Site Directory:
Homebrewing Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
for beginning brewers and curious
homebrewers-to-be.
This page is for new brewers or those considering homebrewing as a hobby. We have tried to give you objective answers to some of the fundamental questions people ask before they plunk down their money to start homebrewing. We are not a store trying to sell you something, so we have no vested interest in whether you take up homebrewing or not. Thus, our answers here are not "sugar-coated" to make it sound simpler or easier than it is. But, it ain't rocket science, either. If you have a question which is not answered here, please feel free to ask (go to the Contacts page).
Clicking on a question will take you directly to that section of the FAQ.
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Can I really make beer at home that is as good as store-bought beer?
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I've had Joe's homebrew, who's been brewing for awhile, and they all taste mediocre to me.
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I'm not much for science or technical stuff. Is there a lot I have to learn before I start?
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What is the difference between extract and all-grain brewing?
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OK, so how long does it take to be able to make consistently good homebrew?
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How much does it cost to get started, and how much does a typical batch of beer cost?
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Can't I just buy some homebrew from you guys, or pay someone to brew for me?
Can I really make beer at home that is as good as store-bought beer?
Yes...absolutely...without question. Believe it!
With simple equipment, simple ingredients, and strict adherence to sound brewing practices, anyone can make good beer from Day One.
I've had Joe's1 homebrew, who's been brewing for awhile, and they all taste like...dare I use the word..."swill".
Joe's beers probably suffer from poor brewing procedures. There is no question that we've all tasted homebrew swill, and we'd all have to admit to having brewed some swill ourselves. I've been brewing for over ten years, and though it is a fairly rare event these days, I do occasionally wind up tossing a batch that didn't turn out to my liking (and personally, I'd rather throw out a mediocre beer than drink it myself, let alone serve it to my friends). Most homebrewers also tend to be knowledgeable beer consumers, and if you think about it, would so many people continue brewing their own beers if it always tasted like swill?
The chances are, your first batch of homebrew will probably be OK, if not downright good. Part of that will depend on your expectations. That is a fact, not just me setting you up to have low expectations so you won't be disappointed. If you go into this hobby thinking that your very first batch should come out tasting just like your favorite microbrew, you will indeed be disappointed. It might not be exactly what you expect, or exactly what you prefer in a beer, but it will probably still be at least "OK.", or maybe even damn good beer. Yeah, there's also a possibility that it'll turn out like swill. But even if it does, it isn't the end of the world, so don't give up on it! Brewing is a natural process and sometimes things don't go according to plan, particularly for beginners. The more you learn about what makes beer the way it is, the better you will get at brewing good beer, time after time, that you'll be happy to drink and proud to serve to your friends.
While anyone can indeed brew excellent beer, it isn't quite as simple as just opening a can of soup and heating it on the stove. Because brewing is a natural process, its final outcome is dependent on how well we manipulate Mother Nature and create the optimal conditions for her to do her thing. Commercial breweries brew on a large scale with really cool but expensive, highly-engineered equipment, in which these factors are all easier to control with the push of a button. While minor fluctuations in any beer-critical factors might have a negligible effect on a huge batch of Budweiser, the same fluctuations occurring in a small-scale homebrewed batch can have a pronounced effect on the final beer. In that sense, I guess you could say that it takes more skill to brew consistently good homebrew than it does to brew consistently good commercial beer.1 No reference to any real person(s) by the name of Joe, homebrewers or otherwise, is intended.
Are there limits to how much homebrew I can make?
You live in the United States, and contrary to popular myth, there are limits on everything.
You are permitted to brew up to 200 gallons of beer (that's 40 cases) annually per household (100 gallons per adult). President Jimmy Carter in October 1978 signed the legislation that legalized homebrewing in the United States...a few years after the end of Prohibition, but better late than never. It's a good thing he signed it when he did, too. The following year he was attacked by The Killer Amphibious Rabbit, which no doubt would have caused any sober, level-headed, God-fearing man to have second thoughts about allowing just anyone to make their own beer.
I'm not much for science or technical stuff. Is there a lot I have to learn before I start?
No, no, no. While the entire body of brewing information is indeed a lifetime's worth of knowledge, you only need to know a minute fraction of that to get started. Here's what you NEED to learn before your first batch:
How to boil water;
How to work a can opener;
How and why to clean and sanitize your brewing equipment. This understanding is important, if for no other reason, than to keep you from trying to take shortcuts which WILL lead you down the path toward Swill. There are no shortcuts to cleaning and sanitizing...you either do it right, or you shouldn't brew.
Follow the instructions and the recipe procedures you are given, to the letter. If "the letter" is unclear in any way, call whomever you bought it from and ask questions...or call us.
