hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1763.txt

Episode: 1763
Title: HPR1763: Intro to Homebrewing
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1763/hpr1763.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:59:53

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This is HPR episode 1,763 entitled Intro to Thombraing.
It is hosted by first-time host Alpha 32 and in about 20 minutes long, the summer is
near, and the joy of making it.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com, get 15% discount on all shared
hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15, better web hosting that's honest and
fair at An honesthost.com.
Hello friends, this is Andrew, this is my first episode for HPR, I'm a little nervous,
but I hope you like it.
I want to talk to you about home brewing, a subject that is near and dear to my heart.
First off, what is it?
Well, it's a bit of chemistry, it's a bit of art, it's a bit of all of that, it's also
its own reward, so you know, you can't argue with beer, why should you do it?
Well, first of all, beer, I mean what more reason you need.
Also there's kind of a camaraderie amongst home brewers, which you'll find out if you
end up picking this hobby up, okay, next.
Where can you do it?
You can do it in your kitchen, you can let things ferment in your closet, you can do it in
your basement, you can do it in your garage, wherever you like, you can do it, wherever your
wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, whatever whoever you live with will let you do it.
If you're lucky like me, my girlfriend is okay with me brewing in our apartment, so it's
pretty cool.
Alright, next, how do you brew?
Okay, basically what you need for beer, you need obviously yeast, that is little microorganisms
that eat sugar and expel alcohol and other things.
So what do you start with?
Okay, you'll start with water and if you're a first time brewery, you'll start with
malt extract, which is going to have all your sugar and your malt flavor in there.
So basically you will get your water hot, you know, get up to about 160, 170 degrees,
you know, and start stirring in your malt, your malt extract there, you get a boil
everything, you know, to give it sanitary, that's a big part of brewing is sanitation.
In a fermentation like this, you don't want any sort of stray, nasty little bacteria in
there because it's sitting so long in a sugary solution like this, it'll go off really
bad, you know, they'll just multiply and your beer will turn out horrible.
I know that from experience, so really, as long as you keep things clean, you can make
pretty well any kind of beer you want, then you can boil fruit in there with it and make
a fruity kind of beer, you can do anything really.
The hard part isn't making a good beer so much.
The hard part would be making a consistent batch because I really little thing that you
do, you know, it affects the qualities of your beer.
So if you have a temperature a little bit higher than you did the time before you made
this batch, then your beer could turn out totally different, you know, the way you add
the yeast really can really affect it as well.
So if you chuck your yeast in, dry, you know, just dry out of the packet, it'll create
a totally different beer than mixing it with warm, warm sugar water before you pitch it
in will do.
That said, you can get kits off the internet, you know, Amazon or Midwest brewing, there
all kinds of different online and brick and water stores where you can get home brewing
equipment, supplies and advice.
If you've ever wanted to start brewing or ever wanted to, you just give it a shot, those
are some of the best places to start, it is at your local home brew shop.
We've got one here near me out in the country, it's a little, well, it's a brewery as well
and the guy sells, sells home brew supplies and anytime I need to know about anything
I can go to him.
So you've got lots of resources there, anyway, basically what happens when you're making
beer, okay, you'll get your, you know, you get your water hot and mix in your malt and
get your sugary, well, it's called wort, W-O-R-T wort, that's your beer that's not quite
beer yet, okay, that's your sugary solution that your yeast is going to eat and turn
alcoholic, okay, so when you're doing your boil there, you know, and you've got your
malt extract mixed in, you can pitch some hops in there to add some bitterness and balance
out the sweet malt flavors, you know, it just depends on what kind of style you like.
You can make something really happy, like a, you can make an IPA, double IPA, whatever
you like, that's a style that I like to make personally because I'm a bit of a hop
head or you can go easy on the hops and make something really mellow, you know, just
a simple, you know, just simple ale, like a pale ale and yeah, there's a whole range
of things you can do, you know, levels of levels and types of malt and different varieties
of hops, you know, different strains or varieties of hops will have different characteristics
ranging from, you know, really, really bitter and to not so bitter from piney characteristics
to citrusy and just anywhere in between there are so many different varieties and if you
get into, get into brewing, you can get a catalog of different hop varieties and it's just
really a bit mind-boggling what all there is out there, it's really great, it's just
a fascinating world of, you know, just hops for different styles, you know, East Kent
doldings for, you know, English varieties and some German hollertow, you know, to some
really heavy duty hops, you know, grown out in Washington State, you can just, it's a
whole world of things to discover and it's a lot of fun, anyway, okay, so you get your
some kind of rambling going off topic and getting distracted by myself, so you can pitch
some hops in there, you know, to get your bitterness up, once you've got your stuff boiling,
generally depending on what kind of style you're doing, your boil is going to last between
45 minutes and an hour and a half, it just depends on how much you're boiling, what kind
of style you're doing, I generally shoot for an hour and a half, hour, hour and a half and
then after that you're going to want a cooler word, now they make word chillers which are, they're
kind of like radiators, some of them, well obviously they got to radiate the heat, you know, some are
immersion type, you know, where it's kind of like a radiator that you know, you'll drop into the
pot and you'll hook one end up to a faucet and run cold water through it, you know, and
the other end you'll put into a sink or whatever, you know, so it can flow out and that that'll
just suck the heat right out of it and, you know, they work pretty well, the only difficult part
about those is keeping them clean sometimes, you know, you don't want anything nasty getting in there.
