{"id":5740,"date":"2013-07-12T09:30:17","date_gmt":"2013-07-12T16:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bensbargains.net\/thecheckout\/?p=5740"},"modified":"2013-10-28T14:52:34","modified_gmt":"2013-10-28T21:52:34","slug":"six-essentials-needed-for-homebrewing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/features\/six-essentials-needed-for-homebrewing\/","title":{"rendered":"Six Essential Items Needed to Start Homebrewing"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Drinking craft beer: awesome. Paying $10+ for a 6-pack: not so cool. You might associate homebrewing with hipsters, or assume anything that ferments in someone’s basement can’t possibly taste any good, but brewing your own beer can save you a lot of money, taste genuinely good (certainly a million times better than a Bud\/Miller\/Coors\/Whatever Lite), and is a lot of fun. Here’s a list of the things you’ll need in order to get started*:<\/p>\n

*If you get a pre-packaged starter kit<\/a>, a lot of this will be included, but it’s still good to know what it is you’re buying and what it all does.<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0Malt Extract Ingredient Kit ($25 to $40)<\/h2>\n

An ingredient kit will have all the grains, fermentables, hops, yeast and priming sugar you’ll need for 5 gallons of beer, along with instructions on when and how to put everything together. A simple brown ale<\/a> is a good place to begin when you’re just starting out. Once you have done a few batches, you can start to get a bit more creative by adding additional ingredients and\/or tweaking the recipes to fit your taste (for example, I recently started with a wheat kit and added blueberries and fresh mint — it was delicious).<\/p>\n

\"homebrew_kit\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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2. Heat Source (Free to $60)<\/h2>\n

The top of your stove will work just fine for brewing, but you could also go for something like this turkey fryer <\/a>if you want to brew outside. I suppose a grill would even work — basically anything that can hold (and get hot enough to boil) a 5 gallon stockpot.<\/p>\n

\"homebrew_turkeycooker\"<\/a><\/p>\n

3. Stock Pot\/Brewing Kettle (Around $30)<\/h2>\n

Speaking of stockpots, you’ll need one. This is what you “cook” the beer in. Most people start with a 5 gallon pot<\/a>, but they come as big as 25 gallons for the semi-professional brewers out there. If you buy one from a homebrew shop, it will be called a “brewing kettle” or something similar, but any old stock pot will work just fine. (FYI, they have them at thrift stores all the time).<\/p>\n

\"homebrew_kettle\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u00a04. Fermenter ($10 to $40)<\/h2>\n

The fermenter is the container the beer sits and ferments in (ie: turns alcoholic) for anywhere from one week to three months. The cheapest version is a plastic bucket with an airlock<\/a> and the standard version is a plastic or glass carboy<\/a> (pictured).<\/p>\n

\"homebrew_carboy\"<\/a><\/p>\n

5. A Good Brewing Book ($10ish)<\/h2>\n

The more you know about the brewing process, the more you’ll be able to play around and experiment. The Complete Joy of Homebrewing<\/a> is a good place to start — it’s a really broad guide that covers everything from equipment to basic instructions to recipes. \u00a0The Alaskan Bootleggers Bible<\/a> is another fun one — super odd and goes over not just beer-making but how to make your own wine, cider,\u00a0moonshine whiskey, bathtub gin…<\/p>\n

\"beer_bible\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a06. A Capper and Empty Beer Bottles ($15 to $20)<\/h2>\n

Nobody wants a flat beer. The cheapest way to fizz your beer up is to start saving\/collecting beer bottles (only the fancy beers will do; twist-off bottles won’t work). Then buy a capper<\/a> to put caps on your beer once you transfer it to bottles (which will create carbonation in a week or two).\u00a0An alternative is to get a kegging system<\/a>\u00a0(around $200); it will eliminate the need for caps and bottles altogether.<\/p>\n

\"beer_capper\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/address>\n

If after all this you find yourself thinking, “You know what, I think I’d rather buy my beer and not mess with this. What am I going to do with all this crap if I don’t end up liking brewing?” The answer is Craigslist. Brewing gear is in high enough demand that you won’t lose much should you decide to sell it after giving it a try. Basically, there’s a lot of potentially awesome beer to gain and not a lot to lose, so go for it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Drinking craft beer: awesome. Paying $10+ for a 6-pack: not so cool. You might associate homebrewing with hipsters, or assume anything that ferments in someone’s basement can’t possibly taste any good, but brewing your own beer can save you a lot of money, taste genuinely good (certainly a million times better than a Bud\/Miller\/Coors\/Whatever Lite), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":5744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[599,31,600,246,598],"class_list":["post-5740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","tag-alcohol","tag-beer","tag-bootleg","tag-diy","tag-homebrewing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5740"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10020,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5740\/revisions\/10020"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bensbargains.com\/thecheckout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}