Nerd Tom has found a hobby in the last year in which nerdiness is a serious advantage – homebrewing. I love beer and I’m very particular about what I drink, and this gives me almost complete control over how my beer tastes. With an investment of about $100, a regular person can buy the equipment and necessary to make a five-gallon batch of beer. Once the fundamentals are there, the geeking out begins. Every batch is literally an at-home science experiment.
Before you can start, you need the proper equipment. You can generally find these items in a local homebrew store, most of them bundled together in a beginner’s kit. Here are the bare essentials.
-Brew pot. This is where the beer is born. Ideally, it should be five gallons or more and made of stainless steel (aluminum can contribute off-flavors to the final product), and have a lid. They sell these in homebrew stores but I’d recommend buying it on Ebay or something like that, to avoid the markup that you generally find in specialty stores.
-Stove. Most kitchens have these.
-Stirring spoon. This should also be made of metal or some other non-absorbent material; wooden spoons are no good, because the spoon has to be sanitized at a certain stage in the process, and that just doesn’t fly for wood.
-Thermometer. Temperature control is pretty important, so you’ll want one of these for monitoring purposes. Cheaper at Target than at the homebrew store.
-Sanitizer. The world in which we live is filled with many microscopic bacteria which can wreak havoc on fermenting beer. Sanitizer keeps this from happening. You’re also going to want a bucket of some sort to use as a basin for your sanitizer solution.
-Grain bag. This is a muslin sleeve, almost like pantyhose, with which you’ll steep your grains at the beginning of the boil. They’re not reusable, so I like to stock up – discounts come with bulk purchases.
-Fermenter. After your initial boil, this is where your mixture becomes beer. For a five-gallon batch, you want a 6.5 gallon container – plastic is the inexpensive way to go. This needs a lid, and the lid needs a small hole with a rubber grommet.
-Airlock. This is an inexpensive plastic device that allows for the necessary release of carbon dioxide from the fermenter, while keeping any oxygen from getting inside. I prefer the three-piece variety because they’re much easier to clean than the single-piece kind. On the left you'll see a disassembled airlock, and on the right is one that's been put together.
-Bottling bucket. I got mine when I bought my beginner kit. This is another plastic bucket, with a hole in the front for a spigot. The bottling process also requires bottles and caps (obviously), and one of the many different types of bottle cappers available. Reusing old bottles is a great way to save the planet and some money, but they have to be clean of any trace of the beer they previously contained.
Once you’ve acquired these items, you’ve got all the basic equipment needed for your first batch. There are many more items that will improve the quality of your beer, but with just what I’ve listed, you can deal on a basic level.
So there’s your infrastructure. Next come the ingredients.
1 comments:
I'm still watching Tom. Now how many grilled cheese sandwiches do you want? Four? I had a stove once, and an office with a security strip on the bottom of the door so you couldn't shove salami under the crack after I went home for the day.
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