As soon as you move up from doing prepackaged kits and start taking a degree of control over the composition of your beers, you are an Intermediate Brewer. In this section you will learn all about how to take those first nervous steps out on your own. What ingredients you need. How to use them to make your beer. You start learning some more advanced techniques which get applied to tie it all together.
Each of the below sections teaches you the pieces you need to make your own beers from extract, hops and grains. You'll not only learn how to follow directions, but more importantly you'll learn how to use this knowledge to develop your own recipes, and to give your beers the flavours that you want them to have, rather than the flavours which were prescribed by the manufacturer. Afterall, that is what homebrewing is all about : making beers the way you like to drink them!
Once you start taking your first steps away from straight kit-brewing, you
take some very dramatic steps towards a whole new world of possibilities when
making your own beer. When brewing with kits, you are completely at the
mercy of the manufacturer. You brew your beer they way they intended it to
be brewed, and not necessarily the way you want to drink it. The
manufacturer has already decided on the exact combination of which grains, which
hops are used at which stages of the process, and so on. That isn't to say
that beer made from kits won't be any good. It's simply to say that you
don't really have any control over the final product.
In taking that next step in brewing, you make a conscious decision that you
want to be the one who controls exactly what combination of which ingredients go
into your beer. Though kits can still be used as an ingredient, you will
also start making decisions on other types of malt extracts, hops, adjuncts,
yeasts and so on.
Malt Extract is basically just the normal extract produced by mashing,
with most (in the case of syrups) or all (in the case of powders) of the water
removed. Excellent beer can be made with Malt Extract, and many brewers will
therefore never have the desire to move on to something else.
In short, making beer with Malt Extract is no more difficult than baking a cake
from a cake mix. You mix a few ingredients together, add some heat, remove the
heat, add another ingredient, and that's pretty-much it.
This section deals primarily with selecting and mixing the raw ingredients
yourself in order to make a beer that has your own special touch added. The
techniques are basically the same as those used in brewing
from kits, but there tends to be one or two extra steps when brewing with
Malt Extract from recipes.
One cannot talk about brewing without talking about proper sanitation
techniques. This is something that simply cannot be ignored if you want to make
good beer. Please do yourself a favour and check out our page on sanitation
techniques.
