Although it is true that people have been making beer and wine in their homes since at least 10,000 BC (that we can prove — maybe much earlier) the modern notion of home brewing is very new.
Chances are that your father did not make beer at home.
Modern home brewing grew out of the dissatisfaction people started to feel in the early 1980’s with the small selection of mostly bland beers. Craft beers, micro brews and brew pubs came on the scene to give people a choice of good taste.
Home brewing also made it’s modern appearance. And with the good also came the bad. No doubt a lot of bad. Because, like any craft or art, brewing beer is difficult. Not once you learn, but to get started. If you did not learn home brewing at your fathers knee then chances are you have no idea where to start to make beer at home.
Enter the Home Brewing Kit.
Home Brew Kits are all-in-one solutions to making your first batch of beer. The best ones come complete with the proper equipment, all the ingredients and detailed instructions to remove all the guesswork.
If you don’t want to wait through several months of trial and error for your first decent batch of beer, then a beer making kit may be right for you.
Besides giving you a drinkable batch of home brew the first time, home brewing kits also have these things going for them:
1. They are a cheap way to test the hobby. Hey, even if you love the taste of beer, making it at home may not be right for you. Why sink $1,000’s into expensive equipment and learn you hate it. Very good home brew kits can be found on the internet for under $100 and many lesser ones run 1/2 that.
2. Home brewing kits come with EVERYTHING you need — a big plus for the beginner. The right ingredients and the right equipment are all included. Not last minute runs to the store when you find you have forgotten an essential component. Not ruined batch because you used the wrong pail or your airlock did not work.
3. Kits can teach you the process of brewing that you can expand upon if and when you want to buy more serious equipment.
4. Home Brew Kits are designed to do exactly what they say they will and exactly what they need to do and come with detailed step by step instructions to help you along. No guessing if you have the right piece or if these hops or grains will work for this beer or that. Plenty of time to experiment later.
Which brings up one of the best reasons to use a home brew kit to make beer at home:
5. The best home brew kits can grow with you. They are great for starting out — all the ingredients to make your first batch or two of beer — but then you can easily reuse the equipment for you future batches. Find new recipes and try different styles. Your kit is ready to perform.
Make sure that if think you may want continue using the kit to make more beer you get a quality kit from the beginning.
These are just a few of the reasons a home brewing kit is best for the beginner.
Author: Mark Hester
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Buy electrical pressure cooker
Using Kegs to brew your own beer at home is a lot easier than most people imagine it to be. If you do not possess the adequate, necessary knowledge needed in order to accomplish brewing your own beer at home with kegs, then you no doubt are missing out on a grand opportunity, as well as missing out on saving a great amount of money in doing so. Consider this fact: it only costs nearly six dollars per gallon to home brewing beer with kegs.
Begin With A Good Kit
The first thing you need to complete when starting to home brew beer with kegs is to shop for a kit which comes with, naturally, the keg, the tap, any other tools that you may need later on to aid you in this task. Generally, most kits will include the ingredients, such as the hops as well as various containers in which to store your home brewed beer. These kits, some of which only cost a mere twenty dollars, will put you on the road to home brewing beer with kegs – and take my word for it – once you start doing this, you will never want to stop.
The cost of the kit is determined by how much beer you wish to brew, what your particular level of expertise is at the current time. Using kegs to home brew beer provides you with an excellent opportunity to brew delicious home, brewed beer that should taste the way that you prefer. As time goes on and you improve in your skills in brewing your own beer from home, you will without a doubt discover it to be a hobby that is well worth pursuing. After a long day at work, home brewing beer by using kegs will provide you with a way to unwind, and give you an exit to enjoy a cool glass of beer that you have the pride in knowing that you created yourself.
After having purchased the kit, it is very important that you follow any instructions found in any home brewing guides you may have strictly. With that in mind, also make sure that you precisely measure the ingredients. Just a small margin of error in measurements can greatly effect the quality of taste and texture of your home brewed beer.
You will need to follow the basics of converting sugars into ethyl alcohol and extracting carbon dioxide from the yeast through the fermentation process. The main distinguishing factor between home brewing beer with kegs and more commercial methods of manufacturing is that of scale. If you possess the proper and sophisticated brewing capabilities, there is absolutely no reason at all why you should not be successful in brewing your own beer at home – your own preferred brand.
As long as you own the right equipment, and harbor a degree of skills in your brewing talents,putting the right amount of effort forward, you will definitely be able to make a high quality, tasty home brewed beer – equal to or better than that of commercial and professional beer makers.