- How and why to be kind and gentle to your beer, both before and after it is beer. ANY splashing or agitation of hot wort, more than a mere gentle stir while it is chilling, has the potential of ruining your beer before you've even given it a chance to be beer. Then, after it has fermented, ANY splashing or agitation of the beer before or while you bottle it, can also ruin the beer. If your supplier doesn't tell you about this, ask them. Or get your reliable homebrewing book out, look up "oxidizing" or "oxidation" in the index, and find out what it will do to your beer.
That's it...not so bad. Pick up a copy of John Palmer's How To Brew, the best homebrewing book out there. Charlie Papazian's The Complete Joy of Homebrewing (3rd Ed.) is considered by many to be the homebrewing "bible." But while it is an entertaining and worthwhile book to read, How To Brew is a much better resource, is also well-written, the beginners parts are easy to read, and it has much more practical and up-to-date information and resources than any other book I have looked at.
What is the difference between extract and all-grain brewing?
The essence of all beer is malted barley...that is, barley (grain) which has been allowed to germinate. Malted barley contains starches which the zymurgist (heh...brewer) converts to sugar by "mashing" it with hot water, then carefully rinsing ("sparging") the mash with more hot water to create a wort (pronounced "wert"), which is raw beer with lots of maltose (malt sugar) and other good stuff. The wort is then boiled and fermented.
Malt Extract, which comes packaged as either a heavy syrup or as a dry powder, is simply raw wort from which the water has been evaporated. The malting company has done all of the mashing and sparging for you, and made it easy for anyone to do extract brewing by simply opening a can or a pouch of malt extract and adding it to water. You now have a reconstituted wort, which you boil and make beer with. Extract brewing has two significant advantages over all-grain brewing:
- it allows you to brew beer in about one-third the time it takes to brew an all-grain batch of beer, and
- it allows you to brew with much less equipment right on your kitchen stove.
All-Grain brewing is simply creating the brewer's own wort by doing the mashing and sparging of the malted barley. It is a more advanced form of brewing, but only in the sense that it requires more equipment and more time. It is still a relatively simple process that anyone can do. As mentioned above, brewing is a natural process...all we are doing is creating the right conditions for Mother Nature to do the work for us. And creating those conditions is pretty easy to do, once you have an understanding of the process. All-grain brewing has several distinct advantages over extract brewing:
- because you create your own wort directly from grain, you have absolute control over the final product, by choosing what goes into it and choosing the mashing process. With extract brewing, all of those choices have been made for you. That's not necessarily bad, it simply limits your options.
- aside from the additional equipment cost, brewing an all-grain batch of beer is much cheaper (by almost half) than brewing an extract batch. That's because you're doing most of the work (mashing and sparging) yourself rather than the malting company.
Where should I go to get my stuff?
I strongly recommend that beginning brewers go to a "brick & mortar" retail store to get your first equipment kit, ingredients and beginning guidance. I recommend Maryland Homebrew in Columbia, MD for that, though we have no connections, financial or otherwise, with them. There, you can see, feel, and browse equipment and ingredients, and ask questions to your heart's content. After you have some experience under your belt and want to venture online to shop for goods, go ahead. There are some excellent online vendors out there, some of which we include in our Favorite Links page.
[Editorial: The Baltimore area once had 5 or 6 homebrew supply shops, but we're now down to three...no, four! -- Maryland Homebrew in Columbia, Annapolis Homebrew (in...duh...Annapolis), the Flying Barrel in Frederick, and the Thirsty Brewer in northern Baltimore County. Competition from online sellers is brutal...both in terms of price and selection. Shopping locally might not always get you the lowest possible price for some of what you need, but there is great value in having local retailers around for support...and to go to when you need something NOW rather than waiting a week or more for delivery. From a personal perspective, I say SHOP YOUR LOCAL RETAILERS!]
OK, so how long does it take to be able to make consistently good homebrew?
What we said above still applies...you can make good homebrew from Day One. But making good homebrew consistently, time after time, is just a matter of experience. The learning curve to get from beginner to making consistently good homebrew is, in my experience, somewhere between 5 - 10 batches. A couple of things really matter here, to your future enjoyment of homebrewing as a hobby, especially if Batch #1 is something less than what you expected:
- It is a hobby, which means that it's supposed to be fun. Don't take the beer, or yourself, so seriously that you want to quit after a batch or two of sub-par homebrew. Granted, spending $25 on a batch of ingredients that turn into crap beer isn't much fun. But you're just starting out...and the beer you might think is crap probably isn't really all that bad (remember, expectations...).
- If you've read one of Charlie Papazian's books, you already know his mantra "Relax. Don't worry. Have a homebrew." Well, I'm all for relaxing, but don't relax to the point of ignoring the details. It is OK, and very natural, to be somewhat stressed over your first batch or two. Relaxing WILL come with a little experience. Everything matters when we brew such small batches as 5 or 10 gallons...good procedures, good ingredients, and rigorous cleaning and sanitation. Developing good brewing practices from the start will help them "burn-in" to your brain, helping them to become second nature down the road, which leads to relaxation.
