Home brew - don't knock it till you've tried it

If you enjoy a few cold bevies at the end of a long day but want to keep the cost down then it might be time to discover the delights of home brew. Super delicious cheap beer may be just a few short weeks away if you do it right! 

Home brew kits and ingredients are readily available across the country and making your own batch of amber fluid is fun and easy to do; and the results are great value for money. For around $30 (after you’ve purchased your first beginner kit) you should be able to brew yourself up the equivalent of 2¹/₂ cartons of beer and you don’t even need to bottle it if you don’t want to, since most suppliers have keg options available. 

The home brew process isn’t complicated, although there are a few different beer brewing methods you can test out - but for your first homebrew foray we recommend taking the simple route with a homebrew beginner kit. You’ll get all of the basic equipment and your first beer kit – and all the steps are pre-sorted for you. The general process to get your first batch ready to drink is this: 

1. Prepare your equipment – this is basically ensuring everything is clean and sterilised.
2. Make your wort (pronounced wert). To do this you need to place the beer kit can in a saucepan of hot (not boiling) water for 10 minutes to soften the contents, then pour into your fermenter container (included in the kit) and add some boiling water. Next you’ll add 1Kg of dextrose, then fill the fermenter to the 23-litre mark, ensuring the temperature is within the range of 18 – 26^oC.
3. Record the gravity reading (your beginners kit will include a hydrometer for this purpose). This allows you to calculate your final alcohol content and gives you a known starting point to check if fermentation is happening.
4. Add the yeast and stir in gently, seal the fermenter and leave in a warm place (around 23^oC is ideal) for 7 to 10 days.
5. After 7 days, if the brew has stopped bubbling, take a hydrometer reading and record it. Continue to take daily readings until you get the same reading for two days in a row, then wait a further 48 hours.
6. Sterilise your bottles and seals, add carbonation drops to each bottle and you’re ready to bottle your beer!
7. Store in a warm place out of direct sunlight for 7 days then move to a cooler place and leave undisturbed for at least another 7 days before sampling your first brew. 

If you’re new to home brewing it’s a good idea to try different recipes and methods until you find the one that best suits your taste – and if you want to make it look great as well as taste great, try filtering it after the fermentation stage finishes.  

There are a few ways to do this. If you keg your beer, you can gravity filter or force filter, but for both options you’ll need a filter kit which consists of a filter cartridge holder, a filter and a couple of metres of tubing (if you are keg-to-keg filtering, a couple of extra bits are needed too). 

Gravity filtering does take quite a bit of time, but it’s a simple process - all you need to do is get your fermenter up high, attach the filter to the tap and let it drain into a keg. 

Keg-to-keg gas force filtering is a much quicker process (around 5 minutes). You’ll need two kegs though - just empty your fermenter into one keg, then connect that keg to the filter’s input hose, and the empty keg to the output hose. Then connect your gas on about 5 psi to the full keg. Turn on the gas, and your beer will be pushed through the filter into the empty keg. 

Want to get serious? 

Once you start to get the hang of brewing your own beer you might want to take things up a notch by investing in your very own Grain Brewery System, so you can get your hands on everything you need to set up a micro brewery and bar at home. You’ll need to find around $3,000 to fund that purchase but don’t worry if you’re a little short on funds because we’re here to help!  Just check out our fast cash loans up to $5K to see how quick and easy it is to get your hands on some extra funds. Once a loan is approved, we can usually deposit the cash into your bank account within a few hours - so you can start researching your brewing equipment options today!