Necessary equipment for brewing at home

Craft brewing as a phenomenon originated in the United States in the mid-seventies. This was due to the large growth of small business and entrepreneurship. Small breweries could not compete with large players in the market in terms of volume and cost of production. But their beer was in demand, as it was brewed not only according to the classic recipe, but also using unusual ingredients.

Today this phenomenon is popular in our country. Each city has its own mini-brewery, producing original intoxicating drinks. For some people, brewing was not a way to make money. This is more of a hobby that provides all friends and family with delicious malt beer.

Equipment for craft brewing is a separate issue. Any business, even if it is not aimed at making a profit, requires certain financial injections. In order to start making intoxicated drinks, you need to purchase brewing equipment at home. It is on sale, and the buyer is offered various options for cost and performance. So what is needed for brewing beer?

Homemade beer versus purchased

Why make a malt drink at home? Indeed, there are many varieties of beer on sale - draft, can, bottle, dark and light, and even with various flavors. Among all the variety you can find both products of dubious quality, and quite pleasant to the taste. However, craft beer has a number of features due to which it can compete with alcohol produced on an industrial scale:

1. Small volumes of production. Because of this, you can try to produce products with different tastes. While large players are aimed at meeting the needs of the average buyer, and their drinks should not be too unusual.
2. Maximize the use of home brewing equipment. You can apply different modes when cooking, different methods of filtering and fermentation. The taste of the drink changes as technology changes. Large manufacturers are working on proven technologies.
3. Small breweries are not aimed at reducing production costs. They can afford to buy the best raw materials and other expensive components. The price of the drink is high, but small batches are disassembled quite quickly. In addition, if you cook for yourself, then the cost of the product becomes a secondary factor.
4. New recipes. Craft beer is often brewed according to original recipes using non-traditional ingredients. Large players are more inert in this matter.

Thus, craft beer reflects the brewer's freedom of expression. He does not depend on many conventions of large-scale production and can create as he wishes.

Ingredients

Before buying equipment for brewing at home, you need to find good raw materials for the production of the drink. Traditionally, beer is made from the following ingredients:

1. Water. Some manufacturers take tap water. With large volumes, this is justified, although it affects the taste of the drink. But in home production it is better to use soft bottled or filtered water.
2. Malt. These are crops. Malt is divided by type, quality, degree of roasting. It must be dry, with a high degree of extractability and protein content. Brewers also focus on the Kolbach number, which shows how much protein dissolves in water when heated. Malt can be purchased in Russian and foreign production. The latter has a higher end product yield and better taste.
3. Hop. These are dry hop cones. Best purchased from foreign suppliers.
4. Yeast. Special brewer's yeast that ferments all ingredients.
5. Additional ingredients - essential oil of hops, cereals, starch, sugar, corn syrup, dextrose. Not required, but often used to speed up the digestion process and improve taste.

Non-traditional ingredients are often used in craft beer - fruits, berries, honey, spices and much more. They give the drink an original taste.

But the base of all types of beer remains unchanged - it is malt, hops, yeast and water.

Cooking technology

When beer equipment for home brewing is available, the technology itself does not seem too complicated. The whole process consists of several stages:

1. Wort grout. Malt raw materials are crushed into small fractions and placed in hot water for some time. During the soaking process, sugars and other extractive substances are separated.
2. Filtration. Wort is filtered to remove dense particles.
3. Brewing beer. The process takes about two hours. At this point, hops are added. Once in the middle of cooking to give the drink a characteristic bitterness. The second time at the end - for a pleasant smell.
4. Hydrocyclone filtration. At this stage, the beer is clarified, making it more transparent, without a cloudy cock.
5. Fermentation. The liquid is cooled to predetermined parameters and brewer's yeast is added. The wort is fermented for several days, then poured into special containers for infusion.
6. The finished product is again passed through the filter and heated (pasteurization) to extend the shelf life. Some beers (ales) do not heat. They insist for a long time, the longer they stand, the richer the taste.

At different stages, you need different equipment for brewing at home. It is available for sale. You can purchase both a full-fledged mini-factory and a separate device. Sometimes amateur brewers cost a minimum of investment.

Beer brewing at home without additional investment

You can make equipment for home brewing with your own hands. To do this, it is not necessary to buy fermentation tanks and cooking tanks with automatic mode adjustment. All that is needed is:

1. Large cooking capacity. Ideally, this should be a pan or tank with a tap at the bottom. Although the last element can be dispensed with.
2. Fermentation tank - any tank of suitable volume.
3. Thermometer. For temperature control.
4. The gauze is dense in sufficient quantity to filter.
5. Containers for bottling the finished drink - plastic and glass bottles.
6. Silicone hose. To drain the drink without affecting the cloudy sediment at the bottom.
7. Chiller. A device for cooling the wort. It can be replaced with a crushed ice basin.

The ingredients are as follows:

• filtered water - 32 l;
• high quality dry barley malt - 5 kg;
• hops - 45 g;
• brewer's yeast - 25 g;
• granulated sugar - 9 g for every liter of water, total 288 g.

