How to brew
If you haven't brewed before, making your own beer may seem as mysterious as alchemy. How can it be that you can mix together a few ingredients, add some water, sprinkle some yeast in and end up with beer?
Ingredients
As we found out in the section What is beer, there are four ingredients that you need to make beer: malt, water, hops and yeast. Each of these four ingredients comes in countless variations and how they are used during in the brew dictates the type of beer that you end up with.
Why brew your own?
There are many reasons homebrewers take up the pastime.
Some brew to make cheap beer. These brewers use the cheapest ingredients possible (typically a can of concentrate and a kilo of sugar) and are in it for the alcohol, not the quality of the beer.
Random beer-related articles from our site
Partial mash brewing
A partial mash, also called a mini-mash, is a hybrid between kit or extract brewing, and full mash brewing. A can of concentrate or malt extract is used, and extra fermentable sugars are added by mashing grain to convert the starches to sugar. Hops are often added to supplement the hops in the can of concentrate. Of course, if unhopped extract is used then hops must be added.
Read more ...Brew in a bag
BIAB is the easiest and usually cheapest way to make an all-grain beer. It is growing in popularity because it is simpler and quicker than other methods of all-grain brewing and requires only one vessel, meaning it needs less investment and less room.
Read more ...Aeration
In the phase immediately after the yeast is added to the sweet wort, it needs to multiply to ensure a good fermentation. To do this effectively it needs oxygen.
Read more ...Latest news
May 28, 2017
New beer reviews
Check out our latest constructive, funny, ridiculous and just plain stupid beer reviews. We've added 20 new reviews of Australian and NZ brews.
Millennium Ale review
We've tasted the 16th bottle of the Millennium Ale. We didn't enjoy it.