Author: Robert Ragsdale
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Electrical Pressure Cooker Online
Certainly beer is not a new commodity around the world. The process of brewing beer has been around for thousands of years, ever since early people learned to make it on a small scale. While you might be thinking that home brew beer doesn’t sound as easy as purchasing beer from the convenience store, it really is very easy and has plenty of other benefits.
When setting up a home brewery to make your own beer, you are really taking the process of producing beer out of the commercial brewery and back to your home. The whole process is much less hassle than you think. This is, in large part, because of the ease of obtaining all the correct materials for starting your home brew beer experience online.
Starting off with brewing beer it is certainly best to purchase on the many available brewing kits to get you started. There are many online beer companies that offer these brew kits very inexpensively. They will come complete with all the parts and equipment, including the ingredients, needed to get your first batch going.
The best benefit of brewing beer at home is that you are going to be able to produce beer with an abundance of different flavors. There are recipe books available that have thousands of recipes for you to choose from. Your friends will be amazed when they come over and are able to sample from a wide variety of different home brew beers, none of which is available in the store.
Another, often overlooked, benefit is that home brew beer will save you money. Most home brew beer kits come with a package to produce five or six gallons of beer. Five gallons of beer is enough for 53 12 ounce bottles, plus a taste more. Depending on how much your normal beer costs, you will probably be ahead of the game by the time you brew your second batch. After that, your only costs will be for ingredients and bottle caps. Now you will have top quality product to enjoy at pennies on the dollar.
In home brewing, just like anything else you practice, you will find that your brews get better and better over time as you learn to work with more subtle flavors and become more involved in the whole brewing process. Home brewing beer is a fun hobby to have and will give back for years.
Author: Jesse L Moore
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Advice on AdSense
Running beertaps.com has been an interesting ride that was more involved than I thought it would be. But, it has been fun. Each new challenge has presented an interesting and useful solution.
For instance, when I was asked about the kegerator a customer just purchased, I realized that there probably are more people out there who have the same questions. So, I wrote a report and published it on the site. Then, I wrote an article to let everyone know that I wrote the report.
That’s about the time the second question came in about keeping beer lines clean. Then, about home brew recipes. So, I kept writing reports to help people and I kept writing articles to make people more aware.
It started out as a big gaggle of reports that I finally organized into a Learning Center that is now populated with great stuff. From Home Brew Tips and Tricks to DIY Home Bar Projects, I keep adding to the learning center. But, I’m always willing to hear what you want to know. I have a form for questions at http://www.beertaps.com/contact.html
But, the recent interactive is the forum I created. It’s easier than a report to write a simple answer. Some answers aren’t as involved as putting an entire article together with pictures and everything. So, I populated the forum with a few items. But, it’s new.
I’d love to see some people on there soon. Start some topics and get some feedback. How else do you expect a forum to get started?
http://brewdrinker.com/thepub/
Hope to see you there!
The production process of beer can be called “brewing” and requires several stages of processing.
In the beginning of the process barley or other cereals, after they have been selected and cleaned, are placed in the tanks of maceration, where they receive water and oxygen needed for germination.
This process usually lasts three or four days during which water is kept at temperatures between 12 and 15 degrees, and it is constantly being changed. Once you have reached the sufficient degree, the barley is put to germinate for about a week in the chests of germination or otherwise in a well ventilated area.
The process is stopped when the sprout has reached about two-thirds of the length of the grain, by drying or roasting.
Barley malt is then ground to obtain a kind of flour, and then it is mixed with hot water (about 65-68 degrees). This phase is called brewing, as the malt becomes a must. Precisely this happens when the starch in malt is transformed into a sugar, maltose. The mass, kept in agitation, is brought together with suitable stops, the optimal temperature for enzyme activity, and degradation of starch and protein.
The next step is cooking the mash within designated boilers, traditional copper (because it is a good thermal conductor that does not degrade too). The cooking time is crucial to choosing the type of beer to be produced and also for its quality, because during this process takes place most of the biochemical reactions, usually varies between one and two hours and a half.
During boiling, following reaction between polyphenols of malt and hops and proteins of the malt, form insoluble complexes constitution.
