo thanks
When to add gelatin in the beer to clarify? Just in the wort with the yeast when kept for fermentation or after fermentation?
https://www.arishtam.com/what-is-cold-crash/home-brew-tutorials/ this has the step by step instructions to add gelatin post fermentation
How much hops per liter of beer? The 0.25g is for the whole batch or per liter?
Also the yield shows 15 points but the instructions are for 3 liter water basis + 1kg ice that too optional.
There are a lot of recipes and ibu calculators for hop calculations. But 0.25gm per liter should be fine.
4 liter is approximately 16 pints
Perfect.Nice job by you.
Thanks Regards.
Sufi nitin purander.
thank you sir. I hope you get your parcel soon too
so simple