• cooking pot, 2-3 gallon capacity or larger small pot, 4-6 cup capacity
  
• mixing spoon, plastic or stainless steel (do not use wood!) strainer, large enough to fit across top of fermentation bucket without falling in
  
• fermentation bucket, 5 gal capacity, with airtight lid and bubble vent siphon tubing
  
• siphon filter
  
• bottling bucket, 5 gal capacity, with spigot 50 brown 12-ounce bottles, non-twist top 50 bottle caps
  
• capping device
  

(Kits typically include everything but the cooking pot, strainer, and mixing spoon.)

Once you've got these objects, gather for the software. In the case of beer, that means these things:

• barley malt (either dry or in syrup form) hops (either plugs or pellets)
  
• yeast (either dry or liquid)
  
• water (filtered water is best, but good clean tap water will work too) priming sugar (corn sugar or straight dextrose; more malt can also be used instead)
  
• sterilizing chemicals (bleach or a made-for-brewing cleaner, such as C-Brite or B-Brite)
  

I'll wait until a later column to get specific about the ingredients. All we're doing in this column is giving you a synopsis of the brewing process. We want to be able to understand the overall concept of each step in the procedure before we start worrying about details. If you're anxious to get started right away, check with your supplier for a beer kit. Several varieties are available, and each kit should contain all the various ingredients needed for to brew a batch of beer.

Once you have all your supplies, it's time to start CLEANING. Yes, this is the major part of beer brewing: clean and sterilize EVERYTHING. The exact amounts of various ingredients you mix together is not nearly so important as having all your equipment clean and sterile. I cannot stress this point enough. If you want good beer, sterilize everything-the brewing vat, the tubing, the spoon, the counter top, everything. A small bit of a contaminant can kill the yeast and effectively ruin all your hard work. So sterilize, sterilize, sterilize! This is what the bleach is for. About 2 ounces (a shot glass' worth) of concentrated Clorox in 5 gallons of water is a good sterilizing wash. If you bought C-Brite or some such cleanser, follow the directions about dilution and rinsing. Rinse all supplies with the cleanest, purest water you can find.

You are now ready for beer brewing! Add about 1-1/2 gallons of water into the cooking pot and set it on the stove. Start heating it on a high setting, because it's going to need to boil for a while. Once the water starts getting hot, you can introduce some ingredients. Add the malt and the hops, then boil the whole solution for 45 minutes to an hour (depending on the recipe). The timing of the boil begins when the solution first starts bubbling, not when you add the malt and hops. This solution of water, hops, and malt is known as the wort.

When the wort has boiled for the desired length of time, turn off the heat and allow the solution to cool. You may even want to set the pot in an ice bath to speed up the process.

Add 3 gallons of water to the fermentation bucket. Pour the cooled wort into vat, straining out the hops and any other chunky bits as you do so. You should end up with about 4-1/2 gallons in the bucket. Add water to bring the total volume up to the 5 gallon mark. This is your final wort, which will eventually become your beer.

Fermentation, the process by which this wort becomes beer, is performed by the yeast. The little microorganisms eat the sugars of the malt and in turn they give off carbon dioxide and alcohol. This process takes 7-10 days to go to completion. Once the wort is sufficiently cool (below 80 degrees F), pitch the yeast, cap the vat, and set the bubble vent in place. Store the vat in a cool, dark closet somewhere and forget about it. (Well, you may want to check on it after a day or two to make sure the yeast has started doing its job.) Come back in a week.

The next step is bottling. Again, pull out the bleach solution and sterilize, sterilize, sterilize! Let the bottles soak at least 2-3 minutes in the solution. Rinse them, turn them upside down to let any rinse water drip out, and prepare to fill them. Sterilize the bottling bucket, all the tubing, the spoon, etc. Do I need to remind you how important this is?

Prepare your priming sugar by dissolving it in a few cups of water and bringing the sugar solution to a boil. Once this is ready, siphon the beer (what's in the vat now is essentially room-temperature, flat beer) from the vat, through the siphon filter and into the bottling bucket. While the liquid is pouring into the bottling bucket, add the sugar solution to the mix. Doing this while siphoning assures that the sugar water will mix thoroughly into the beer.

You are now in the home stretch. Raise your bottling bucket up to a good level (on a counter or a table top), place a bottle underneath the spigot, and fill that bottle up. You want to leave a little bit of room at the top of the bottle so the beer doesn't spill out under the cap, and also so the carbon dioxide that is produced during this next phase has some room to expand without blowing the caps off. Place a sterilized cap onto the bottle, crimp it tight with the capper, and voila! One bottle of homebrew.

Once you've filled all the bottles, let them sit in the cool, dark place again for another 2-6 weeks (depending on the type of beer and your level of impatience). After the yeast has had time to carbonate the beer inside the bottles, it's drinking time. Relax. Have a homebrew. Enjoy.

-Brewmaster Orf

Coming next column: an actual beer recipe!

Brewmaster Orf has a Certificate of Mixology from International Bartending Institute and a Master's degree in chemistry from Oregon State University. He has been home brewing for over four years, and he has been drinking beer for many more years than that.