Publisher's Synopsis
So you've decided to make your own beer at home. Congratulations! You're about to engage in a wondrous and rewarding task almost as old as humanity itself. But there's no reason to be intimidated. Although people have been brewing beer for millennia, the basic process has remained much the same through the ages. This e-book will discuss some of the simplest recipes to try out at home.
For your first few beers, it's wise to start with a kit: the cans or cartons of thick, sticky syrup that you mix with water and ferment in a bucket. Feel free to jump straight in and purchase the extra stuff you need to make a batch from scratch, but there are a few reasons to keep things as simple as possible for the first few batches.Plenty of work goes into designing kit beers, and they tend to create beers that are classical for the style. Most kits have the potential to give you very good beer indeed - because of this, combined with their low cost, many people are happy never to progress to all-grain brewing.
There are far fewer processes involved in making a kit beer, and therefore there are fewer parts that can go wrong. This leads to a better chance of having good, drinkable beer a couple of weeks down the line. Kit beers will give you a chance to practice some of the key skills involved in brewing an all-grain beer. Critically, you will have to get used to sanitary workflow - anything that touches the beer must be cleaned and then sanitized beforehand.
The only problem with kits tends to be their flawed instructions. Throw them away, and follow these instead. They may seem overly comprehensive: this is intentional. I want to introduce you to good brewing practices that will help you further down the line. Start as you mean to go on. Take your time. You'll be fine. In your kit, you'll have a tin of hopped extract and yeast. They'll win you with phrases like 'just add sugar and water'. If you want average beer, use their instructions. But the next chapter will guide you towards truly great beer from these same cheap kits.
