Get brewing

Tips to get started

So you’ve watched the Victoria Beer Week demo, and you’re convinced that homebrewing is for you.  So, how do you get started?

BrewVIC – the local homebrewing club

There are plenty of people around Victoria who are just as enthusiastic about brewing as you are.  BrewVIC is a great community of local brewers who can help you get started.  Connecting with BrewVIC is easy:

There are monthly get togethers that include everything from group brews, like the VBW event, to bottle-shares and style-themed tastings.

Local Homebrew Shops

The proprietors of the local homebrew shops are happy to get you started brewing.  They have years of experience helping people like you make great beer at home.

One man’s trash, is another man’s…

Homebrewing Methods

Like many ‘big boy’ hobbies, there are no limits on how much time or money *can* spend building a home brewery.  Try starting simply…

Kit Brewing

Investigate doing kit brewing (rather than “all-grain”/from scratch) first.  While it’s the simplest method, you can still make great beer while mastering required skills for all brewing methods (whether by kit or from grain). Moreover, all the equipment you’d get to start making kits will still be usable if you do ‘graduate’ to doing “all-grain” brewing.  At the same time, if it turns out the hobby’s not for you, you haven’t invested a whole pile of cash on equipment you’ll never use.

The local shops can certainly help you with kit-brewing equipment and the beer kits themselves.  Starter equipment usually runs about $75 (and usually consists of a plastic bucket fermentor, a glass carboy fermentor, tubing and other bits & pieces).  The beer kits are about $30 (ask for “The Brew House” brand kits) and are available in a very wide range of styles/flavours.

The Brew House kits are about 15 litres of hopped wort.  You pop the top on the kit, pour the wort into a fermentor, dilute with a little water, pitch the included yeast and in a couple of weeks, you have fresh, ready-to-bottle beer.

Extract Brewing

The next step you can take is doing extract brewing.  This is a method where you’d buy malt extract (the product of mashing malt then condensing it into a syrup or down to a powder), some steeping grains to add malt character and hops to add bittering an flavour to your beer.

In a large pot  (about 50% bigger than the size of batch you wish to brew), you steep your crushed steeping grains in hot water (just like making tea) for about 30 minutes. You add your malt extract and dilute with water to the appropriate specific gravity (i.e., concentration).  You bring the wort to a boil and add hops for bittering and flavour, chill the wort and pitch the yeast.

Besides the equipment listed above in kit brewing, you also need a big pot (and something to heat it with).  An 8-gallon pot, appropriate for a 6 gallon (23 litre) batch, can cost anywhere between $50-100.  For a batch this size, heating on the stove will be a bit of a challenge.  Many use propane ‘turkey fryer’ burners.

Brew in a Bag (BIAB) All-grain Brewing

All-grain brewing is called as such because the brewer uses no malt extract, only grain to make wort.  Brew in a bag brewing uses a large bag for mashing.  Many use paint strainer bags that are available from many local paint stores.  BIAB is a very quick and inexpensive way to make the jump to all-grain from extract because the only real additional equipment requirement is the bag.

You crush base malt (usually a relatively neutral malt that makes up the great majority of your grain bill) and add them to the bag along with your crushed character grains.  In your brew pot, heat water so that when the grain bag is dropped in, the temperature will end up at the appropriate mash temperature.

Multi-vesseled All-grain Brewing

Stepping up to the next level means acquiring more equipment.  With multi-vesseled brewing, one vessel is used for mashing and another one for boiling the wort (and often, a third for heating sparge water).  At this stage, you’re also likely really stretching your DIY wings.   There aren’t that many ‘out-of-the-box’ multi-vesseled systems on the market.  Most all-grain brewers have systems that have been customized one bit at a time.  When you’re ready to make the jump to multi-vesseled all-grain brewing, you’ll be ready to do the same.

Most of the DIYers will make regular trips to Home Depot and Andrew Sheritt (for plumbing bits and pieces), but often the online shops are the best bet for brewing specifics (like stainless steel ball valves).  The local homebrew shops don’t tend to stock a lot of all-grain hardware (I think mostly because every DIYer does things their own way with their own equipment).  Some of the popular online retailers (with lots of shiny stainless and handy gadgets) include:

Get brewing!

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