Learning to brew for free
As a beer lover, I’ve often considered brewing my own beer. The possibilities seem endless – brown ales, pale ales, stouts, fancy Belgian-style beers – all for a little effort and at a significantly lower cost than the same number of cases of beer. That, and I’d truly understand and know my beers.
Then I looked a little closer, at a whole lot of cleaning, lugging pots and bottles around, more cleaning, stirring and mixing, more cleaning, some sterilizing for good measure. You get the idea. It was the thought of sterilizing a whole bunch of bottles that finally persuaded me not to try brewing, but I still feel as though my beer education is lacking something as a result.
If, after reading that, you’re still interested in brewing, the good news is that there’s a very comprehensive looking (and FREE) guide to brewing available on the internet. Even better, if you decide you like it and get sick of waiting for your inkjet to laboriously print that puppy out, you can buy a copy of the entire book as well.
If you’ve brewed using this guide, let me know, or if you can recommend other online brewing sources throw it in a comment for the rest of us.
My husband and I love homebrewing! The sterilizing is a pain but we found a neat little gadget that gets the bottles in and out quickly, and a sanitizing powder that doesn’t need to be rinsed out and works great on the bottles and pots, etc. We haven’t used that guide but he swears by “The Complete Joy of Homebrewing.”
Actually, I’ve never had a problem with sterilizing bottles. Microwave some water to boiling temperature and fill the bottle with it for a minute, which gets rid of most bacteria you can expect to deal with. It’s getting enough boiling water for the large buckets we’ve got (mead and liqueurs) that’s a pain.