I believe the two things that discourage most beginning homebrewers are poor sanitation (so the beer gets spoiled) and a crummy pot (so the frustration gets high).
But a good pot for a 5 gallon batch of beer is expensive! Even a generic stainless steel pot with a good thick bottom and decent handles, 8 gallons or so, no bells and whistles, can run $100.
Who wants to drop that kind of money on a hobby you don't even know if you're going to enjoy?
But you can make great, even outstanding beer without that kind of investment if you just do it kind of backwards. You're going to need a spaghetti or canning or stock pot...something 10 or 12 quarts...if you don't have one in the house, borrow it from your grandmother....offer her a beer to rent it or something...or a neighbor.
Here's an extract recipe for an American IPA.
Go to your local homebrew store and get
- 9 pounds of liquid malt extract (unhopped), something with a little color like a northern brewer gold.
- 3 ounces of amarillo hops. they should be somewhere around 9% alpha acids. If you don't know what that means, roll back to the hops 101 post
- 1 sachet of SafAle S-05 yeast.
Should run you about $30-35 and it's going to make 50 bottles of really good beer.
Now here's the deal -> the malt extract is sterile...so you don't have to do the whole hour boil for the extract. If you DO try to do the whole boil with the extract and you're using less than 5 gallons of water, then the wort is too thick and you won't get good bitterness and flavor from you hops.
So we're going to boil the hops (only) for an hour, get a really good extraction of alpha acids and flavors and we're only going to add the extract for the last 10 minutes, just to make sure the whole mess gets a good solid boil and sanitized.
Here's the 1, 2, 3 of the process:
- put 1 ounce of hops and 2 gallons of water in your pot. maybe only 1.5 gallons if you only have a 10 quart pot
- bring it to a boil and start your timer. and we mean a good roiling boil.
- after 40 minutes (20 minutes remaining) add another ounce of hops
- in 10 more minutes, stir in the extract. keep stirring and, from here on out, don't leave the room...you have to keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't boil over...if it starts to, remove from the heat and just manage it, so you have a good boil for 10 minutes.
- after the extract has come back to a boil and isn't threatening to make a huge sugary mess, add the last ounce of hops and boil for 5 more minutes.
- turn off the heat.
- add water or ice to bring to 5 gallons in your fermentation vessel, bucket, carboy, whatever
chill, pitch and ferment; each of those are a entire book in their own right and we're not going into that today....so scour the web or read a book or ask me a specific question if you need help.
But that's it. How to make a great beer when you got no pot.
Note: a slight variation of this is to put, roughly, 1/3 of the extract in at the beginning and save 2/3 for the last 10 minutes. There are a couple good reasons to consider this, namely getting some carmelization out of the wort and, when following a recipe to get a more accurate hops extract to what the original creator intended.
