Disclaimer: I have brewed beer as a hobby for about 4 years now, I get okay results, but I absolutely HATE getting technical about food (and beer is food). Like with any hobby, people create artificial barriers of entry to brewing, and there is a lot of drama and people Knowing Better and putting others down for not following some particular step or not knowing their hop types or whatever, it’s all steeped in elitism. I just wanted to share my experiences of brewing simple, nice beer, with as low barrier of entry as possible, where you don’t have to worry about some exact measurements one way or another, just enjoy the process and hopefully have a nice drink at the end. I wrote this short guide because I felt like sharing the little knowledge I have and am reposting it from the VHC discord.

This is for a ~10L batch. The total process takes at least two weeks of fermentation, and at least a week of post-ferment (but 2-3 weeks is recommended). The brewing takes a few hours, but most of it is spent waiting, just checking in on the beer regularly. The bottling takes anywhere between 30min to two hours, depending on how well you streamline your process.

Prices are local to me in Sweden, looking at a single online store, YMMV. All equipment should be fine to buy second-hand if you can (and will last you years if you choose to continue). I use $$$ because I am trapped in the hegemony of the Big Satan and also because the conversion between the local currency and USD is just a matter of dividing it by 10 (give or take), and this makes it easier for other people to follow.

Ingredients

The most basic beer is made with just 4 ingredients: water, barley, hops and yeast. Some sugar is also needed for bottling.

Water: you know this one. In total you will need something like 20L of water but not at the same time and the tap water is fine.

Barley: you need malted barley, crushed. Malted barley (or just “malt”) is barley that has been sprouted for a few days, then dried to stop the process from continuing. The process converts the grain starches into various sugars which can then be fermented into alcohol. Unless you want to run a big operation, buy pre-malted and pre-crushed barley from some beer brewing shop. There are a lot of different kinds to choose from, I recommend buying a cheap crushed “base” malt, meaning a very pale kind that isn’t roasted. In Sweden that usually goes for something like $30 for a 25kg sack. You need a tenth of that for one batch, but smaller quantities will obviously cost more. If you just want to try out this once, then yeah, a small 2.5kg bag is enough. Once you get more into brewing, you might want to start experimenting with other kinds, for example roasted malts which add full, slightly chocolate-like aftertaste to the beer and make it much darker, different grains like wheat for that sweet, sweet weissbier experience, or spray malts which are essentially sugars freeze-extracted from malts, which add plenty of weight and taste to the beer, but are expensive. You will usually still use mostly the base malt, and only add a little of the extra malt on top of that, usually 5-10% by weight. For now, 2.5kg of basic pale malt is enough.

Hops: biggest point of annoyance with microbrewers. There are hundreds of varieties, and people will swear by different kinds and different combinations of them for different kinds of beer. Sure, there are some subtle differences but most of it at the amateur level is just people trying to sound cool. Most popular hops will work for brewing, for example Cascade, Mosaic or Hallertauer varieties. You can usually see the “alpha acids” percentage, in simplest terms this is the “strenght” of the hops, I recommend something in the 5-10% range to begin with, for example Cascade, but feel free to take whatever. Hops usually come in two forms: pellets, and dried hop cones. Pellets are the easiest to use in my opinion, and usually come in 100g bags costing like $5 each. About a third of that is needed for the 10L batch.

Yeast: theoretically you could try regular baker’s yeast or even wild yeast, but it’s not recommended (but I haven’t tried, who knows, maybe it works great). The brewing yeast is fairly cheap ($4 for a sachet of dry yaest that is enough for 2 batches. Honestly I thought it was cheaper, maybe they hiked the prices) and much more stable for brewing, and if you’re already buying malt and hops, you might as well spring for the yeast too. The most common and simplest variety is US-05. No need to go for anything else at this stage.

Sugar: regular white sugar. You will need 40-50g per batch.

Equipment

The absolute most basic things you will need are: a very big pot (15+ L), thermometer, a big strainer, a big bowl, a fermentation vessel with an air lock, and desinfectant. If you want to bottle the beer (which I recommend), you will need beer bottles, a capping tool and bottle caps.

The pot: just a big pot, that’s it. I recommend a matching lid. 15L is needed so you have a margin for it to reduce down to 10L without having to constantly watch it.

