Brew Your Own Beer

Another thing the article fails to mention is the use of a hydrometer throughout the process. This is almost as cheap and simple as a thermometer, about $10 for the hydrometer and a tube to use with it, and it will last a lifetime if you don't drop it. This reads the amount of dissolved solids (mainly sugar) in a beer. Commonly there are three scales: specific gravity, potential alcohol, and percentage of sugar, the last used mainly by winemakers. I take a reading every time I am handling the beer anyway, either from the siphon hose or a sanitized dipper like a measuring cup. This tells you where the beer started, whether or not it is done, and where it finished. These numbers can be compared to printed recipes and style charts, or your own records of previous brews. Subtracting the final reading from the initial reading will tell you the percentage of alcohol. Knowing when it is actually done will help prevent exploding bottle stories. Counting bubbles is not reliable. As time goes on, the amount of bubbling has less relation to what the yeast are doing. After about three weeks (for a normal strength brew), it is mostly just CO2 coming out of solution, which could go on for months. Also, you can drink the samples to taste the beer at different stages, so you learn what is normal and can possibly detect problems while there is still time to do something about it. Returning samples to the fermenter would risk contaminating the whole batch.

The one thing that this article fails to mention is that you don't have to waste time bottling beer if you invest in a kegging set up. My husband and I make at least 75% of the beer we drink. After years of washing bottles to bottle beer in throughout college we invested in a CO2 tank and some used 5 gallon soda kegs. You can ferment your beer and then you simply sanitize your kegs and put the beer in it and allow it to carbonate. Within about 1.5 hours you can drink your beer! We have a farm and could never find the time to provide all our own beer if it were not for kegging. If you own a large turkey fryer pot you can make up to 15 gallons of beer at a time so you won't have to brew so often. Kegging set ups are available at many online and local homebrew stores. If you want to make a lot of your own beer and are stressed for time, kegging is the only way to go. Oh and you can also make homemade sodas and sparkling juices by simply mixing the soda ingrediants and putting the mixture in the keg and carbonating so that you have soda/ root beer within an hour or hour and a half! For sparking juice you can just put it in the keg (so long as it has been pasturized) and carbonate it! This is a great way to get kids to drink their juice or drink soda with no preservatives or corn syrup since you choose what goes into it.

Brewing is fine, but for a little less effort, using most of the same equipment, home made wines are my preference.

The same stores that sell beer making supplies generally also carry wine making supplies. You can make virtually any variety you can find in the store, or make wines from any fruit, and some vegetables.