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The
Brewing
Process

1. Preparing the yeast
You'll need to plan your brewing a little bit ahead of time, especially if you're using Wyeast. Wyeast needs to be started 24 hours in advance to give the yeasties a chance to get lively. Wyeast comes in a flat foil package with a bulge in it. Lay the package on a counter or a table, press the package so that the bulge is near the top, and hit the packet hard with your hand until your break the bulge. Knead the package for a little while to mix the yeast you've just released with yeast food. Put the package in a warm place and leave it alone for 24 hours. The package should puff up as the yeast gets busy and starts producing CO2. If it doesn't puff up, you may have gotten dead yeast. Toss it and try another package. That, or show it the bag of brown sugar that you bought and promise it fun food to eat if it will only grow a little bit bigger. If you're using dry yeast, skip this step.

2. Preparing your kitchen
When your yeast is ready to roll, get your kitchen ready for brewing. Clean off the counters and get everything out of the sink. Fill up your brewing kettle with four gallons of water and put them on to boil. Grab four clean gallon milk jugs. Fill them with tap water and add iodine solution in the proportions described on the bottle. Swish the iodine around and then let the sterilizing solution sit in the jugs for at least ten minutes. That should kill off anything nasty that might have been growing in the jugs, waiting to contaminate your beer.

3. Cleanlienss is next to godliness
A brief digression about cleanliness: No matter how big a slob you may be (and I'm a major slob -- just ask anyone who's been in my office) you've got to make sure that anything that touches your beer is clean. The art of brewing is to let yeast grow in your beer and to preventing anything else from growing in it. Some brewers use chlorine bleach to sterilize their equipment, others run it through the dishwasher. My brewing partner and I have ruined two batches because of non-sterile equipment, and I'm now a convert to iodine. Don't let anything touch your beer unless it's been boiled for several minutes or soaked in iodine solution. Period.

So why are you boiling this water? Well, for one, to sterilize it -- If your municipal water supply has even a low bacteria count, you want to make sure all those buggers are dead before leaving them alone with your beer for a few weeks. Boiling also has the important effect of de-chlorinating the water you'll be using. Most municipal water is chlorinated, and chlorinated water makes nasty beer. (If you don't feel like purifying all this water, you could buy a few gallons of spring water from the grocery store instead.) Once the water is boiled, put a stopper in your sink and dump all the iodine water into the sink. Now you've got a sterilizing bath for all your brewing equipment. Fill the jugs with the boiled water and put them in the fridge.

4. Create atmosphere
Start by putting music on the stereo that you think the beer will like. I'm going to brew this beer while listening to Billy Bragg. A German Weissbier might call for some classic Kraftwerk, or perhaps some polkas. The super-hoppy coffee beer I brewed last month begged for Ministry's "A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste". You make the call. Next, open a homebrew to drink while you brew. If you don't have any homebrew around, any small microbrewed beer will qualify. (You won't lose any points for drinking the beer you're aspiring to create, in this case, Bass.)

5. Make a mini-mash
We're going to start this beer by making what's known as a mini-mash. Pour the pound of crystal malt into your larger mesh bag and tie it off. Use a rolling pin (or any other bludgeon-like object: frying pan, heavy glass bottle, nightstick...) to crush the grain. You want to open the kernels, exposing the inside, not to turn the grain into dust.

Put a gallon of cold tap water into your brew pot, add the mesh bag and heat the water until it boils. When the water boils, remove the mesh bag, letting the water drain into the pot. You'll notice that in the few minutes the grain was in the pot, it turned the water yellowish-brown and you've got a pungent smell filling your kitchen. Though your housemates or spouse may now be complaining, this is a good thing: you've got the beginnings of a wort.

Add two more gallons of tap water to the brew pot and let the water temperature increase to a boil again. Pour in the brown sugar, a cup at a time, stirring vigorously. When the sugar dissolves, add the next cupful until you've used the entire pound of sugar. Open the malt extract and let it drain into the pot while you stir. (This is probably a two person operation unless you're remarkably strong.) You've got to stir like crazy, because there's a lot of sugar in this brew and you don't want anything sticking to the bottom and burning.

Once the wort is boiling again, put the ounce of Northern Brewer hops into your smaller mesh bag, tie it tightly and toss it into the brew. These are your boiling hops, and they'll sit in your brew for the next hour. In 55 minutes, you'll add an ounce of Fuggles hops -- your finishing hops. (If you're counting very closely, you'll notice that you're out of small mesh bags. Bummer. Tea balls for brewing with loose tea work well. Or you could use cheesecloth, or a clean nylon stocking. Be creative.)

6. Prepare for fermentation
Keep stirring the brew every couple of minutes, making sure that nothing's sticking to the bottom of the pot. While the brew boils, you can get your carboy ready for fermentation. Fill it with five gallons of tap water and add an appropriate amount of iodine solution. Put your airlock assembly, carboy stopper, funnel, thermometer and 5' length of tubing into the iodine solution in the sink. When they've had 15 minutes to chill out, drain the water out of the carboy, fill the airlock with boiled water (from the jugs in the 'fridge), and fit the stopper and airlock onto the carboy.