Thermometer: a good thermometer that you can submerge in water/beer, that’s it. Nothing fancy required.

Strainer: just a big strainer, for straining out the spent malt in one of the steps. Later on if you feel like stepping up your game, you might invest in more specialized equipment to streamline the process, but this is enough for now.

Bowl: just a big bowl that can fit the excess wet malt during the lautering step.

Fermentation vessel: a cool name for just something where the wort (i.e. pre-fermented beer) can ferment into beer. Historically people have even used literal holes in the ground, but nowadays you can buy plastic buckets with matching lids, the lids already equipped with airlocks. The airlock is there to let the CO2 created during fermentation out without the closed bucket exploding, and without letting any outside air back in. I recommend a bucket with a hole in the side, where a plastic tap can be mounted, it helps a lot during bottling. A fully equipped “fermentation vessel” like this should cost something like $10-15 new. Some people may use glass or plastic carboys, which look cool and all, but are super annoying to clean. Stick to buckets, you will thank me later.

Disinfectant: unless you want your beer to sour in an unpleasant way, basic sanitation is required. In my experience, most people online are way too anal about it as I skip some of the sanitation steps and have never had a problem, but you still don’t want the beer to get infected before the yeast takes hold. I use sodium carbonate peroxyhydrate, it’s a white powder that you dissolve in warm water. You don’t use a lot and it lasts forever so you are good buying just a little pouch. Just be careful, some of the disinfectants might be bad for your skin and virtually all of them will fuck up your soft membranes.

Bottles: regular glass beer bottles are fine. You can just buy some beer, drink it, wash out the bottles and you’re good. I suppose even glass soda bottles work. A 10L batch will fill about 30 330ml bottles (math is hard).

Capping tool: these are special tools that close a fresh cap on the glass bottle. Probably the most specialized thing on the list, and aren’t super cheap. Standing ones are way more comfortable and reliable than handheld, but cost about 3x as much ($45 vs $15). It’s virtually impossible to properly close a bottle without one.

Caps: beer bottle caps. They are cheap, smallest batches I can find cost $5 for 250 caps, and if you buy a bigger batch then you’re paying even less per cap. They also come in many different colors and you can even get custom prints.

Another good thing to have might be a hydrometer: it’s basically a weighted glass tube with graded marks on the side. When submerged in liquid, it will float at different heights depending on the liquid’s density. There are many ways to grade them, I use one that shows “relative weight”, i.e. density relative to water, so for example a reading of 1.040 means the wort is 4% heavier than water. This measurement is helpful if you want to know the ABV at the end of fermantation. Still, the recipe should yield a consistent 4% beer, so you might skip it if you wish. If you do buy it, consider also a tall measuring glass that fits it, makes it slightly easier to use it.

That’s basically all the things you will need and then some. If you get more advanced, you can start looking into a second fermentation bucket, for streamlining some steps. This one won’t need a lid or an airlock, but is useful for filtering out residue before bottling, for example. When you have that, you can also consider a lautering filter that you can install in it (expensive!) making one of the brewing steps a breeze, and a bottle filler that makes it easier to not spill the beer (cheap). Also a pretty cheap but quite helpful addition is a clearing agent. The only vegan clearing agent I know of is Irish Moss, or its extracted form Protafloc. I use the extracted granulates, and a pinch per batch is enough. What it does is that it binds the messy proteins that form during the boiling phase for easy filtration so the beer gets clearer in the end.

The brewing itself

Basic beer brewing consists of 5 steps: mashing, lautering, boiling, fermentation, and bottling (or kegging, but I’ve never done that) and we will do them in that order. Mashing: you put the malted barley into warm water, to extract the sugars from it. First, pour 5-6L of water into the big pot, and keep it on high heat. Weight out about 2.5kg of malt in a big bowl. You can do with as little as 2kg, but it requires more work (longer lautering/straining), and I am a bit lazy so I opt for more malt. You want the resultant mixture of malt and water to be about 65-70C, so I usually bring the water to about 75-80C before turning off the heat. Make sure that you take the temperature while stirring, as the temperature differential can be huge in such a big pot. Once you are at the correct temperature, pour the malt in, slowly while stirring (use a wooden spoon or something), or you will have to deal with clumps which is annoying. Once that’s done, put the lid on, and you can wrap the pot in a big towel for extra insulation, so it doesn’t cool off too quickly. Absolutely do not go above 80C as the malt will start cooking and you will get The Bad Slop™️. Still usable, but will not be great lol. Now the pot needs to rest for at least an hour. You don’t need to do anything special in the meantime.

