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Brewing Beer using a beer kit or Malt Extract.
Brewing your own beer at home is easy when you use one of the many kits on the market today. The procedure varies slightly depending upon which type of kit you use, and the manufacturers instructions should always be followed precisely, but, in general it entails little more than adding yeast to a sugar rich solution of malted barley in a brewing bin and then leaving it for 5-7 days in a warm place to ferment. During this period, the yeast converts the sugars present into alcohol and carbon dioxide. At the end of the fermentation period, when most of the yeast has died and fallen to the bottom of the brewing bin, the beer is transferred to either bottles or a barrel, given a little extra sugar, sealed and left for a couple of weeks to clear and mature (produce some more carbon dioxide to protect it and give it "fizz"). Around three weeks after starting the kit, it will usually be ready to drink.
What do I need?
You can brew beer with very little equipment, some of which you will probably already have at home, but it is probably easier (and will usually produce better results) if you have some specific equipment that you keep and use only for brewing. As an absolute minimum you will need:
As long as the equipment is clean and sterile, you could feasibly brew the beer in a dustbin and transfer it to empty plastic fizzy drink bottles using a measuring jug and a funnel (not too long ago, that was precisely how most homebrewing was done...) Realistically, better results will generally be obtained from using specialist equipment that can be easily cleaned and sterilised and kept specifically for brewing use.
As a minimum, the following equipment will be needed to allow you to make your first brew:
The following items are not absolutely necessary but will make life a easier:
It is possible, to save money and a bit of effort, to ferment your beer in a pressure barrel and then store it in the same barrel without syphoning it off the dead yeast. Providing that you plan to drink the beer within a few weeks, there is, in principle, nothing wrong with this approach. If, however, the beer sits on dead yeast for any length of time, which it will if you are planning to mature it for several weeks to improve the body and flavour, there is always the chance that the beer will become tainted and pick up "off flavours".
Personally, I would always choose to brew in a dedicated brewing bin and then transfer the beer to a wide necked pressure barrel to mature. In almost 20 years of using this method, I have never had a failed or tainted brew, but I may just have been lucky.......
Once they have made a few beer kits and are happy with the general process of fermenting and bottling/barrelling their beer, many home brewers want to move on and start taking greater control of the colour, flavour and bitterness of their beer. The simplest way to do this is to move onto Brewing with Malt Extract. It does require some additional equipment and a little more time than brewing with beer kits, but the results can often be considerably better than even the best two can kits can produce.
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