What special gear do you absolutely, positively need?
- A 6-gallon food safe bucket
- A lid for said bucket
- Some way of blowing off CO2 - there are airlocks for this you can buy at a brew store for about 2 bucks. If you want, you can just fit a piece of plastic line into a hole drilled in the lid, and drop that line into a another, smaller bucket of water
- A muslin bag, or optionally a re-usable tea bag big enough to hold a pound of grain
- Some sanitation. I like StarSan - it's easy to use and you don't have to be obsessive about rinsing. Never fear the foam.
That's really about it. Everything else you've got in your kitchen.
Step 0: Set up some sanitation
The way I like to do this: Put a few gallons of tap water in a cooler, and throw in the appropriate amount of StarSan. Then, I just throw all my utensils in there. I can also use that sanitizer to wash out the fermenting bucket and lid.
Step 1: Steep the grain
That Briess Caramel 40L is malt. That pretty much means it's germinated barley that's been roasted to a specific darkness - the higher the L (Lovibond) value, the darker it was roasted. You're going want to crush this grain - most of the time, your local brew store will do it for you. Take the crushed grain, put it in the muslin bag.
Now, you're going to heat up some water in a stock pot. You've got one of those, right? You'll want to heat up about a gallon of water - I prefer the gallon jugs of spring water you can find at the grocery store, because I know they don't have a lot of chlorine. Heat this water to 160 degrees F. A thermometer will help here - if you don't have one, your brew store will sell you one for a couple bucks.
Put said grain into the hot water, and leave it there covered for 30 minutes. In the meantime, have a beer. When the 30 minutes is up, remove the bag and discard the grain. If you want to get fancy, throw it in a colander and pour some more bottled water over it into the stock pot.
Step 2: Gentlemen, start your boil.
Add some water and crank up the heat. Once you get a boil going, turn down the heat to keep it steady, and start a timer for 60 minutes.
The three injections of hops in that recipe all have times listed next to them: 60 minutes, 15 minutes, and zero minutes. This refers to the amount of time left on the clock. Put the 60 minute hops in right when you start your timer. Put the zero minute hops in when it runs out. If you can't figure out when to put the 15 minute hops in, you've had too many beers - call someone to help you off the floor.
When the boil starts, you'll also want to stir in all your extract. Go ahead and do this over the course of the next 10 minutes or 20 minutes - no rush.
Step 3: Once again, into the fermenter
You're going to start this step by cooling down your wort. (That's the name for the stuff you've made up till this point) The most gear-free way of doing this is to drop it in a sinkful of ice water. Make sure you don't get any of that nasty, dirty ice water in your nice clean wort.
Once it's getting down into the 80-90 degree range, go ahead and dump it into the fermenting bucket. I like to filter it through a colander to get most of the hops out, but I won't judge you if you leave some chunks in - this is your first time. Once it's in there, fill the bucket up to the 5 gallon mark, seal the lid on, and apply whatever excuse you've got for an airlock. You sanitized it, right? Good.
Step 4: Wait.
Let it sit in a corner somewhere for about two weeks. In the meantime, you're going to need to figure out your bottling situation. I recommend you go back through some previous beer posts I've made that have more detail, and do a little reading.
After a day or so, the airlock will really be bubbling. This will settle down to a bubble every minute or two after a few more days. And that means it's working.