Lautering: you strain the malt to extract the sweet, sweet wort. It’s literally sweet and very tasty, actually. This step is probably the most complicated/annoying part of the process. Take your fermenting bucket. If you don’t have one and use a carboy or something, then shit, you will need a second pot, though not necessarily as big as the first one. Put a strainer over the top, and carefully pour the malt mixture over the strainer. You want to get all (or as much of) of the malt into the strainer as possible, if it doesn’t fully fit, transfer the already strained malt into a bowl. The pot needs to be fully free of malt. If anything’s left, pour back the strained wort, and strain again. Actually, do it anyway, strainig the malt a few times over is recommended to extract as much stuff as possible from it. Keep the wort in a smaller pot for now, and fill the big pot again, with as much water as you think will fit in the secondary vessel. It might even be helpful using a third pot, as you will want to end up with like 15L of wort in the end, but you also don’t need it all in one go. Bring the big pot up to about 70C, and pour that water through the strainer again. If you had to separate the malt into smaller batches, you might want to mix them again, so that you extract the sugars evenly. The more you strain, the more sugar you will have in the wort, meaning more taste and alcohol in the very end. Once you have like 9+L of wort strained to a sufficient level, you can pour it into the big pot, and start the next step, keep this step open for now (which is what I do). If you want to do everything by the book, you will need to lauter it all now, which probably requires a lot of space and extra pots, so you can fill your big pot to the brim. When you have strained all of the malt, you can actually use it for other stuff. It has no sugars, but lots of fiber and some protein, so you can dry it out, grind it into a flour and use as filler in bread, for example.

Boiling: you bring the wort to a boil and add hops, Pretty simple. Really, this step is the simplest, but also takes the most time. Just put the big pot of wort on the stove and cook it, at the highest possible setting. It needs to cook for at least one hour, but usually it takes longer. Keep a tally of how much wort you’ve had, and continue lautering, by heating water in a smaller pot on the side and straining it again, then adding the strained wort into the big pot. In total, I usually get 15L-20L, and I want to reduce it to 10-12L, so you can imagine the time it takes. It doesn’t need too much active input aside from the lautering on the side, and adding the hops (and optionally the clearing agent near the end). Hopping is probably the most contentious point in brewing, and dudes will tell you all about the science of waiting 5 minutes here to add this hop, then 15 minutes to add that one and so on, but fuck that. I either add my hops slowly over the course of the boil, or just dump them in from the beginning. Too much headache otherwise, and I don’t really feel that much of a difference anyway. I usually add 30-35g of medium-strenght hops to my boiling wort, and that is pretty bitter already (which I like). You can go higher for a really hoppy beer, or go milder, or whatever you feel like, it’s your beer, and fuck the pretentious douches. Hell, if you want an extremely hoppy beer, you can even do the so-called “dry-hopping” where you add extra hops mid-way through fermentation, but it tends to make the beer muddier in the end, if that’s something which bothers you. If you use a clearing agent, add it about 30min before you stop boiling. As mentioned, a pinch of the Irish Moss extract is enough. Now at the end of boiling, another highly disputed step comes up. According to Science™️, you need to bring the hot wort back to room temperature as quickly as physically possible. This is due to the risk of bacteria forming within the 40-50C range, infecting your beer and making it go bad during fermentation as the yeast will not be strong enough to fight back. Recommended amateur solution is to put the pot in your sink, fill the sink with cold water, throw in ice, then change out the water once some of the heat gets transferred and repeat until your wort has cooled, and it should not take longer than like 15min or Bad Things will happen. I followed this advice for ages, until one time I didn’t feel like it and nothing happened. I haven’t been quick-cooling my wort for like two years now and I have not had a single problem. I am not promising it won’t happen to you, but I personally skip the quick cooling, it’s a mess and a lot of work, I just let the wort cool down on its own, which maybe takes two hours but I don’t care. You will also notice I haven’t mentioned anything about sanitation yet, which is also personal experience and some common sense: why disinfect anything that will be boiling anyway? But some beer bros will yap at you if you don’t disinfect your pots and strainers for previous steps.