Anyway, once you get your word down to about, you know, 70 degrees or so, 70, 75 degrees, actually,
yeah, usually around 72, you know, right in between there, you'll get your word into your fermenting
vessel, which can be just about anything, as long as it's sterile. A lot of folks, you will use a large
carboy, which is essentially just a big glass or plastic bottle, you know, like the, like a water cooler
jug, if you clean and sanitize one of those, they work great. Depending on the size of batch you're
doing, you'll need to leave a little head space, you know, if you save, you've got a five gallon batch,
you'll want to get like a six gallon carboy or fermentation vessel, you know, to give your
work space to breathe there, you know, and so it doesn't blow the top off. That's a real risk,
I bet it happens. It happened in my closet and it was nasty. So yeah, you'll get your word into
the fermentation vessel and you'll pitch your yeast. Just don't worry about stirring it up,
it'll do it on its own. You're going to leave it there for a while. It'll all get down in there,
and the yeast will be happy, and start eating the, eating weight, that sugar, and expelling alcohol,
and carbon dioxide. You know, you got to keep a sanitary in there. So they make these little airlocks,
just something that'll let the carbon dioxide out and keep anything from getting into it. You can
finance your home restore. Yeah, so you'll let that guy ferment for a week or two, you know,
however long you feel like, you know, just until the airlock stops bubbling, this is what I do,
and then you're not quite ready to drink it. It's tempting, and you can drink it, it'll be beer,
it just won't be carbonated, you know, it's not so bad, but it's a better carbonation. So after
that fermentation period there, you know, you're a week in the closet. You can pull it out, and
put, transfer it to a secondary fermenter. You want to let it mellow out for a little longer,
or you can go ahead and bottle it, just right there. I've done that before, and it turned out great. I made
a pale ale a couple of years ago, and I bottled it straight after, you know, primary fermentation,
that first week of letting the yeast get happy in there, and it was a good beer. I mean,
any beer is a good beer. My favorite beer is an open one. So once you're bottling, you're going to
need to give those little yeasty fellows something else to munch on when they're in the bottle,
so they make bottling sugar. So what you'll do is you'll bring a bit of water to a boil,
you know, half cup, you know, 20 CL, 20 or 30 CL, I think is a half cup, I don't remember. Anyway,
that's a different issue. You'll do that, you'll bring that got that water to a boil, and then add
your, your priming sugar, so what they call it, usually just some corn sugar. You add a few ounces,
you know, a few tens of grams of it, whatever the measure is, sorry, and then you will mix that
in with your fermented beer, and transfer it into bottles, cap them, and then you'll have to let
that hang out for a while, actually, usually a week or two, and you have to be careful, you don't
want to use too much priming sugar, because if you do, your bottles could explode, and it's a big mess,
so there are, like, formulas for that kind of thing, I don't know them, I generally just use like a
a half cup of sugar when I'm doing it, and it's turned out pretty well for me, I haven't had any
bottles explode, except for, well, once, but I did something different there, it wasn't paying
attention, so, now, once you have let your guys hang out in the bottles for a week or two,
they should be good and carbonated, then, yeah, after about two weeks, you can put one in the fridge,
let it cool, and, yeah, pop your first home brew, it's a great experience, you know, it's a really
good feeling drinking a beer that you know that you made, there's nothing better than drinking
your own beer, and sharing it with your friends, it's pretty awesome, I hope you guys I'll try it,
we could all use more home brewers in the world, because a world without beer is a very sad world
indeed, okay, as far as, like, learning to brew, because once you make your first batch, I'm sure the
bug is going to get you, you know, you're going to want to do this more, you're going to want to,
yeah, learn to be a better brewer, there's so much out there, it's just incredible,
um, anyway, there are all kinds of resources on the internet, American Home Brewers Association,
I'm sure there's something for that internationally as well, I don't know what it is, as I live in America,
I haven't had to look at that kind of thing, anyway, there are a couple of good books that I've got,
there's the Home Brewers Companion by Charlie Benskreetus, but Pappasian, I think is how you pronounce it,
and it's, it's a really good, and he is the, so I'm reading off the back of the book now,
founder and president of the America's Home Brewers Association and Association of Brewers,
yeah, he's a pretty cool guy, you know, just judging from reading his books,
um, now this, um, Home Brewers Companion is, uh, really, it really goes into,
into a lot of depth, into different aspects of brewing, brewing, it's a, it can, can be a little
intense actually, I've gotten into it and there's so many different things that you can do,
and that he talks about it in there, it's, it's really impressive, um, now, now the first one
that I really, really recommend that anybody interested in doing this gets is the complete joy of
home brewing, um, also by Charlie Pappasian, uh, it's kind of your Home Brewers Bible,
uh, there are a lot of recipes in here, uh, lots of advice, but mostly it's, uh,
it just helping you kind of get off the ground and, uh, you know, helping you learn about what's
happening, uh, when you're brewing and all the different types of ingredients you can get,
and the differences in them, um, it's a really great resource for a Home Brewer,
a honey skill level, I mean, it's great for me, I'm not a, I'm a particularly skilled brewer,
but I love it, and I know really skilled brewers who still swear by it, um, so yeah, if you
want to get into it or you're just interested in it and don't, and don't end up brewing, uh,
it's still a good, a good book, yeah, um, anyway, uh, I hope you guys
enjoy this episode, I'm sorry for all the, uh, awesome ums, uh, this is my first episode, you know,
so anyway, uh, thanks for listening, and happy brewing.
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