If you've ever wanted to try brewing your own beer at home I strongly suggest it. Your first sip will spoil you for store-bought!
I'm right now boiling the wort for my third batch. Not wart as in what you get on your skin so save the wisecracks. It's wort (pronounced wert).
Start with 5 gallons of purified water. Not tap water, purified water. Too much bacteria in tap water and you don't want that for beer. Boil a gallon and add the malt syrup and dried malt extract. About 5-6 pounds of malt total. That's the wort. It has a nice smell when boiling. After boiling for 30-45 minutes, the big pot goes into an ice bath in the sink. Then it's poured into the fermenter (5-gallon food-grade plastic bucket with a tight sealing lid) with the other 4 gallons of purified water and I add the packet of yeast (when the thermometer reads about 75). The lid goes on and the airlock goes into the little hole in the lid. (for those who don't know, an airlock lets gasses out of the bucket but doesn't let outside air in)
Within 24 hours fermentation gets going and gets going strong. The airlock bubbles like crazy. After a week or so, maybe 10 days, the bubbling slows to one every several minutes. Then it's time for bottling.
Ever wonder where the carbonation comes from? When I bottle the beer, I siphon it from the fermenter to the bottling bucket. The bottling bucket is just another food-grade plastic bucket with a spigot near the bottom. Before I do that I boil a small pot of water, maybe a cup or so, and in that I dissolve several tablespoons of dextrose (corn sugar). As I siphon the beer into the bottling bucket I add the dissolved sugar, making sure it mixes evenly with the beer. I've got an attachment that goes on the spigot that helps me fill the bottles. It fills the bottles from the bottom up to prevent splashing, which minimizes oxidation of the beer. That's the tedious part of the process. I've got 2 cases of beer to bottle, one bottle at a time. As each bottle is filled, I then have to cap it. I've got a small press that caps each bottle, no twist-tops here.
Then the filled bottles go in the boxes, which sit in a container in case any bottles happen to leak or explode (hasn't happened yet but yes it can happen sometimes). For the next week or so the bottled beer sits at room temperature and finishes becoming beer. The sugar I added before bottling is what gives the carbonation. The remaining yeast feeds on the sugar and gives off carbon dioxide, carbonating the beer. After 7-10 days I move the beer into my refrigerator (sometimes use the fridge I bought for the shop because it has more room and doesn't get quite as cold as the one here at home) and finish the aging. That takes another 2-4 weeks.
And that's all there is to it.
I aged my last batch at the shop because like I said the fridge there doesn't get quite as cold as the one here at home. You want to age the beer cold but not super cold. So I had 2 cases of beer in that fridge and the guys were getting curious. When the time came I called them in the break room (after we all clocked out of course) and passed around some cold ones. I got nothing but compliments, they couldn't believe it was homemade.
Yesterday I went and got enough to make 2 more batches. And my third batch is about to have the yeast pitched as soon as I log off here. Wish me luck.
Hey if there's ever an Atlanta apostofest, I'll brew up a batch and bring it.
Mike.