The Many Paths to Great Home Made Beer

Before you really get oriented to what home brewing is all about, it’s easy to think it is a process that is set in stone and there is only one right way to do it.  And it is true that the brewing and fermenting process has some steps that must be followed with some discipline if you wish to enjoy a great home made beer.  But one of the reasons that home brewing is such a passion to many people who enjoy this way of making beer is that there as so many varieties of recipes and styles of making.

You can easily get a feel for what a huge variety there is in ways to brew beer and in recipes for ingredients when you visit your local beer supplies retailer, go to home brewing web sites or sit in at home brewing club meetings in town.  And the great thing about the social side of the home brewing culture is that you will come home with a notebook full of ideas of things you can try on upcoming batches of beer.  The odds are you will have months of ideas to try out and you may never run out of new approaches, blends and recipes to try to make your home made beer interesting and tasty for yourself, your family and your friends.

For that first time home brewing recruit, one of the best ways to help him have the fun of making beer at home without so much investment and mess that will come in due time is to go with a home brewing kit or machine.  Beer making machines literally take all of the thinking and planning and risk out of trying out home brewing to see if you want to make the investment in a full set up.  The machine comes with a full set of ingredients for one batch of beer and the equipment is automated so the novice home brewer can make the beer and move it through the fermentation and aging process and know the fun of having real home made beer a few weeks later.

Similarly kits simply the process of buying and using the equipment and ingredients to get started in home brewing.  Unlike the beer making machine which is used once and discarded, the beer maker’s kit gives you the basic equipment which will be the beginning of your collection of the tools of a beer maker to be used over and over many times.  But the kit provides the ingredients and the instructions to make the process of learning to make your own beer easy and fun to learn.

Even for seasoned home beer makers, there are variations on the home brewing method that will give you more flexibility and range of choices that will affect how unique your beer will be.  But each may have a greater investment of work and effort to use effectively so it’s worth getting familiar with them in advance so you know your investment of time and effort and what you might expect with a new brewing method.

Probably the most common brewing method most amateur brewer’s use and the one that is taught in most home brewing guides is the extract method.  And even though it is well known, because you are truly brewing beer yourself as opposed to using a kit or a machine, you can alter the consistencies and flavors of your beer and get a wonderful brew each time you use this approach.

You can settle on the extract method for a long time or perhaps use it exclusively for your brewing career and get great  beers with it every time.  But if you want a greater challenge and the possibility for even more unique beers as a result, you can explore the Mini-Mash method and the Full Mash Brew styles of home brewing.  Each is more complex and takes longer to finish the brewing process.  But they also give you a lot of flexibility and even more ability to make your own beer unique and distinctive.

It’s up to you where to start in your beer brewing hobby and the paths you take.  You can explore new approaches through networking with other brewers.  But you will never get bored brewing beer at home because the variety of methods and ingredients are virtually limitless.

Thanks for stopping by! Please share with us your home brewing experiences, ideas and tips.

Looking Before You Leap into Home Brewing

Whenever you start a major new hobby, its best to take a few minutes and think about what you are getting into.  A lot of new hobbies require a significant investment of time and money.  This is certainly true of golf, skydiving, scuba and home brewing.  So along with a plan on how to get started, its good to have a good plan for getting ready to plunge into home brewing full scale.  If you have a road map for “checking it out”, you can determine if home brewing will fit into your lifestyle and your budget.

“Looking before you leap” means that you find out what it means to be involved in the hobby or sport as a full time member of that hobby community.  When it comes to home brewing, that will only happen when you too can make your own beer at home.  And when that time finally gets here and you can play with the recipes and make the taste of your own beer very unique, that will be an exciting moment for you.  But a mature approach to this very adult hobby means checking it out and knowing the investment of time, money and space in the home before you spend your first dollar to get set up as a home brewer.

An easy and fun way to ease into the hobby of home brewing that doesn’t cost a cent is to begin to network with those who are already well into their passion for making beer.  You can find forums online to use to learn more about getting started.  And there are almost certainly a number of home brewing societies and clubs in town that you can find out about online or through your local retail brewing supply store.  These social connections will be people who are very much “evangelists” for home brewing because they know the fun of it.  So you will get plenty of chances to sit in with a new friend to step through the brewing process and not only learn what equipment you will need but how it is used as you get training from an “old pro” in home beer making.

Once you have gotten some basic training the free route through home brewing gurus, the time will come when you are ready to consider buying your own equipment and taking a stab at it yourself.  But you have already witnessed that home brewing is a big event in the house filling up the kitchen, the refrigerator, making a mess sometimes and requiring places to store, refrigerate and ferment the beer in the various stages from ingredients to finished product.

So it is important that the hobby of home brewing not just be your solitary passion but if at all possible you get the family into the act.  If they can attend meetings at the home brewing club or go to competitions or other events that are all about home brewing, they can catch the same enthusiasm you have.  That enthusiasm will be very important particularly in your significant other because each brewing session will be a major event in the house involving the kitchen with lots of pans and bottles and equipment.  So having your wife or husband fully onboard with the process and even working on it together makes the fun of home brewing even more fulfilling.

Another area of looking before you leap is to plan out not only how you will use all of the equipment you will buy but how you will handle issues of storage.  It’s a very pragmatic concern but if you bring in this arsenal of beer making equipment. Between batches it is going to have to be somewhere.  And while you will enjoy that equipment a great deal, you don’t want it to dominate the home.

By getting a feel for the equipment when you are preparing to start your home brewing hobby, you can prepare a storage space for the equipment when it is not in use.   Think ahead about storage for the fermentation phase of brewing as well as storing up to five gallons of beer per finished batch.  But by thinking ahead, when you become a very active home brewer, you will have your family and facilities all ready for the changes.  And that is looking before you leap into the exciting world of making and enjoying your own home made beer.

Thanks for stopping by! Please share with us your home brewing experiences, ideas and tips.