Step 1 - I like to Watch ! ;)

Sorry to dissappoint, but no sexy pictures or videos here .. I just know what guys like, and that's beer .. am I right fellas ?

To ease myself into the process, I asked my neighbor ..who sadly .. got rid of his boat before I could mooch some time with it .. if I could watch him and help him brew his next batch of beer.  This I did .. all the while peppering him with questions and sampling his previous batch.  It seemed easy enough.  Heat some water up, throw in this syrupy stuff called Malt Extract and cook it while periodically adding hops. 

It actually boiled over once, and you will forever see warnings that this will happen during the process of adding the extract to the water.  However, I have never experienced this problem.  Am I not getting it hot enough ?  After the 60 minute boil, You dump it into a special plastic fermenting bucket with a frozen gallon of spring water (making sure to remove the plastic container of course) to help cool it down.  Throw it in the corner to cool down further and when around 70 degrees F, add the yeast.  Air and open containers, and dirty equipment is the enemy.  You don't want any stray yeasts or other organic matter to get into your brew or you will end up with that infamous "Skunky brew".  You leave the beer in the fermenter until the "bubbling" is down to one bubble every 60 seconds or so.  It bubbles because you insert a water trap into the top of the fermenter.  The pressure in the fermenter is increasing through the fermentation process.  As the pressure inside exceeds the external pressure outside, a bubble of gas will find its way out and through the water trap and vent to the air.  As the fermentation process dies down, the pressure does also and the bubbling will slow down significantly. 

After that, you siphon the beer off of the residue/sediment on the bottom of the fermenter and into a glass or special plastic carboy.  A carboy looks like a 5 gallon water jug that you would place on a water cooler at the office or at home.  You typically leave the beer in the carboy for at least a week, then you keg or bottle it. 

When I went back to the neighbors to help him bottle it, more sampling was required.  It tasted alright , but not up to snuff to the sample of his previous batch.  The reason is this newly brewed beer is still "green", and had no carbonation as of yet.  While bottling I also managed to break 2 bottles.  It sounds worse than it is though .. basically the neck of the bottle fractured .. so we screened it for glass particles with a filter sock and had more "samples".  I could get into this !

Once bottled, you need to let the beer sit in the bottle for at least 2 weeks, but a month is far better.  It gets better with age, just like wine.  The carbonation in bottling results from boiling some corn sugar in some water and adding it to the beer just before bottling.  The sugar will ferment while it is capped and the beer will continue to get better.  a 5 gallon batch will make 50 12-oz bottles or so.  Not bad for around $35 in ingredients.  It will help to find your local brewing supply store.  They are all good guys that will help talk you through the process and help in creating your beer recipe til you know what you are doing.

I am definitely going to try this.