When the finishing hops have been in the brew for five minutes, take out both hopsacks and turn off the heat. Take the airlock and stopper out of the carboy and put your funnel there instead. Pour the hot wort from your boiling pot into the carboy. It helps to have at least two sets of hands for this step of the process. One person should hold the funnel so that it's not completely seated in the neck of the carboy. If air can't get out of the carboy at the same time that liquid is getting in, the wort will pop and spurt, possibly burning you. Be very careful.

Once you've poured the wort in, add boiled water from the 'fridge to fill the carboy almost to the top. Swish the mixture around to mix the water and the wort.

7. Cool the wort
Your beer should now be pretty hot -- if you were to pour yeast into it right now, the yeast would die. So you've got to cool the wort off. Unfortunately, you've got to cool the beer in a hurry -- if the beer remains hot for too long, there's increased chances that the mixture will get infected, and certain flavor compounds will break down, making the beer less tasty. Serious homebrewers use a funky device known as a "wort chiller" to cool their beer off. We're going to use a significantly less high-tech solution and put our carbody in the bathtub, and fill the bathtub with cold water. Take the airlock off the carboy, but leave the stopper in, and slowly lower the carboy into the bathtub. Be very careful not to bang the carboy against the tub, and don't place the carboy directly under the faucet -- the carboy is quite fragile while undergoing this temperature change.

When the bottom of the carboy feels cool to the touch, stick the thermometer into the carboy. When the temperature has dropped below 80 degrees (but preferably higher than 60 degrees) take the carboy out of the bathtub. If you're taking hydrometer readings, pour off a small bit of your beer and record the reading. This reading is the original gravity of the beer. My OG reading for this brew was 1.022, which means that my chilled wort was 1.022 times as heavy as water -- pretty light, but not unusual for a beer this pale. If your reading is way off this number, you may well have botched something.

8. Add the yeast
Your packet of Wyeast should be big, puffy and happy by now. Sterilize it and a pair of scissors in the iodine solution. Take the airlock off the carboy, open the yeast with the scissors and pour it into the beer. Swish the carboy around vigorously to let the yeast explore their new home. Fit the stopper back into the carboy, but instead of adding the airlock this time, attach the five foot tube instead. Move the carboy into a warm dark place -- closets work well, basements usually don't because of temperature fluctuation.

Fill a basin or pot with water and place the five foot tube running from the carboy stopper into the basin. You've just made a sloppy but functional airlock. Carbon dioxide can get out of the brew, so your carboy won't explode, but air can't get in through the water. Why do this instead of using the airlock you paid perfectly good money for? Because in the first few days of brewing, your yeast is going to be very busy, and it's likely to produce a good quantity of foam. This foam can pop the airlock right out of the carboy. The basin and tube system allows the foam to overflow into the basin.

9. Fermentation
The next part of the brewing process requires very little work and a whole lot of patience. 12 to 24 hours after you've added the yeast to the beer, you should see foam begin to appear on the top of your beer. (If you don't get any foam at all for 48 hours, you may have what's known as a "stuck" fermentation. Some brew shops sell a chemical solution that restarts stuck fermentations -- give your shop a call and see if they can help you out.) For the first few days of foaming, you'll probably see foam creep through your airlock tube and accumulate in the basin. Change the water every day so that your house doesn't smell too raunchy, and wait for the fermentation to calm down a bit.

When the beer is still actively foaming , but not pushing out through the tube and into the basin, it's time to put on the airlock. Make a quart or so of iodine solution, and boil a little water. Soak the airlock in the iodine, fill it with cooled boiled water and replace the tube in the stopper with the airlock.

Visit your beer every day for the next week or so. You should be able to see bubbles of carbon dioxide float up through the airlock and out of the beer. When these bubbles stop appearing, your beer has made it through its primary fermentation. This can take as long as two weeks in a heavy beer with a weak yeast, and as little as three days in a light beer with an aggressive yeast.

If you've got a hydrometer, you can be certain that your beer is ready to bottle by taking a reading of the specific gravity of the beer. As fermentation takes place, the sugar in the wort, which makes your beer heavy, is converted into carbon dioxide and alcohol, which are a good deal lighter. Consequently, when the specific gravity of the beer gets very close to that of water -- around 1.008 or so -- it's time to bottle your beer. If your hydrometer reading reveals that the gravity is around 1.015, give the beer a few more days to ferment.

10. Bottling
Bottling is a major pain in the butt, but be consoled that it's the last major step before you get to drink your brew! I'd recommend recruiting at least one friend to help you with this step in the process. With three folks, bottling is a breeze.

Start by washing the 48 pry-top bottles you've been saving for the last few weeks. Then, fill your bathtub with cold water and household bleach. Put the bottles in the tub to sterilize them.

While the chlorine is busy taking out millions of innocent bacteria, get your beer ready for bottling. Take your five gallon plastic food grade bucket and wash it out with iodine solution. (If you didn't fork out 10 dollars for a clean plastic bucket, line a garbage can with a 20 gallon garbage bag.)

