Brewing

Brewing is an ancient art and is fairly easy and fairly cheap to get started with. It's far easier than you think. Brewing encompasses any boiled and fermented beverage, anything between beer and mead.

Fermentation, simply put, is the process of yeast converting sugar into alcohol and CO₂. Brewing, at the most basic level, involves giving yeast things to eat. It's a little more complex - you also need to manage what kind of yeast you have, what the yeast has to eat, and for how long.

Different brews require different techniques - if you're interested in making a specific drink see the links below.

The History of Brewing

Brewing was known to the early Chinese, the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians and the Babylonians. As best as we can make out, most of these early brews involved thick porridge-like mixes of grain and water that had been left out for wild yeast. The resulting 'beer' was probably not particularly tasty, but alcoholic. Big news.

Beer tended to dominate cultures that lacked wine - the Romans looked down upon those pesky barbarians who drank beer.

It has only been relatively recently that the agent of brewing (yeast) was actually understood to be any part in the brewing process at all. Many of the old recipes call for you to simply put the ingredients into a barrel previously used for the purpose and wait. It was not known what it was that magically caused the alcohol to form in the brew.

Obviously, brewing still worked - mainly because the grapes often carried the wild yeasts upon them, but also because the residue of the previous brews would still be embedded within the grain of the oak casks.

General Brewing Technique

If all that you're interested in is Beer then you should visit a home brew shop or supermarket and pick up a brewing kit. These tend to include most if not all of the following:

• Long plastic spoon
• Fermenter (including lid, airlock and rubber seals)
• Bottle filling valve

This equipment can be used to brew other things than beer and should cost $60-$100 (Australian).

Wine kits are also available - though often much harder to find. However most stores also offer many books on brewing that will give you a wide range of options for your brewing pleasure.

Basic Safety

The number one tip I can offer is to do a good job cleaning your equipment. This really does make a huge difference to the outcome.

While many people claim that it is necessary to sterilise, it is more important simply to follow good common sense with regard to basic hygiene. you're basically doing some cooking with some food that will be sitting around for weeks (beer) or months (wine) and so if any greeblies get in - they will breed for that time and you'll end up with an awful mess.

If you trust yourself to be exceptionally clean, then do so, but otherwise, invest in some of the pink sterilising solutions you can get at a brew shop. Alternatively, try Aquashield.

A word of warning: be careful if you use sterilisers that aren't specifically for brewing!

You will be drinking this stuff later, and drinking bleach or other household sterilisation stuff is a Bad Idea™.

The only other thing to be careful about is bottling - read the page on glass grenades to get an idea of one of the more dangerous problems that can occur if you're not patient.

Topics

Equipment

• Brewing equipment

Basic brewing can be done with little equipment. I will list the equipment in order of importance

• Fermentation bucket:

These are sold in any homebrew shop, or you can use a large bucket or container you have already. You want to size your bucket a gallon or two larger than your batch size. you want a bucket that can be sanitized easily. This means it shouldnt be scratched up, because bacteria can hide in the scratches and avoid the sanitizer. It is best if there is some way to seal the bucket. I use 6 gallon plastic buckets for my primary fermentation and glass carboys for the secondary fermentation. The six gallon bucket costs about $10 at a homebrew store.

• Boiling Kettle:

I use a 21 liter aluminum pressure cooker. For a five gallon batch of beer, you want to be able to boil about 2.5 gallons of liquid. A 16-32 quart enameled steel, aluminum, or stainless steel pot will work well. this can be the most expensive part of the setup. I bought my pressure cooker off of ebay for $30, I think you can get enameled pots pretty cheaply at a walmart.

• Longhandled Spoon:

to stir the boiling wort with.

• Bottles:

To bottle a 50 gallon batch, 50 or so 12 ounce bottles are required. I have heard that you can use twist-off type bottles, but I only use the kind that require a bottle opener. I heard that you can get powdered glass in your beer when using twist-off bottles, because they arent built to be recycled. Pop-top bottles are surprisingly hard to get a hold of in 50 bottle batches. maybe contact someone you know that works in a restaurant for these. Homebrew shops sell the bottles new for 50 cents each.

• Bottle caps:

These can be purchased inexpensively from a homebrew shop. I think they run about $3 for 100

• Bottle Capper:

This costs about $15 at a homebrew shop.

• Sanitizer:

you can pay a lot of money in a homebrew store for a fancy no-rinse sanitizer, or you can use common household bleach. I use bleach. I pay about $1 a gallon for it.

• Airlock:

This allows the carbon dioxide to leave your fermenter, but keeps air out. It isnt absolutely necessary, it is possible to brew fine beer without one, but they are cheap and make life easier. They cost about 75 cents at the homebrew store.

• Hydrometer:

found in homebrew store for about $3-6. these are very delicate, I have broken several. These are not especially necessary anyways. They are used to find the alcohol percentage of the beer.

• Timer

• Thermometer

Types of Brewing

• Wine brewing
• Mead brewing
• Beer brewing
• Alcoholic Infusion (legal liqueurs)

Drinks

• Mead
• Wine
• Beer
• Spirits
• Cider / Perry
• Cordial

Sources

There are several period sources for information regarding brewing but as with recipes much of what is "known" about period methods is speculation. Most long works on the topics are Out of period.

Useful works include:

• The London and Country Brewer
• The Complete Joy of Home Brewing 3rd ed.
  • by Charlie Papazian
  • very good descriptions of everything needed to homebrew, including many recipes.