Now that you have a cooled down wort, fermentation. Here, you need your disinfectant. I put mine in a spray bottle for easy application. I generously spray down everything that will be touching the beer: the inside of the fermentation bucket, the lid, the airlock, the strainer (it can be useful now too), the hydrometer and the measuring glass if you will use them, an extra spoon. It goes quick so I might as well. Let the disinfectant do its job for a few minutes, pour out the excess disinfectant from the bucket etc, and pour over the wort into the bucket carefully. If you do it through a strainer, you will notice a lot of nasty shit getting stuck in there, that is mostly weird protein chains from the barley and hops, and also a lot of muddy hop residue. You can discard it. If you have a hydrometer, now is the first time to use it: either submerge it into the bucket directly and read the value, or get some of the wort in a measuring glass and get the reading that way (easier). A typical reading for beer made this way is 1.045, meaning this mixture is 4.5% heavier than water. This is what’s called Original Gravity (OG). Note it down, for example on a piece of paper where you can also date the beer and tape it to the bucket. Last step is adding the yeast. A typical 11.5g sachet is enough for 20L, so add half, and stir it into the beer with a desinfected spoon (or with the hydrometer like I do). Put a lid on it, make sure it’s tight and that the airlock is filled correctly with water. Place the bucket somewhere out of the way and forget about it for like 2 weeks. The yeast I recommended before is a “top fermentation yeast” meaning it works best in the 18-23C temperature range, which mostly yields stuff like ales. The other main kind is “bottom fermentation”, working in the 5-12C range, and yields, for example, lagers, but is much more difficult and takes more time (and I’ve never tried it). Never add yeast to a hot beer, the temperature will kill the yeast. The beer should start bubbling within a day, and days 2-3 will have it fart constantly. Some people say the outgassing smells bad, it’s never been a problem for me as I have always put it way out of the way, in a cabinet for example. After a week the bubbling will become very rare, and two weeks after the start should be enough. More advanced people might want to transfer the beer to a new bucket after one week, which helps with clarity, but it’s not necessary. It’s also not a big deal if you forget the beer for a longer time, like a month.

Last step is bottling. Here I am a bit more anal about hygiene. You will need enough empty bottles and fitting caps for them. I usually fill the sink with warm water, dissolve some disinfectant in there, and soak the bottles for a few minutes (I can’t fit them all at the same time so I do it in batches). Similarly for caps and any other equipment you will need here (like a bottle tapper, a spoon or the hydrometer). You can measure your beer’s weight here again (before you add sugar), this will be called the Final Gravity (FG). It will be lower than the OG, let’s say at 1.015, due to most of the sugars having been converted to ethanol and the (outgassed) CO2. To calculate your ABV, you can use the simple formula (OG-FG)*131.25. In our example of OG=1.045 and FG=1.015 this would mean we get an ABV of 3.9%. It’s not an exact measurement, but it’s close enough. Other stuff you will need is sugar, its role is to give the yeast residue just a tiny little snack so it can fart inside the closed bottle, giving the beer its carbonation. I usually measure out about 4-5g of sugar per 1L beer, and dissolve it in half a cup of boiling water, then add that to the beer (this amount of boiling water is not enough to kill all of the still required remnants of the yeast). Stir it carefully, as there is now a lot of residue at the bottom of the bucket, and if you stir it up, you will need to wait before it settles again unless you like dirty beer (not that it’s particularly bad, just doesn’t look super nice and the last swig of the bottle will be extra bad). If you have a second bucket with a tap, you can put the sugar solution in there and carefuly pour over the beer there, leaving the residue behind. I do it and it helps clarity a lot. Fill the bottles properly, you don’t want to fill them too little (not enough pressure to carbonate it) or too much (too much pressure, risking the caps blowing off), instead the level has to be at about the middle of the bottle neck. If you have a tapper, they usually take just enough volume that you can fill the bottle to “the top”, then when you take the tapper out the level goes down just enough. Cap the bottles. Now they will need at least a week of post-fermantation before they’re good enough. But give it two weeks and they will be even better.

All in all, in very rough calculations, ingredients come to about $1/L of beer, and the cost of the basic starter equipment is about $30. The thread pic is a bottle of beer made with this very method.

FIN