Creating a Home Beer Brewery

Creating a home beer brewery can be a fun and exciting process and something that a group of friends might go in together to buy and use. Home beer breweries do not have to be expensive, since most of the equipment can be bought for under two hundred dollars. There are more expensive systems on the market that automate the process and create more beer at a time which cost around twenty-five hundred dollars, but this is usually not appropriate for a home user who only wants to make their home beer brewery for their own consumption and for friends and family.

Equipment and Supplies

Whether home draught beer is desired or bottle beer, there are some pieces of equipment that are common between them. The main difference comes when the beer is ready to be either bottled or placed in a keg after primary fermentation has occurred and it is ready for secondary fermentation with the pure dextrose added to it. It is during secondary fermentation that the beer becomes carbonated and the sediment settles so that it is ready for consumption. Placing the beer from the home beer brewery system into a keg is a fun variation because it allows the individual to serve their own draft beer for parties at their home.

A home beer brewery needs a brew pot to begin with. The brew pot must be able to hold at least sixteen quarts so that all the water and ingredients for making wort can be contained in it. This brew pot must be made of stainless steel or enamel coated metal so that the taste of the metal is not transferred to the wort. After the brew pot, the primary fermenter is needed. This fermenter needs to be able to hold at least seven gallons and also needs to have an airlock and stopper to go with it. This allows the wort to ferment without exploding, letting the carbon dioxide out and preventing air from getting into the system.

A bottling bucket is needed as well as a saucepan in which to mix together the pure dextrose and water solution that is added to the mixture before bottling or kegging it and going into secondary fermentation. If bottles are used, they should be glass and of a dark color such as dark brown or green. Each of the bottles must be cleaned and sanitized before the bottling process begins and there should be at least forty bottles.