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.