Relax, Stop Worrying, and Have a Homebrew

There's really two methods.

Most people start with extract brewing, and that's what I started with.

Extract brewing basically takes out one major step in the beer making process.

Beer is nothing more at its basic level, it's nothing more than water, malt or grain of some kind, yeast and hops, that's it, four ingredients.

And of course there's a lot of other things you can add to beer, but beer itself, basic beer, takes four ingredients.

Well, extract brewing cuts out the process for making malt.

Instead of taking grain and creating malt, you basically use a malt syrup.

So it greatly simplifies the process of making beer.

And the other thing that's nice about extract brewing is, other than a really big pot, it doesn't require any specialty equipment.

A really big pot to boil your beer in, and really some kind of a container, which could be something as rudimentary as a five gallon bucket with a lid to actually ferment your beer in.

And that's about it.

And maybe an airlock, which I'll explain that in a little bit.

So I started with extract brewing.