Homebrewing for Beginners | jorj.tech

Homebrewing for Beginners

A beginner's guide to homebrewing - covering terminology, equipment, the brewing process, how to read a recipe, and tips to get your first batch right.

I wanted to take a second to write an article that I wish existed when I was first starting out with homebrewing with my friend.<br>We started homebrewing in college during COVID because we were roommates and had nothing better to do given no social events<br>were really happening at the time. It took us quite a while to be able to brew a recipe without a video accompanying the recipe<br>itself (shout out to Joshua Weissman) or the recipe being explicitly written for<br>novices.

All of the recipes that were written for people that already understood the terminology were completely off limits to us<br>because we simply couldn&rsquo;t understand them and didn&rsquo;t really feel like taking the time to understand them at the time.<br>Eventually we did come to learn about them, and that unlocked a whole new world of what recipes we were able to follow and it<br>also gave us the confidence to create our own recipes or make targeted changes to existing ones. So my hope is that I can<br>kickstart other people&rsquo;s journey into homebrewing with this article.

Terminology

This is not an exhaustive list of terminology, but it is more than enough to get you started when it comes to reading a recipe<br>and feeling like you can actually walk away knowing how to execute on the recipe.

Grain Bill

A &lsquo;bill&rsquo; (list) of mostly grains, but sometimes other things like oats, rice husks, etc. used in a beer recipe.

Extracts

Extracts come in both liquid and dry form and what they allow you to do is skip the &ldquo;mashing&rdquo; process that you have to do<br>with grain to pull fermentable sugars out of them. Extracts are basically, over-simplified, fermentable sugars from grains<br>that you do not have to extract out of the grain yourself. Extracts are mostly reserved for novice brewers that want to<br>skip the most finicky part of the active brewing process (mashing).

Hops

Hops are plants that grow in very specific climates around the world that give beer flavor, aroma, bitterness, and help<br>preserve it. Generally speaking hops are 1/3 of what make a beer a beer (grain and yeast are the other 2/3).

Water Chemistry

Some recipes, not all, give water chemistry (or water profiles). What this essentially is is a set of minerals that you<br>add to distilled (completely pure) water. In my opinion this is optional as a homebrewer and you&rsquo;re going to be just fine<br>using spring water, but if you feel compelled to do this then go ahead and do it.

Mash / Mashing

Mashing is the process of extracting fermentable sugars from grains. There are specific temperature ranges that activate<br>enzymes in grain that helps turn the starches in the grain into fermentable sugars. The term mash refers to the active<br>mixture of your grains suspended in the hot water. Generally speaking mashing lasts 60 to 90 minutes somewhere between 148<br>and 158 degrees fahrenheit. Usually homebrewers suspend all of their grains (from their grain bill) in a permeable sack<br>within their brew pot.

Wort

The term wort refers the resulting sweet liquid after a mash (after pulling your grain sack out). Even after adding hops<br>and during the fermentation process the liquid still is referred to as wort up until it is done fermenting when you can<br>call it beer.

Strike Temperature

Strike temperature refers to the temperature you want to get your water to before adding your grain sack to start mashing.<br>Generally speaking this should always be 10 degrees fahrenheit above your target mash temperature, because the grains<br>themselves will lower your water temperature by about that much.

Sparging

Sparging is the process of extracting all of the fermentable sugars that are stuck inside of your grain sack after the<br>mashing process. That grain absorbs a lot of liquid. Simply stated all this is is suspending your grain sack a little bit<br>above your brew pot, squeezing the sack (you can use two dinner plates), and pouring more water through the grain sack.<br>Generally you&rsquo;ll squeeze, pour some water, squeeze more, and do that 4-5x until not much liquid is coming out from<br>squeezing.

Boil

This happens after the mash (if you&rsquo;re using grain, if you&rsquo;re using all extracts you actually just skip to this step). The<br>primary functions of the boil are to sterilize your brew (bacteria during fermentation is bad) and do hop additions.<br>Generally speaking a boil lasts 60 minutes. Adding hops at the beginning of a boil means that you&rsquo;re using that hop almost<br>exclusively for bittering and adding hops at the end of the boil means you&rsquo;re using them almost exclusively for their<br>flavor and aroma properties. Adding hops somewhere in between the start and the end of the boil is essentially a gradient<br>between bitterness and flavor/aroma.

Gravity

Gravity is a unit of measurement...