Home brewing is the process of creating beer at home from the ingredients, malt, hops, water and yeast. The process itself is really quite simple and only requires a little preparation and an afternoon of cooking. You can find everything you need to create your first batch of homebrewed beer at your local homebrew store, or from one of the many online homebrew retailers. A basic homebrew kit that contains a 7 gallon plastic bucket, a siphon lock, some hoses, and a grain bag, will normally cost you about $40.

Your first batch of homebrew should be a simple pale ale style beer made from malt extract. An extract based pale ale kit that included malt, hops, and yeast will usually run you between $20 and $30. The homebrew process goes something like this. You boil your malt extract in about 3 gallons of water with some of the hops from your recipe kit for about an hour. You add a bit more hops in the last 10 minutes of the boil to give the beer a crisp taste. You little the brew settle and transfer it to your bucket. When the brew (also known at this point as wort) cools down you add the yeast and seal the bucket with the siphon lock.

It takes the beer 2 – 3 weeks to brew and then if you bottle the beer, it takes another week or so for the bottle conditioning to take effect. You end up with about 5 gallons of homebrew that is every bit as good as what they serve down at the pub.