Horst Buch's Fast and Easy Beer

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—Caps: 66 caps at 73¢. The cheapest caps are overruns from various commercial beverage companies, meaning you could wind up topping your bottles with caps for orange soda or something worse.

Plain caps cost a few cents more and are well worth the extra expense. "Real Beer" caps will set you back 86¢ a batch.

Here's the equipment you'll have to invest in only once:

It may sound tempting to just go ahead and buy a beginning brewer's kit, but trust me, it's smarter to pick out each item individually. You'll end up with everything you need, and you won't waste money on stuff you don't. Here's the list of necessities, along with their prices taken from the latest catalogs:

—A large pot is needed for boiling ingredients. A four-gallon stainless steel stock pot at $48.95 is handy for other things besides making beer.

—Along-handled spoon helps mix ingredients as you go. A stainless steel spoon is nice, but a plastic paddle won't scratch your fermenter and costs just $4.99.

—A fermenter is a large bucket that holds beer while it ferments. Purists warn against using plastic, saying it scratches easily and must be replaced often. I've had the same plastic fermenter for 10 years and it's like new. With an indelible pen, I marked the fermenter at one-gallon intervals so I never have to measure when adding water. A seven-gallon fermenter (big enough to hold six gallons of bubbling brew) costs $11.25.

—A six-gallon glass carboy, which holds the beer while it clears, costs $24.95. If you can get a better deal on an empty fivegallon, bottled-water carboy, you'll need an additional one-gallon jug (you can use an apple or cranberry juice jug).

—Airlocks and stoppers will allow gasses to escape without letting nasty critters fly in. You'll need three airlocks and three rubber stoppers, one for the fermenter, one for the carboy, and one for the gallon jug. A stopper is simply a rubber cork with a hole drilled in the middle to hold the airlock. Stoppers come in various sizes for various prices. The hole in the fermenter generally takes a #2, the carboy takes a #6 1/2, and most one-gallon jugs take a #8 1/2. Cost for three airlocks with stoppers is $5.66.

—A syphon is used to prevent the awful-tasting sediment at the fermenter's bottom from mixing with the fresh beer that you transfer into the carboy. The syphon should have a stiff plastic tube at one end so it will stand in the carboy instead of snaking out and spraying beer all over your walls. A removable filler attachment at the other end helps you fill bottles after the beer has cleared. (hint: slip a cork onto the stiff end to hold the syphon up out of the bottom muck, and add another cork to the filler for easy gripping.) The total cost is $13.34.

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