Forbes - Home brewing: producing your own beer, wine and cider

There are a number of ways to brew beer at home but before going through the options lets look at the basic brewing process broken down into four stages:

Mashing: The soaking of ground malted barley in hot water, producing sweet wort.

Sweet wort is then mixed with hops, producing hopped wort.

Yeast is added to the hopped wort mixture and it is left to ferment.

The beer matures in bottles or kegs with sugar or carbon dioxide added to increase carbonation.

Undoubtedly the easiest way to start brewing is to use one of the many kits available. Essentially, these beer kits are concentrated hopped worts, so in effect steps 1 and 2 are done for you. These concentrates are produced in the same way a brewer would, but after the hops are added some excess liquid is evaporated under vacuum at low temperatures to preserve the delicate flavours, then the concentrate is pasteurized and canned. To continue the brewing process at home, all that is necessary is to dilute the concentrated wort back to its original density, ferment and then bottle or keg it.

Sometimes extra hops are included to restore aroma lost during production. Some cheaper kits require that you add a large amount of sugar to the concentrate before fermentation. These cheaper kits are alright if your budget is tight or if you are just starting out on your new hobby, but will not, in most cases, produce beers to the same quality as the more expensive, no sugar, all grain kits.

The advantage of brewing from a kit is the ease of obtaining all the ingredients you need. The recipe is taken care of for you and less equipment and space is needed than for other methods.

This method is more complex than using a kit. The malt extract concentrate does not contain hops and when diluted and heated gives you the equivalent of sweet wort. You then add the hop flavour by adding a muslin bag (sparge bag) containing the hops to the sweet wort, for around 20 minutes towards the end of the heating process. The resulting hopped wort is then fermented and bottled or kegged.

Half mashes are a halfway house between the concentrated malt kits and a full mash.

The sweet wort is made from a combination of specialty grains soaked in hot water and malt extract.

The advantages of partial over full mash are that you dont require quite so much space, equipment or skill. The advantages of partial over a malt extract brew is that you have more control over the finished beer.

At the other end of the scale of complexity from the home brew kit is the full mash. There certainly is craft and skill in brewing a full mash and the effort involved in acquiring these skills and brewing full mashes will reward you with the satisfaction of brewing beers as good, if not better than, commercial breweries.

To produce a full mash, first of all you need a grist. This a mix of crushed, dry grains that are mixed together before mashing. Typically, the major portion of this grist would be pale malt with maybe a small amount of crystal malt. Other widely used grains are wheat, maize and dark roasted malts.

The grist is then mashed, i.e. it is soaked in hot water for an hour or two. The purpose of mashing is to convert the starch in the grist (which isnt fermentable by brewers yeast) into sugar (which is).