Homebrewing for Beginners

A beginner's guide to homebrewing - covering terminology, equipment, the brewing process, how to read a recipe, and tips to get your first batch right.

I wanted to take a second to write an article that I wish existed when I was first starting out with homebrewing with my friend. We started homebrewing in college during COVID because we were roommates and had nothing better to do given no social events were really happening at the time. It took us quite a while to be able to brew a recipe without a video accompanying the recipe itself (shout out to Joshua Weissman) or the recipe being explicitly written for novices.

All of the recipes that were written for people that already understood the terminology were completely off limits to us because we simply couldn’t understand them and didn’t really feel like taking the time to understand them at the time. Eventually we did come to learn about them, and that unlocked a whole new world of what recipes we were able to follow and it also gave us the confidence to create our own recipes or make targeted changes to existing ones. So my hope is that I can kickstart other people’s journey into homebrewing with this article.

Terminology

This is not an exhaustive list of terminology, but it is more than enough to get you started when it comes to reading a recipe and feeling like you can actually walk away knowing how to execute on the recipe.

Minimal Set of Equipment Required

I’ll provide links where I can to examples of equipment, but I’ll just be providing links to Midwest Supplies. You can get almost all of this stuff through other retailers like Amazon or even your local brew shop.

I’ll start with the three things that will determine how large of a batch you’re able to brew:

If you want to brew 5 - 6 gallon batches, which is pretty standard in the homebrewing community, you’ll want a brew pot that can hold 8 gallons, a 7 gallon carboy, and ideally an external propane burner (you can get away with a gas stove, but it’ll take longer to get things to temperature).

The rest of the items don’t determine the size of batch you can brew, they’re fixed for all batch sizes:

Optional Equipment

The Generic Homebrewing Process

  1. Develop or find a recipe.
  2. Buy the ingredients.
    • You’ll need to go to your local homebrew store for grains (or extracts), hops, and yeast. If you do not have a homebrew store near you, you’ll need to order these ingredients online at a website like Midwest Supplies. It is important that you need to buy your grains milled or have the ability to mill them yourself (most people don’t - they just buy them pre-milled or have the brew store mill them).
    • Buy as much as you can at a normal grocery store to save money. Things like spring water, any fruits you may need, etc.
  3. Sanitize all of your equipment using Star San sanitizer (if your equipment is especially dirty use PBW cleaner before Star San).
    • When I say sanitize everything, I mean everything. If you’re going to use scissors to open a package of hops - those scissors need to be sanitized. I try to sanitize as much as I can within my brew pot while I sanitize the brew pot itself.
    • You’ll want a dedicated brew sponge that you replace every once in a while for this process of getting the Star San or PBW on all of the surfaces of your brew pot, tools, and carboy.
  4. Add in the pre-boil volume of your water into your brew pot.
  5. Start your burner to start heating up your water with a thermometer in the pot.
  6. Turn off your burner as soon as your thermometer reads your strike temperature.
    • If you end up going over you’ll need to just leave the burner off with no lid on your pot and wait for it to come back down to strike temperature. Stirring helps bring the temperature down a little faster.
  7. Lower your grain sack with milled grains into your brew pot that is currently at strike temperature. If your sack allows you, open it up (drape it over sides and tie it to your handles to keep it from falling in) and give it a stir every once in awhile. If you’re not able to do that, no worries. Put the lid on and check in on the temperature every bit to make sure you are within a degree or two of your mash temperature - you’d be surprised at how well your temperature will hold especially in a 60 minute mash.
    • If you end up dropping too much in temperature from your mash temperature refire your burner, but only do it in intervals of 60 seconds or less. Your temperature gauge is likely going to lag behind the actual water temperature when you have all of your grains in there.
  8. At the end of the mash you’ll pull your grain sack out, suspend it above your brew pot, and start sparging (see the terminology section above for a quick primer on what sparging is).
    • After this you can discard the grain - you can compost it if you have the ability to do that where you live.
  9. Turn your burner back on full blast and bring your wort to a boil.
  10. Follow your hop schedule and add hops in at the appropriate time during the boil.
  11. At the end of your boil time, turn off your burner.
  12. Bring your wort down to ~73 degrees (or whatever temperature you’re going to ferment at) with whatever means necessary.
    • This is the most annoying part of being a homebrewer if you do not have a wort chiller. What my friend and I did for a long time was just place the entire brew pot into a sink with a plug in it, fill the sink up with ice water, and then stir the brew pot. We’d replace the ice water once it fully melted/was obviously too warm to be helpful.
    • You can put it into your carboy before it gets all the way down to the temperature you’re fermenting at and allow it to naturally cool off inside of the carboy, but ideally you don’t do that very often or with too extreme ranges of temperature.
  13. Take an original gravity reading with your hydrometer if you have one. Write this number down somewhere - you’ll need it to calculate the ABV after fermentation concludes. You can pour the wort liquid you used to take the hydrometer reading back into your brew pot as long as the vessel you did it in and your hydrometer were both sanitized.
  14. Transfer the wort from your brew pot into your carboy.
    • You can either use a funnel and just dump the wort through the funnel into your carboy or use your auto-siphon. Most people use a funnel during this step just because it is faster.
  15. Pitch your yeast into the carboy.
  16. Fermentation under normal conditions (at about room temperature or right above) should normally only take about 5-7 days depending on the type of yeast used. You’ll know it’s done when you stare at your airlock for a minute or two and see absolutely no movement (no gas escaping).
    • Don’t feel pressured to get it out of the carboy as soon as fermentation stops. You can leave it in there for longer if you need to - honestly up to a certain point (don’t go over 2 weeks) this can only help really ensure fermentation is completely over and really squeeze the maximum amount of ABV you can out of your fermentable sugars.
  17. When you’re ready to bottle, sanitize everything you need to bottle with Star San (and potentially PBW if anything is especially dirty for whatever reason).
    • You’re going to need your brew pot, your stirring spoon, auto-siphon, bottling wand, bottles, and caps all sanitized.
    • You don’t need to Star San the bottles as long you pull them directly out of the dishwasher before bottling.
  18. Use a priming sugar calculator to determine how much corn sugar (or whatever you’re using) you need to add to your beer in order to bottle carbonate your beer. You can use this online calculator (or whatever online calculator you can find, there are tons of them).
  19. Dissolve the priming sugar in a small amount of water on the stove (get it to boiling, add the sugar, and then pull it from the heat).
  20. Use your auto-siphon to extract all of your beer out of the carboy and into your brew pot. Be careful to not pull any of the trub or krausen into your brew pot, but if a little gets in it isn’t that big of a deal.
  21. Add your dissolved priming sugar into your brew pot and stir well.
  22. Put your bottling wand onto your auto-siphon and start siphoning out of your brew pot into the bottles.
  23. Cap your bottles and let rest for at least 2 weeks to allow for carbonation to take place. This should happen at the same temperature you fermented at.