There is a tendency for beginners to want to try something different every batch...they want to be able to make it all. There is nothing wrong with that, but I encourage new brewers to brew the same recipe more than once, especially if the first batch didn't turn out the way you thought it should. If you pay attention to procedures, and keep track of what you've done with prior batches (i.e. good recordkeeping), you should be able to reliably recreate the same recipe a couple of times.
This is an important step in your brewing development: gaining the confidence to brew something that will turn out predictably, and being able to relax about it. Every beginning homebrewer gets anxious (i.e. worries) about the whole thing the first time a batch doesn't come out perfectly. But you should definitely have more successes than failures. If you've brewed ten batches of beer and only a few of them resulted in what you consider to be a "good" beer, you should get some objective assistance. First, find someone who will be honest with you about your beers...are they good beer or are they swill? And ask someone who you know brews good beer, to come watch and help when you brew your next batch (a really good reason to join a homebrew club). Remember, too, that it could be your expectations are getting in the way of your results. Someone else might taste one of your beers and pronounce it to be a good "something", maybe not the Sierra Nevada the recipe was advertised as, but still an OK beer. But if that same person makes a face, and almost all of your beers turn out with the same funky taste or aroma, you're doing something wrong. Chances are, it's one of two things:
- poor or inconsistent cleaning and sanitation practices, and/or
- poor beer handling once it is been brewed.
How much does it cost to get started, and how much does a typical batch of beer cost?
"Bare bones" equipment kits at homebrew suppliers generally start at around $50-60. Better ones ($75+) will have more of the things you will eventually need anyway. They typically will not have everything you really need, particularly a large kettle at least 20 quarts in size. If you already have one that you use for your every day cooking, you can use it for brewing as well...it does not need to be a dedicated brewing pot. Stainless steel is probably better than aluminum, but if aluminum is what you have, use it. An inexpensive ($30-40) 20-quart stock pot from your favorite discount retailer will do. A good book ($10-20) is fairly mandatory, and typically NOT included with many kits. A 5-gallon glass carboy ($25) is also kind of necessary in my view, and not typically included. Ultimately, you're looking at somewhere around $100 - $125 in start-up costs.
That doesn't include any ingredients. Ingredients for a typical extract-based recipe should cost somewhere between $22 - $30. That will produce two cases of 12-oz. bottles, at somewhere between $11-15 per case. Not bad, huh?
That brings us to bottles. You need two cases of them for a typical 5-gallon batch. You can either buy them new (about $10 per case) or used from a homebrew shop, or just re-use commercial beer bottles that you've been collecting in anticipation of brewing your own beer. Just make sure they are NOT twist-offs, because they tend not to seal properly with homebrew bottle cappers.
How long does it take to brew a batch of beer?
From brewing day to drinking day, it is usually a minimum of three weeks:
- week 1: primary fermentation
- week 2: secondary fermentation
- week 3: carbonating
Very often, a week isn't enough to properly carbonate a beer and two-three additional weeks work better. Plus, the beer will age and mellow in those additional 2-3 weeks.
The length of your brewing day depends on your brewing method. Brewing a batch of extract beer takes about 2 hours from start to clean-up. If you brew all-grain beers, it's a good six hour day. Racking the beer after week 1 into a sanitized carboy takes all of about 20-30 minutes total, including sanitizing and actually transferring the beer, and cleaning your primary fermenter. Bottling day takes a couple of hours, from preparing your priming sugar, sanitizing the bottles, transferring the beer to a sanitized bottling bucket (using only sanitized tubes and racking canes), putting the beer into bottles and capping them.
Almost everywhere you turn...books, magazines, homebrew supply shops, club newsletters, other brewers...not to mention the Internet.
Can't I just buy some homebrew from you guys, or pay someone to brew for me?
Heh...you funny.
Ever hear of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms...or William Donald Schaefer (Maryland State Comptroller)? It is illegal, under Federal and State law, to sell homebrew. However, I suppose there is nothing stopping you from paying for the ingredients and having a homebrewer make it for you. But once you pay someone for his/her time to brew for you, then you've probably entered the realm of establishing an illegal, unregulated brewery in way violation of federal and state laws.
One more thing...how about distilling alcohol?
As I said before, there are limits on everything. I personally think it is ridiculous that we are allowed to ferment beer and wine for our own personal home consumption, but forbidden by Federal and State law to distill alcohol for the same purpose. Go figure. With that said...
- Can it be done? Sure can.
- Is it easy? Sure is. Get yourself a copy of a book entitled The Lore Of Still Building.
- Is it dangerous? It can be.
- Will I go to jail? Only if you get caught.
