Welcome to Home Brewing Heaven

Welcome to the world of home brewing beer! Home Brewing beer is a time honored tradition that is as American as apple pie, Pet Rocks and Monster Truck Rallys.

Beer, a brief history

What we know as beer today has been brewed and perfected over time. It is known that the Ancient Egyptians brewed something that resembled tea and would later become "Bier" when the Europeans got a hold of it. In Medieval Europe in the 9th century, HOPS were added to the sweet grain concoction and the modern drink called beer was born. God bless the Europeans.

Home Brew and its methodologies

There are two primary methods of brewing beer available to the home brewer: Extract and All Grain.

Beer consists of grains that have had the starch modified and turned into a sweet WORT (pronounced WERT). Extract brewing is the easiest and quickest method. It takes pre-modified grains and puts them directly in to the boiling water. As you can imagine the conversion process is done for you and therefore costs more...much more.

The All Grain method consists of taking raw grain and converting it into a wort using a simple two step process called a mash. This method is more time consuming however costs much less and creates a much better tasting beer.

In the following pages we will follow the process of All Grain Brewing and hopefully make the process seem easy to understand. The process is long and most of the time is spent cleaning and waiting but the result is well worth the work.

Standard Disclaimer

Reality is this: there are many little gotchas and perfections that I will gloss over here since a specific step by step would bore you to death. There are volumes of data available on the internet that can guide you through this process. The singly best spot is Home Brew Talk. I live at this forum. Any questions large or small have been answered there and you can learn more than you ever wanted to know.