Sterilize your long spoon, racking tube, bottle filler and five foot length of plastic tube. Take the airlock out of the carboy and put the carboy up on a sturdy table or counter. Put the (lined) bucket down on the floor. It's time now for a demonstration of the principle of the siphon.

11. The siphon
Attach the racking tube to one end of the tubing. Place your finger over the open end of the racking tube, and put the other end of the tubing under the faucet. Fill the tubing and racking tube with cold water. Ask whoever's helping you to bottle to put her thumb over the end of the tubing and bring that end down into the plastic bucket. In the meantime, you should take your finger off of the end of the racking tube and put the tube into the carboy. Once the tube is in the carboy, your partner should remove her finger. If all goes well, the water in the tube should flow into the bucket, followed by your beer.

12. Racking the beer
The process you've just begun is called "racking" the beer. The idea is to separate the beer from the dead yeast, which has probably settled to the bottom of the carboy. With this in mind, it's a good idea to have one person holding the racking tube in the carboy, keeping it about a half inch above the bottom of the carboy and the muddy, yeasty layer. Somewhere in this process, I like to taste the brew. If it tastes like warm, flat beer, your brew will probably be drinkable in two weeks in the bottle. If it tastes strong, sweet, strange, but not nauseating, it'll probably be okay after some time in the bottle, but it may take a few weeks in bottles to mellow out. If it tastes disgusting, bitter or foul, you may have lost this batch. If there's no evil odor or strange things floating in it, you may want to bottle it and see if it gets any better.

While your partner holds the racking tube, mix three-quarters of a cup of corn sugar with half a cup of water and put that on the stove to boil. Put a couple of cups of water in another pan, along with 50 bottle caps and put that pan on to boil as well. Are you beginning to understand why you need a friend to help in this phase of brewing?

13. Carbonating your beer
Stop racking the beer when you've hit the sludge level. Put the carboy somewhere safe and, if you're forward-thinking, fill it with water and bleach so that it'll be easier to clean later. Move the bucket up onto your counter or table. Dump the corn sugar solution into your beer and stir it up with your sterilized spoon. Corn sugar is junk food for yeast -- it loves it and turns it into alcohol very quickly. You really don't care about the alcohol they create at this point in the game -- you do care about the carbon dioxide that this secondary fermentation will create, because that carbon dioxide will carbonate your beer. Without a secondary fermentation, beer would be alcoholic and fairly tasty, but completely flat.

While the sugar is diffusing itself throughout the beer, take your bottles out of the bathtub and let them drip dry. While the bottles dry, you need to get another siphon started. This time, attach the racking tube to one end of the tubing and the bottle filler to the other end. Put the racking tube end under the faucet and fill the tubing up with water. Place the racking tube into the bucket 'o beer. You're ready to bottle.

14. Delegation
If you've got three people involved with the bottling process, here's how to deploy them. Have one person hold the racking tube in the bucket 'o beer, making sure that it's not sucking up the plastic bag and clogging. Your second person gets to sit on the floor and actually fill the bottles. The bottle filler is pressure-activated. You need to press it against the bottom or side of a beer bottle to make it fill. Fill the bottles up so that there's a half-inch or so of air at the top of each, and hand them off to the third person in the assembly line. The third person gets to cap the bottles. Take the bottle caps out of the boiling water, holding them by the edges. Each capper works differently, so follow the instructions that come with the capper.

15. Patience is a virtue
Five gallons of brew should produce about 45 12 oz bottles of beer, or 7 1/2 six packs. Resist the temptation to take the cap off a bottle and give it a shot -- it won't be all that pleasant an experience. Instead, put the bottles in a safe dark place and do your best to forget about them for two weeks.

15. Test run
After two weeks have gone by, chill a bottle of your brew and give it a taste test. If it smells right and doesn't have mold or anything else floating in it, it's probably not going to kill you. Pour it into a nice glass and give it a taste. If the gods of zymurgy have smiled, you've just produced the first of your many homebrews.

16. Give it space
If you're not happy with how your brew tastes after two weeks, leave it alone for a few more weeks. Many beers get better with age -- more time in the bottle means more time for the flavors to mix together and for the rough edges to smooth out. If you put your beer into green or clear glass, make sure you keep the bottles in a dark room - exposure to light can "skunk" beer, giving it a nasty smell and taste. If the beer isn't better after a few more weeks, you've got a couple of alternatives. If you enjoy cooking or baking, you might want to try beer-batter onion rings, beer bread or beer-based chili.

17. If you should fail
If you're truly crazy and jonesing for homemade alcohol, you could follow the advice of my old friend Thomas Cunningham and build a still. Bad beer evidently makes pretty good mash for making whiskey.

18. Kick back and grab a cold one
There are numerous more complicated ways you can brew beer, and literally thousands of brew recipes. If you enjoyed this process so far, you may want to look into brewing with all-grain, culturing your own yeast or making kegs of beer that you serve pressurized under CO2. Me, I'll be brewing five gallons at a time, searching for the perfect porter. Happy brewing.