The fermentation is divided into two phases: the first, the main fermentation, sees as the main protagonist, the yeast, whose function is to convert sugars and amino acids into alcohol, carbon dioxide and aromatics. The process is faster (it takes usually three or four days) than the low fermentation, as is held in higher temperatures and fermentation processes are favored by heat. This yeast also goes back to the surface and is recovered by skimming, and this is important economies.
The secondary fermentation (also called maturation) instead is to leave for about four or five weeks, the beer in huge vats of aging at a temperature between 0 and 2 degrees. This operation allows to fill carbonated beer and to deposit the residues of yeast, as well as to harmonize the various ingredients.
Finally there is the pasteurization, the process in which not all beers are, as it is to bring the beer to a temperature of 60 degrees to destroy microorganisms and thus preserve the product better.
There are some beers that are “fermented in the bottle.” In this case, before closing the cap, add the yeast which increases the rate of alcohol. Wheat beers are an exception that, although yeast in the bottle, maintain a normal gradation. At the end of the process, the beer is filtered to remove residuals of opacity and finally bottled or keg.
Author: Kristoffer Kilpinen
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Electrical Pressure Cooker Online
If you are thinking about starting to learn how to home brew your own beer, there is an important tool your are going to need. This tool is an instrument called a hydrometer. This tool is going to let you know when your beer is done and ready to be bottled.
The basic hydrometer measures the specific gravity of a liquid. It is something that looks like a graduated tube that is made to float up right in the liquid. It is really a must have tool in the world of home brewing.
The specific gravity of plain water is 1.000, which what you start with. Now, after you have brewed your beer or sometimes called wort and have the fermentation process started. This will change the specific gravity of the liquid also called how heavy it is. This heaviness of the soon to be beer is caused by how much sugar you have used by the yeast.
You will see how handy this device is going to be in your beer making process. The beer will not be ready for bottling until the fermentation is finished. Place the meter into the brew and let the meter stop bobbing. If the reading is between 1.010 and 1.008 at 60 degrees Fahrenheit, it is ready to be bottled. Now if the reading is more than 1.015 the fermentation (making alcohol) is still occurring.
Before measuring always make sure the meter is clean and dry. If it is calibrated correctly the gravity should be 1.000 at 60 degree water. There is nothing wrong with doing the measurement twice either.
Author: James John
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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High on the supermarket shelf, somewhere between the Scotch Whiskey and bottled lagers, you will find the eccentrically named English beers, each of them painstakingly and lovingly crafted.
‘Old Peculier’ shares this space with ‘Youngs Ram Rod’; the ‘Blandford Fly’ and of course our locally produced award winning ‘Old Thumper’ from Ringwood Brewery.
Ringwood has a long history of brewing, at one time its industry was dominated by breweries and malthouses. Ringwood Brewery stands on the site of the old Tunks Brewery which closed around the end of the 1800s.
When you pull into the small car park adjacent to the brewery store, the first thing you notice is the biscuity, sweet smell of malt. It’s very nearly overwhelming, but as I later found out this is the beginning of the process that eventually gets our frothy pints to the local pub and bottles to the supermarket shelves.
Suzie James met me with a warm handshake and a promise to sample their seasonal beers. “Hmm! I’m a bit of a lager fan”, I admitted guiltily. “Do you realise you’ll now never leave this place!”, she retorted, and if you do you will leave in a pie!” “Then I will endeavour to enjoy every sip” I promised. It seems they have more than ‘just a passion’ for their beers.
“The brewing methods we use are still very traditional”, she told me, “although we do have computers to monitor the process continually.” When you wander through the brewery you sense a wonderful feeling of the old world, sitting comfortably with shining moderninity.
At any one time Ringwood Brewery have a stable of four beers. Their ‘Best Bitter’, ‘Fortyniner’, ‘Old Thumper’ and a seasonal beer, of which there are four to match the mood of the season.
‘4x Porter’ is their traditional dark beer – one for winter – the brew you will find if you visit your local now; a beer for supping next to a warm open fire. In the spring you’ll encounter the ‘Bold Forester’, brewed with a lighter amber malt, giving a gentler more biscuity flavour. ‘Boondoggle’, will quench your summer thirst, while ‘Huffkin’ will serve you well through the autumn months and prepare you for the winter chill.
Not only do Ringwood Brewery take pride in producing some of the best beers in the world – they now own a vineyard in the Bergerac region of France. Since the mid 1990s they’ve developed three whites, three varieties of red and a sparkling wine too, all of which enjoy a loyal following nationally.
