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Brewing beer yourself

Can you brew your own beer?

Introduction

Brewing beer in your home kitchen is not all difficult. Here Bart and Ger show you some of the basics steps.
As you can see this is a real home kitchen and hardly no sophisticated tools are being used.

About the malt
Introducing the first ingredient: Malt.

During the preparation stage the wheat that has been converted to malt (you can buy malt in some specialized shops) is grinded.
The grinding mill can be a simple model such as the one that was used to grind coffee beans. Of course this mill must have been cleaned thoroughly for this delicate new task.
To get a nice and strong beer you need to apply several types of malt. The basic malt would be a lager malt but other types would be chocolat malt, black malt or amber malt.

The hard work
Introducing the second ingredient: Water.

Brewing is not simply boiling the beer-to-be but a time consuming process of gradually raising the liquid temperature for example:

  • Start at about 50 to 55 °C and maintain that temperature during approx. 30 minutes.
  • Raise to 60 °C and hold that temperature for approx. 30 minutes.
  • Again raise the temperature, now to 70 °C and keep this temperature for at least 30 minutes. An Iodine test can be done to be sure that all starch has been converted to sugar.
  • Finally raise the temperature to 75 °C.
With electronics being Ger's speciality we used an electronic heater but using one of the the kitchen's gasburners (and a thermometer) would do fine.

Adding hop
Introducing the third ingredient: Hop.

In order to give the beer the right taste one has to add hop. Also adding hop will benifit to the preservation of the beer over time.

Removing larger particles
After boiling and consequently cooling down, the larger parts (remainders of the malt and hop) have to be removed. A large punctured spoon can be used to do this.

Filtering out smaller particles
Smaller parts have to be removed to obtain a more or less clear liquid. A clean piece of cloth can be used for this.
On the photo a you can see a siphon is being used to guide the turbid liquid over a piece of cloth into a receiving cask.

After this the first fermentation can be started.


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