Home Brewing: How to Make Homemade Beer

By The Mother Earth News Editors
Published on January 1, 1988
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Raise your glass to home brewing, a fun, challenging activity that yields delicious results!
Raise your glass to home brewing, a fun, challenging activity that yields delicious results!
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Primary fermenter and Boiling Kettle
Primary fermenter and Boiling Kettle
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clockwise from left: hydrometer, siphon tube, thermometer.
clockwise from left: hydrometer, siphon tube, thermometer.
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Stainless spoon and bottle capper.
Stainless spoon and bottle capper.
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Secondary fermenter with fermentation lock
Secondary fermenter with fermentation lock
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Fig. 2. Adding malt extract
Fig. 2. Adding malt extract
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Fig. 6. Transferring to primary fermenter
Fig. 6. Transferring to primary fermenter
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Fig. 7. Sparging the wort.
Fig. 7. Sparging the wort.
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Fig. 4. Adding the hops
Fig. 4. Adding the hops
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Fig. 3. Stirring the extract
Fig. 3. Stirring the extract
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Fig. 5. Adding malt grain
Fig. 5. Adding malt grain
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Fig. 11. Sterilizing the bottles
Fig. 11. Sterilizing the bottles
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Fig. 12. Siphoning into bottles.
Fig. 12. Siphoning into bottles.
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Fig. 10. Adding priming sugar
Fig. 10. Adding priming sugar
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Fig. 8. Adding Yeast
Fig. 8. Adding Yeast
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Fig. 9. Transferring to secondary fermenter
Fig. 9. Transferring to secondary fermenter
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Fig. 14. Enjoying a home brew
Fig. 14. Enjoying a home brew
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Fig. 13. Capping the bottles
Fig. 13. Capping the bottles
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Raise your glass to home brewing, a fun, challenging activity that yields delicious results!
Raise your glass to home brewing, a fun, challenging activity that yields delicious results!

MOTHER’s Handbook shares a detailed home brewing article on how to make homemade beer. Includes step-by-step instructions, equipment illustrations, beer recipes and a beer ingredient chart. (See the beer equipment illustrations in the image gallery.)

Home Brewing: How to Make Homemade Beer

There are three likely reasons why you may not have tried making your own beer: 1) you don’t like beer, 2) you’ve read about making beer and decided it was too difficult or time-consuming, or 3) you tried someone else’s home-brew and decided you’d never tasted anything quite so awful. We can’t help you with reason one. If you don’t like the stuff, that’s that. But if you’ve hung back for either or both of the other two reasons, this handbook is for you. (Oh, yes–it’s also for those of you who have tried brewing beer and met with unqualified disaster.)

If you can boil water and stir, you can brew beer–and we’re talking premium here. Things have come a long way since home brewing beer was legalized in 1979 (a single-person household can make up to 100 gallons a year, a family household 200 gallons). Not only have techniques been refined, but the variety and quality of brewing ingredients and supplies now available virtually assure pleasing results.

True, home brewing in some circles has reached a state of high science. Serious home brewers (sort of a contradiction in terms, actually) dabble in a world of alpha and beta hop resins, custom-made wort chillers and tenth-degree temperature control. Most malt their own barley; some even grow their own brewing hops and grains and cultivate their own preferred strains of yeast. These are the home-brewing possessed, intrepid souls who explore the nether worlds of fermentation. They produce extraordinary beers.

But you don’t have to practice high science just to make good–very good–beer. Brewing is an eminently inexact science, forgiving of many mistakes and allowing for much experimentation. Just look at any half-dozen books on the subject. Like as not, each will describe a different procedure for brewing and fermenting, and each will include recipes unlike those in the other books. All will produce perfectly good results.

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