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But if you want to get totally series!!11 about brewing beer, most of your gear is going to be home made. I'll try to explain best I can. But realize there are whole volumes of books written on the in's and out's of brewing beer.
First, I'll describe my set up. I have:
* an outdoor propane chili cooker with two burners. I forget who makes them... Bayou something.
* 3 standard kegs (y'know, the big ones you use at college parties) with the tops carved out of them and fittings attached to the bottom of them. These serve as various cooking kettles. The fittings on each one serves a purpose. It's imperative to have at least one kettle of some sort that can hold 7 gallons or more of water. I'll explain more on this later.
* 5 or 6 carboys ranging from 5 gallons to 6.5 gallons in size.
* A siphon made out of standard tubing
* A wort chiller made out of simple copper tubing that can hook up to a garden hose
* A small dorm sized refrigerator converted into a kegerator.
* Two soda kegs.
* Various nickle and dime stuff like iodine sanitizer, airlocks and big wooden spoons.
All told, I've probably spent close to 700 dollars on everything but I'd say half of it, if you have the courage, can be made or manufactored DIY style.
Now obviously not everyone needs or wants to brew beer on such a large level but in order to acheive maximum efficiency on your money spent, my set up and ones that surpass mine (trust me, they can get elaborate) are the way to go.
So how do you brew beer, right? It's simple: malts are soaked in hotwater and the starches are broken down into sugar. The sugar water is boiled, hops are added, then the liquid is cooled. Yeast is introduced and then the beer is aged for a specified amount of time. That's the process. That's it.
Here's where you have to figure out what you want to do as a brewer. I'll break it down into three levels and go through to process and explain what equipment is needed.
The beginner:
The beginner does not perform the first step in the process of converting starch to sugar because he or she purchases either Dried Malt Extract (DME) or a liquid malt extract. All he or she needs is a kettle big enough to hold 6 or 7 gallons of water. The process is simple: add the malt extract and necessary water together, bring the water to a boil, and add the hops. The wort (as the liquid is now known) is chilled using a wort chiller or by letting it cool in a sink of cold water (go with the wort chiller) and then placed inside a carboy. Yeast is introduced and an airlock is placed on top of the carboy and the beer ferments for a specified amount of time. Some people, half way through the fermenting process, will transfer the beer to another carboy to help clear out the yeast sediment. People act like it's a crime if you don't do a transfer, but cloudy beer tastes the same as clear beer. It's just for show.
Once the beer has fully fermented, the beginner usually bottles their beer which means buying empty bottles, beer caps, and a cap press. If I remember correctly, the brewer will have to add a tiny bit of sugar to the beer during bottling. When the beer is bottled, the sugar will activate the yeast again and force the beer to carbonate over a week to ten days. The beginner also usually only has the capacity of making 5 gallons of beer at a time.
The nice thing about making beer from extract is it is completely fuck up free. As long as you sanitize everything your wort touches after it cools, you cannot screw this up. It really is as simple as following directions and boiling water. And it's quick. About 2.5 hours for the whole process. I know a ton of brewers who refuse to go 'all grain' (read: expert) simply because of this reason alone. You can usually buy a kit for about 125 dollars that will have everything but the kettle (a big stock kettle usually goes for about 50 bucks) which will include a nice glass carboy, a hydrometer, some cleaning supplies, usually malt for your first beer, dried yeast, a siphon, and a thermometer. Everything in the kit you will use again and again on all levels of brewing.
The downside is that you're spending about as much money on extract, hops, and yeast as you would if you bought a decent import or microbrew from the local store - About 6 dollars a six pack or so. And, it's harder to customize your beer (which can be a good thing, to some degree). But most people start here. The most important thing to remember is this again: nearly every item you use at the beginner level will be applicable at the expert level. Personally, I've only had to discard one item, a kettle, that was no longer valuable to me since I stepped up to the carved out kegs.
An intermediate brewer will do the same as the beginner, except some malt grains will be steeped in a sock in the hot water prior to adding the malt extract. Everything else is still the same.
I'll explain now how I do things. The following is a typical 10 gallon batch process for me.
As previously mentioned, I have three kegs carved out with various fittings attached to them. In one of the kegs, the fittings has a screen filter at the bottom of it attached to an external fitting (like a faucet). In that kettle I heat up 8 gallons of water or so to 160 ish over the chili cooker and drop in the grains. The chili cooker is turned off and the starch is converted to sugar over the next hour. While that is happening, in another kettle I heat up about the same amount of water to 170 degrees (obviously I have a thermometer :) ) over the second jet of the chili cooker. When the time is up, I slowly pour the 170 degree water into the kettle that has the grains in it and open the fitting (where the filter is) and drain the wort into the third kettle. This should yield about 12 gallons or of wort.
The third kettle is now placed on the chili cooker and boiled. The process at this point is virtually the same as a beginner would do just on a larger scale. Hops are added. The wort is chilled. I sterilize my carboys and then transfer the wort into the carboys. Yeast is added. The wort ferments into beer. Sometimes, I'll transfer it to a secondary carboy to clear. That just depends on the style. If its a stout, who cares if it's cloudy, right?
So what about bottling? Fuck that. Bottling is a major pain in the ass. This is where the soda kegs come in. I transfer the beer to soda kegs, pressurize them with CO2 which forces carbonation into the beer. The beer is ready to drink from the tap the next day.
There are major downsides to making beer this way. First and foremost is time. This process takes no less than six hours. And it wasn't cheap to acquire all the equipment. Like I said before, I've spent no less than 700 dollars on everything. I would also highly advise no to brew like this indoors.
The upside? Premium beer and bargain prices. A ten gallon batch like the one I mentioned above is a whopping 30 bucks in grains, hops, and yeast. Tell me where you can get two thirds of a Guinness keg for 30 bucks? That's right, you can't. :)
Wow. I typed alot. Anyhow, that's how you can make beer. As they say, there's more than one way to skin a cat. There are plenty of work arounds on the internet for nearly every step involved. But the process itself is painfully easy. And there are whole sites dedicated to beer recipes whether they be expert or beginner or inbetween. If you have any questions on anything, just pm me. You'll find homebrewers LOVE to give advice.
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