Brew Your Own Beer!
While we’re still enjoying 90-degree days, August might be the best time for picking out a winter hobby. And for beer lovers – brewing your own batch of the amber beverage might be a winning pastime. Aficionados claim it’s not that hard to brew beer at home that tastes better than most commercial varieties! Plus it’s an enjoyable pursuit, especially the challenge of designing new recipes, and without a hefty price tag.
How Tos and Tutorials
If you’re new to the homebrew phenom, before you leap into this new (and hoppy) hobby, visit the American Homebrewers Association site and watch a few of the tutorials. From Small Batch Homebrewing, to All-Extract and All-Grain Homebrewing, the association signs up members who share a love for beer and prefer to brew their own at home. You’ll also see how to make cider, mead and partial mash. (Which we think is partial moonshine!)
Check out one of these YouTube videos to see how the pros approach homebrewing. You’ll hear that it’s simply a matter of boiling liquid, transferring it from vessel to vessel and waiting for the yeast to work its magic. Northern Brewer TV breaks down the process and posted this encouraging word, “If you can make a box of mac and cheese, you can brew beer.”
Beer-N-BBQ by Larry is another resource popular with homebrewers nationwide, with overviews of equipment, recipes and more. Larry is passionate about barbequing, too, so expect to see plenty of footage of steaks and ribs on the grill, baked beans from scratch, and bread and pizza baking outdoors! Larry started homebrewing several years ago with videos documenting his obsession and he happily shares his insights with plenty of DIY and how-to videos.
Toys, Equipment, Recipes and Requirements
Larry will show you his toys, his containers, his equipment and tell you the steps to take grain and convert its starches to sugars and then to alcohol.
Basically, the brewing process amounts to this:
- 1. Malted barley is soaked in hot water to release the malt sugars.
- 2. The malt sugar solution is boiled with Hops for seasoning.
- 3. The solution is cooled and yeast is added to begin fermentation.
- 4. The yeast ferments the sugars, releasing CO2 and ethyl alcohol.
- 5. When the main fermentation is complete, the beer is bottled with a little bit of added sugar to provide the carbonation.
How to Brew explains all the pieces and parts you’ll need to get started and you can either order hops, grains, and yeasts online through a site like Northern Brewer, or you can shop local at Castle Rock Homebrew Supply. Just a few minutes from your front door, you’ll find one of the largest selections of beer-making (and cheese and wine-making) supplies in a 40 mile radius! The business was born out of the owners own love for home brewed beer, and they are passionate about passing the torch onto other beer lovers!
And if you’d like to grow your own grains, HGTV has a quick tutorial about growing a container beer garden, complete with an empty beer bottle and twig trellis for your hops!
Grow Your Own in Crystal Valley
With so many entrepreneurs, home chefs and home gardening experts in the master-planned community of Crystal Valley we imagine there are one or two home brew aficionados, as well! Join the community that’s away from it all but close to everything essential! These new homes surrounded by nature are only minutes from the town of Castle Rock, crafted by Colorado’s top builders — from Richmond American Homes, Kauffman Homes, Century Communities to D.R. Horton, the thoughtfully designed ranch or two-story models – are priced from the $400s.