The process itself looks like this:

1. Pour 25 liters of water into the cooking container, heat to 80 ° C. Place crushed malt in a container in a bag of gauze. Keep 1.5-2 hours at a stable temperature of 65-70 ⁰.
2. Heat the liquid to 80 ° C, hold for 5-6 minutes. Take out the malt.
3. Rinse the malt in the remaining water to wash all sugars and extractives. Add water to the tank.
4. Boil. Divide the hops into three equal portions. Add the first at the beginning of cooking, after removing the foam, the second after 50 minutes, the third after another 10-15 minutes. In total, beer is brewed for about an hour and a half.
5. It is necessary to cool the raw materials very quickly. The faster the process goes, the lower the risk of infection of the malt with wild yeast strains. To do this, put the container in a basin or ice bath and pour it several times through cheesecloth into another tank.
6. Add a malt drink and yeast to the fermentation tank. Install a water seal and leave to roam for 7-10 days.
7. Product readiness can be determined by the absence of bubbles in the last 24 hours.
8. Carbonization. It is made so that characteristic bubbles and foam appear in the beer. To do this, in clean pasteurized bottles add 8 grams of sugar for each liter of liquid.
9. Drink a bottle of sugar with a narrow silicone hose and seal. Secondary fermentation will begin, due to which carbon dioxide is formed in the beer.
10. To achieve the perfect taste, beer bottled in containers is cleaned in a dark place for a couple of weeks. It must be kept at a temperature of 22 ° C.

So making DIY brewing equipment is easy. However, all operations will have to be performed independently, using the most primitive devices. And the performance will not be too high.

Options for purchased equipment

All equipment for small brewing can be divided into two categories:

1. Amateur. Low power, capacity and performance. Designed for a couple of boils per month exclusively for your own use.
2. Mini-factory. Brewing equipment designed for a minimum of 100 liters per day and operating continuously. There are equipment options for 100, 200, 300, 500 liters per production day. Such equipment cannot be delivered at home, as it requires a lot of free space.

Minimum equipment

If you don’t want to bother with pots and basins with ice, then you can buy inexpensive brewing equipment of low productivity. So it will be possible to brew 40-50 liters of good craft beer at a time, and after 2-3 weeks of insisting get an excellent malt drink for your own use. The minimum equipment for home brewing equipment is:

• A small volume wort boiler - 50 liters.
• A pair of fermentation tanks equipped with water locks.
• Mill - for crushing malt.
• Chiller - for cooling the wort.

A cooker is actually the same large pot. But with a tap at the bottom and a thick bottom for even heating. In addition, it immediately provides a filtration system. As a rule, this is a metal mesh for separating particles of coarse and fine fractions.

Ancillary equipment

A wort boiler is not enough. It is necessary to purchase all other additional equipment. Each has a very important function, and without these devices the brewer will have more problems.

A millstone in the form of millstones with a handle is a very useful device. Hard and dry barley is not so easy to grind. The mill copes with this task quickly. In addition, it can be upgraded - add a handle like a meat grinder, or attach a drill to mechanize the process.

Chiller also facilitates the work of the brewer. To cool a huge tank with 50 liters of beer is another task. It is not easy to even lift it, given that the container itself weighs 8-10 kg. And it will need to be dragged to a bathtub or basin with ice and lowered so that everything quickly cools.

Chiller facilitates this procedure many times over. It is only necessary to lower one tube into the vat and wait. The whole process will take 20-25 minutes.

Fermentation tanks are also an important element. They are of different volumes, but it is better to take 30 liters. Most brewer's yeast bags are designed for such a volume of liquid, which is very convenient.

Price

The equipment for brewing in the minimum configuration will cost 25-30 thousand rubles. About 40-50% of this amount will be the cost of a brew boiler. The rest is the simplest additional equipment.

Professional equipment

Some brewers want to automate as many operations as possible. And if finances allow, then they acquire mini-breweries.

Such brewing equipment at home has a slightly different configuration, has more capacity and performance. Yes, and you can only call it “home” conditionally, since you cannot place it at home. To install it, you need at least a spacious garage or other production sites.

Benefits

Brewing mini-factories are modernized brewing boilers. They have built-in heating elements, thermostats and pumps. All this is accompanied by an integrated electronic unit, which automatically monitors all stages of production. The brewer only needs to load the raw materials and select the desired recipe.

Further, the equipment will work according to a given program. It will only notify the brewer about the end of a particular stage. Free creativity remains, that is, the development of original recipes.

Price

Professional equipment for brewing at home will cost 80-100 thousand rubles. The 50-70 liter automatic brewery itself is 70 thousand rubles. Another 10 thousand rubles. will have to spend on a used refrigerator for wort. The amount obtained is impressive, but with such volumes and automation of the process, you can brew a hoppy drink not only for yourself, but also for a small craft bar.

300 liter brewing equipment will cost significantly more. But in this case we are already talking about the serious scale of production. And if a person makes such investments, then only for the purpose of subsequent sale of craft beer for profit.

Do I need to buy an additional fermentation refrigerator

If you make a malt drink for sale, then a refrigerator, even if used, is necessary. It is necessary to store the brewed beer at low temperature and in the dark, which is unrealistic to do at home with large volumes of production. So this expense item must be provided.

Making beer at home is the right decision. This is the only way to get a 100% natural product with an original taste. And not only for themselves, but also for the purpose of sale.