Let's Begin!

Making beer is a relatively easy process (after all we did it). All you really have to do is make food for the yeast, then the yeast does the rest (more or less). The most important practice you need to remember is keeping things sanitary. Figure out what kind of beers you like, and what kind of beers you would like to make. The folks at your local homebrew store can help you put together the equipment and ingredients.

So, you have your equipment and ingredients. The night before you brew, put one gallon of spring water in the freezer, bottle and all. Make sure it completely freezes. This will help later in the brewing process.


Mashing

During this step, you will take your malted grain and malt extract, add it to water, and apply heat. If you want to get really fancy, you could roast and grind your own malts. That is really for advance users (not us), so just get the milled malt (grist) from your homebrew supply store. The result of the process will be wort.

Put the milled grain into cheesecloth socks, tie them off, and put them in a stockpot with 3 gallons of water.








Heat the grains and water to 180 deg Fahrenheit. At this point the water should have turned grain-colored. Remove the socks and bring the wort to a boil.







Once the wort is boiling, carefully add the malt extract. Be sure to continually stir the wort so the extract does not burn on the bottom of the pot.







You also want to keep on eye on the wort - foam can start to build and spill over the top. If the wort does start to foam too high, just remove the pot from the heat source until the foam settles. Once the foam process has subsided (its okay if you don't get towering foam), bring the wort to a rolling boil. At this point you will add the hops to the wort.

To be continued...

Update: Part 2, Part 3, Part4