How to brew a craft beer that doesn't suck
The BoP (brew on premises) revolution is here, and it’s demystifying the art and science behind brewing good beer. With the rise of homebrew shops that allow on-premise brewing in cities throughout the United States, you now have the chance to concoct, brew and bottle your own suds. And it’s virtually guaranteed to not suck.
Under the supervision of veteran homebrewers, you are guided through the process of selecting grains, boiling water and hops, and bottling your very own craft beer. The price tag depends on the ingredients you use, the amount of beer you haul away, and the city in which you’re brewing.
The only downside is waiting three weeks to drink your beer.
Here’s 5 steps to making good beer:
1) The mash
Select your recipe, weigh your grains and steep them in hot water to extract sugars. Rinse grains and transfer to a boiling kettle.
2) Boiling hops
Bring your wort to a boil and add your hops. These bitter flowers are in the same family as marijuana and balance the sweetness of the sugars. They’re also antimicrobial and help stave off infection from souring bacteria. To get hoppy aromas and flavors, add hops late in the boil or after you’ve turned off the heat.
3) Add yeast
Crash the temperature of your wort (that’s the young beer that hasn’t fermented yet) and add yeast, the little fungi that will turn the sugars into alcohol.
4) Wait
Fermentation usually takes about a week. Yeast eats sugar and oxygen and burps out alcohol and carbon dioxide.
5) Bottle your beer
Transfer the fermented beer into bottles. Since it’s flat, you’ll need to add a bit of sugar to carbonate the beer. Bottle conditioning takes a couple weeks. Commercial brewers force carbon dioxide into their beer to move product faster.
6) (Bonus step) – Bottoms up
Invite your friends over and dazzle them with your homemade beer. If you don’t have any friends, drink the beer alone on your house, in your underwear, with the shades drawn, muttering to yourself in the mirror.
Where to brew-on-premises
Look for brew-on-premise locales in your city. Here are a few:
Brooklyn’s Bitter & Esters fees start at $400. They have 50 recipes to choose from, but customers can brew anything they want—except sours. You walk away with six cases of beer.
Yolo Brewing in Sacramento starts at $170 for a Pale Ale. Because Yolo is also a commercial brewing company, it provides impressive equipment—like a steam boiler—to expedite your brewing process. You get five and a half cases of beer.
Hopsters in Boston starts at $150 and you get around three cases of beer. Hopsters includes custom labels for your brew, too.
Baltimore’s Nepenthe Homebrew (featured in the video above) charges $160 for two cases of beer.