How to Brew Extract Beer at Home: A Simple Beginner’s Guide to Great Tasting Homebrew

Quick Table of Contents:

Talk to any professional brewer these days and ask him or her how they started their journey with beer and I bet nine out of ten will say brewing beer at home. Now more than ever with the uncertainty of the world around us and the new found time some of us have now, it is a great time to begin a new hobby.

Why not embrace the hobby that keeps so many people repeatedly happy over so many years?

Brewing beer has been around for a long time. There are four components when it comes to brewing beer; grain, hops, water, and yeast. You do not need to know every little thing about each of these components just yet.

It is helpful to know the basics. Water is important. At this point in your homebrewing experience, do not stress out about this too much. Use filtered water if at all possible. If filtered water is not an option, go to the store and pick up enough bottled water for your brew day.

Grains or malt imparts color and flavor to your beer. It also imparts the sugar that is needed by the yeast to produce alcohol.

The hops are to assist in your quest to make sure your beer is not too sweet to drink. Yeast is the component that takes your wort(unfermented beer) and makes it into the beverage that we all long for after a long day of work.

If you are anything like me, you are excited about starting to brew. I understand the excitement. The best advice I can advocate is to read first. Read this guide to brewing your own beer.

Usually when homebrewers begin their hobby, they are purchasing pre-made kits that contain every ingredient that is needed to make your own beer. These kits also include instructions to brew that particular beer.

Read and understand these instructions. This is very similar to following a recipe and instructions to cook food. The better you understand the process of brewing, the better off you will be and the better your beer will become.

There are a few different ways to brew beer at home. For the sake of this guide, I will focus on extract brewing.

This will allow for first time homebrewers, like yourself, to understand the full process of brewing. The rest will come in due time.

We can skip the big debate on what brewing method is considered ‘actual brewing‘ and what is cheating for now. The history of beer tells us that isn’t going to change anytime soon.

Let’s get right into how to brew beer at home without wasting any time or money shall we?

Here’s the equipment you’ll need for Extract Brewing:

  • Brewing Kettle
  • Homebrew Beer Kit
  • Fermentation Vessel, carboy or a bucket
  • Airlock and stopper
  • Hydrometer/Refractometer
  • Hydrometer Testing Jar
  • Long spoon
  • Wort Chiller
  • Thermometer
  • Turkey Baster
  • Sanitizer Star San
  • Burner
  • Muslin Bags
  • Timer

Full list of all Homebrewing Equipment for all types and styles here.

For bottling your beer:

  • 48 (12oz) clean bottles
  • Bottle caps
  • Bottle capper
  • Bottling bucket
  • Racking Cane or Auto Syphon
  • 5 feet of ⅜ inch beverage line
  • Sanitizer Iodophor

A Step – by – Step Guide to Extract Beer Brewing 

Cleaning Equipment

One of the most important parts of brewing beer is cleaning and sanitizing. When you are beginning your brew day, it is critically important that you have clean equipment.

Anything that is in contact with the wort prior to boiling needs to be cleaned. If you are using a big spoon to stir in the dry or liquid malt extract, your spoon should be cleaned but does not need to be sanitized.

The boiling wort will take care of anything that the wort comes into contact. Anything that is contact with the wort after the boil and cooling stages must be sanitized. Star San is a very popular sanitizer.

When using a thermometer to check your temperature during the cooling stage, you will want to sanitize it. It is extremely helpful to have a bucket of Star San on hand during your brew day.

Heat the Water

You have two choices here when it comes to heating your water. You can use your kitchen stove and place your kettle on one of your burners. Conversely, you can also splurge a little and purchase a burner to brew outside with the use of propane gas or an electric set-up.

Your kettle size comes into play here. This is where you want to be efficient with your brewing process. If you are using a small-ish kettle for your brewing process, then using a kitchen stove is a possibility. I would say a small-ish kettle would be around 4-5 gallons.

Typically, an average sized batch of beer is 5 gallons. When using a kettle around 4-5 gallons, you will only be able to do a partial boil. Don’t worry, this is totally normal. You will use 4 gallons to start with and then after boiling and cooling your wort, you will add the additional water to make sure you end up with 5 gallons.