How to Read a Recipe

Let’s try to break apart a real recipe on the internet and turn it into human words. If you want, try to do it yourself before reading my interpretation. Here is the recipe we’re going to use.

Let’s start near the top. It says this is a 5.5 gallon batch size with a pre-boil volume of 7.5 gallons. That essentially means this recipe wants you to start with 7.5 gallons of water and by the time you’re done mashing and boiling it should be at about 5.5 gallons of wort. What that implies is that this person is using no sparging water or post-boil additive water. I almost always modify a recipe to do both of those things if it doesn’t call for them, for two reasons:

  1. Sparging helps increase your efficiency as a homebrewer. Brew houses have much better equipment that allows them to extract a maximal amount of fermentable sugars from grains without sparging, but we do not have that luxury.
  2. Adding water post-boil helps bring your temperature down much faster.

So the rule of thumb is this - you’re going to lose about a gallon during mashing and another gallon during the boil. That is already kind of implied in the recipe, but there it is plainly stated. So what I would do with this recipe is start with a pre-boil volume of 5.5 gallons, sparge in a gallon, and then a post-boil addition of another gallon to end back up with 5.5 gallons of wort liquid before fermenting.

Moving on to the fermentables section of the recipe we see 3 things that we’re going to be extracting fermentable sugar from. Those three things are 12 lbs of american - pale ale, 3 lbs of flaked corn, and 0.30 lbs of american - white wheat. All 15.3 lbs of those fermentables will end up going into your grain sack.

After that we see a hop schedule. The hop schedule essentially says:

Then we see the mash guideline. All this is saying is that you should mash for 60 minutes at 152 degrees fahrenheit. This implies that your strike temperature should be 162 degrees fahrenheit.

Next is the “Other Ingredients” section, which sometimes contains things to add into the carboy or some maybe things you steep in the wort during the boil. In this recipe there is none of that, only the use of a whirlfloc tablet when there is 15 minutes left in the boil. A whirlfloc tablet helps your beers come out more clear, so most of the time you’ll want to use one unless you’re making some sort of a hazy type of beer.

The yeast section is saying to use Wyeast - Belgian Saison 3724. In the table it says that the yeast will consume approximately 78% of the fermentable sugars (so this beer shouldn’t come out too dry), this is called attenuation, and optimal temperature range to ferment at is anywhere between 70 and 95 degrees fahrenheit.

The priming section tells you that with this batch size and this yeast you’re going to want to use 4oz total of corn sugar when bottling in order to bottle carbonate your beers. Normally I just skip this section and calculate it myself when I’m bottling using any one of the many priming sugar calculators you can find online.

Finally there is a target water profile section. I have never done water chemistry, but it gives you the breakdown of mineral composition to add into pure distilled water if you would like to do that. I always just opt to use spring water, but maybe one day I will care enough to do this.

Tips for Beginners