I was allowed to leave freely despite my mention of the ‘L’ word; proudly clutching four bottles of ‘Fortyniner’ – I think there’s something very unusual about this place – I’ve found myself converted; perhaps rehabilitated!
Copyright Simon Lawrence
Author: Simon P Lawrence
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Canada duty
Now that I’ve brewed my first lager, I’m venturing into the land of all-grain brewing. There is a lot a vocabulary between the grain and the beer that I have gotten confused a number of times. I thought that it would be advantageous for me to put my ducks and a row and figure out the transformation of grain and words to beer. Then I figured I’d write about it so here we go. Please correct me if I get anything incorrect.
All grain brewing is brewing from scratch. To brew from scratch with as little as possible you need water, malt, and hops. Obviously we know what water is, good ol’ H20. Malt is the grain (barley or what-have you) used to produce beer. And hops is the plant (Fun Fact: close on the plant family tree to marijuana) used to balance the sweetness of malt with bitter. There are many different variety of hops, grains, and different flavors of water, which is not going to be covered here. This is about the basics.
The malt (grain) starts as a shell and runs through a machine. The mill. The mill cracks the grain to open it up so that the flavors (again keeping it simple) can be brought out. Once the malt is cracked, it is now called grist. So the Mill This turns the grain into the grist.
Now that you have the grist you have to get all the good stuff out. You do this by mashing. To mash, you need to dump your grist into a mash/lauter tun. For your basic homebrewer (such as myself) that can be as simple as a jobsite cooler (ex. your standard gatorade sports cooler, preferably 10 gallon), with a false bottom.
A false bottom in this case is a screen in bottom of the cooler that you can drain the water through the grist.
Now you have your grist in your mash/lauter tun. Mashing is nothing but steeping the grist in hot water. This extracts all the sugars.
After about an hour of mashing, you need to lauter your mash. Lautering your mash is opening up the spigot at the bottom of your mash/lauter tun, and letting your wort (your mash has now turned into wort, nothing more) drain out.
Now you sparge your mash. This gets extra wort out by rinsing the mash with water.
Now you have wort (pronounced wert). Which you may have already heard of before if you’ve at least read about homebrewing. If you are using specialty grains this is where you steep your grains. Just like you would tea, except with a larger bag of grain.
Now you begin the boiling (be careful not to boil over), and you add your hops at different intervals. Once the boil is done you chill the wort, add it to your fermenter, and pitch your yeast.
Pitching your yeast involves no wind-up, no projectiles. Just dump your bag of yeast in.
Almost done here folks. If you’re brewing a lager the next part is lagering. If not, but you want to refine the flavors of your beer a little more, or let more sediment fall out, it’s the secondary fermentation. So whether you lager, or secondary ferment, you rack your fermented beer to another container, possibly a carboy.
Racking involves using a racking cane which pulls the wort off the sludge that has accumulated on the bottom of your fermenting vessel. You want to leave that sludge behind. A carboy is a a funny shaped bottle, much like the bottle at your office water cooler.
Home stretch now. Now you condition your beer. Conditioning involves adding a little extra sugar so when you seal your beer it ferments just a little bit more and carbonates it.
That’s IT! Keg it, bottle it. Wait for it… wait for it… drink it!!
Like I said earlier, please let me know of any corrections and I will update this post. I owe a lot of information from my own experience and from John Palmers “How to Brew.” Good book, go and get it.
Author: Eugene Kolankowsky
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Excise Tax
So are you somewhat interested in home brewing but unsure whether you want to invest in a home brew kit? It was recently brought to my attention that you can brew your own beer at home using a coffee pot.
Necessary Equipment (nothing that you wouldn’t normally find in the kitchen)
Coffee maker
Coffee filter
Wooden rolling pin
Saucepan larger than 2 quarts
2 1-quart canning jars with lids
cheesecloth
2 rubber bands
½ gallon of filtered water
Necessary Ingredients (can be bought at your local beer brewing retailer)
1 ¼ cups of malted barley
5-7 Hop pellets (compressed hops)
½ packet of champagne yeast (or baker’s yeast)
If you are new to brewing, one of the most important things to remember is to keep everything sanitary. If any bacteria gets in your beer when you are brewing or bottling, it could ruin your entire batch. Brewing in a coffee pot is no different. Be clean.
First take your 1 ¼ cups of malted barley and crack the grain with your wooden rolling pin. Don’t roll the grains too much; just make sure that all the grains are cracked. After cracking the grains, put them in the coffee pot. Pour two cups of water into the coffee maker and turn it on.
