Home brew is easy and good, Part 1 - The Brew

We're going to show just how easy it is to brew up a great batch of craft beer, right in your own kitchen. For this round we are using a Cream Ale kit from Northern Brewer, available here. We've used a few Northern Brewer kits, including St. Paul Porter and American Wheat with excellent results. Each kit brews 5 gallons of beer which usually yields 54 12oz bottles. For the Cream Ale Kit we're using that works out to just under $.50 a bottle, you can't beat that!


Hardware Supplies In addition to your beer ingredient kit you're going to need a few specialty items. We put our rig together for just under $50 at a local brewery supply store. This was the bare minimum to get started with just one bucket for fermentation and we've since added a second, I'd suggest going with this basic starter kit. Check that page for what you else you may need.

Brew Now comes the fun part (at least until the drinking part). Consult your kit for your exact instructions, the only deviation we made was the addition of peaches and cardamom.

- Start with about 2.5 gallons of water over high heat.

- This kit comes with cracked grains and a cotton bag, put the grains in the bag and put in the pot

- Let the grains soak then pull out the bag before it gets over 170 F or so.

- Boil

- Pull off the heat and add the malt extract. If you find it hard to pour you can put it in a pot of hot water, but it's not that bad.

- Boil (but watch it, easy to boil over at this step!)

- Add the hops (8 year old wearing colander not required)

- Boil continuously for 60 minutes, in the meantime clean and sanitize all the fermentation equipment. (Bucket, lid and whatever type of air lock it came with). Smells good doesn't it?

- Remove from heat. This is where our experimenting comes in. We added 4.5lbs of peaches (nectarines really, but who would notice?) that have been thoroughly washed and slightly mashed. To that we added 2 Tablespoons of ground Cardamom. The fruit needs to sit at at least 180 F for 20 minutes to kill just about anything that might still be lurking around.

- After the mix (technically wort!) has cooled a good bit, fill your sanitized and rinsed fermenting bucket with about 2 gallons of cool water then add the wort mix

- Top it off to 5 gallons even with some more cool water. 

- Let it get to room temperature then add the packet of yeast. Place the lid on top, fill the air lock with water as needed and seal it up. Within 24 hours you should start to see the air lock bubble like mad, we have Fermentation!

Now comes the waiting... 2 weeks!

Our Peach Cardamom Cream Ale is in it's second week of fermentation now. Next up, The Bottling.