After about an hour the coffee maker will shut down. At this stage the “masking-in” process is complete. Strain the “mash” through a coffee filter. After straining, pour the liquid into the water-heating chamber of the coffee maker with one more cup of filtered water. Turn the coffee maker on again. When all the liquid empties into the coffee pot, take the liquid and put it back in the coffee maker with another cup of water. Repeat this step approximately 5 times, each time adding one cup of water.
After you have done this, pour the final liquid into a saucepan and boil. After boiling for 20 minutes, add the 5-7 hops pellets before boiling for another half hour. Remove from heat. Stir the liquid in the saucepan and pour it into a canning jar making sure not to splash. Immediately after you fill the jar, place it in a sink filled with ice.
After your wort, the expression for the beer at this stage, has cooled to about 65 degrees, put on the top to the jar and shake. Take off the lid, add yeast and stir. Next place cheesecloth over the jar’s opening and secure with a rubber band. Do not place the lid back on the jar.
Place the jar in a dark place about room temperature; wait one week, and your beer should be ready. This is a good way to make smaller amounts of beer if you don’t have a beer kit, but once you have mastered this, I strongly recommend investing in a homebrew kit. You will be able to make better tasting beer and much more of it at a time.
Author: Pat McLoughlin
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Benefits of electric pressure cooker
If your favorite beer comes from a beer store, you may never have experienced the overwhelming pleasure of savoring your own homemade beer.
Sure, the commercial stuff is OK. But if you want the soul-stirring satisfaction of sipping a delicious beer that you’ve made yourself, you’ll want to try the world’s most popular home beer recipe, Goat Scrotum Ale.
Goat Scrotum sounds utterly gross, doesn’t it? The truth is that it’s a beer that everyone enjoys. One of the reasons it’s so popular is that it can be brewed in a variety of ways and in many custom flavors. If you like chocolate, you can make it taste like bitter-sweet chocolate. You may prefer a fruity-gingery ale, a palate-popping spicy blend or a smooth, fragrant brew. There are hundreds of possible combinations and creating your own personal varieties is a fascinating hobby.
Goat Scrotum Ale became wildly popular back in the early 1800s when it was known as “Tumultuous Porter”. The deeply satisfying ale continued to be a great favorite of beer drinkers until prohibition came along and the brew and its recipe disappeared. Lucky for us, the recipe was brought back to an appreciative world of home brewers by a researcher named Charles Papazian.
Making Goat Scrotum Ale the Papazian way was pretty exciting, to say the least! Here are the Papzian ingredients:
5 lbs dark malt extract
1 lb crystal malt
1/4 lb each black patent malt and crushed roasted barley
3 1/2 oz Hallertauer leaf hops
1 cup each brown sugar and blackstrap molasses
1 lb corn syrup
2 tspns gypsum
1 tspn Irish Moss
1 pkg ale yeast
3/4 cup corn sugar to prime the bottle with
To customize your ale and create your very own specialty brew you may use these optional ingredients in whatever combination you wish:
2 to 4 oz freshly grated ginger root
Up to 2 inches brewing licorice
2 tbspns spruce tree essence
1 to 10 dried chili pepper
1/4 cup slightly crushed juniper berries
6 oz unsweetened Bakers chocolate or cocoa powder
Following are Mr. Papzian’s directions:
Steep the crystal malt in the brewing water for one hour at 150F. Remove leftover crystal malt and mix in dark malt extract, brown sugar, blackstrap molasses and a pound of the corn sugar.
Bring to a soft boil until all the ingredients are dissolved completely. Add in a quarter ounce of hops and the optional ingredients you choose to use. Boil fifteen minutes. Then, add a half ounce hops and boil another fifteen minutes.
Toss in the black patent malt and crushed roasted barley. Boil for another
fifteen minutes. Add another quarter ounce hops and the gypsum and Irish Moss. Boil for thirteen minutes. Now stir in the remaining ounce and a half of hops, boiling for two more minutes.
Allow the wort to cool to room temperature. Strain carefully while transferring the liquid into the fermenter. When the wort’s temperature falls below 80F, stir in the yeast.
And finally, when the wort has completely finished fermenting, add the three-quarters cups of corn sugar.
You’re now ready to put your delicious creation into bottles and look forward to that first tantalizing sip.
Author: Grant L. Jensen
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Benefits of electric pressure cooker
