Alright as promised, this should give you a rough idea of how to make beer. Note this is whats called All-Grain brewing where you use nothing but grains like the commercial breweries do, most people start of doing extract brewing where a large portion of the process is condensed down into a concentrate that is added later in the process. With that out of the way...
YeastYeast is the lifeblood of beer, it turns sugary bread water into a delicious fermented beverage. Yeast is responsible for the vast varieties of beer out there, from cold fermented German lagers to warm fermented English Ales all of the distinct flavors come from the different varieties of yeast and the flavors each produces. I am going to be making a Chimay Dubbel, for those who don't know this is a pretty famous beer from Belgian. Belgian yeasts are very closely related to French wine yeast which often results in a fruity beer and can also be fermented at a pretty high temperature to create these flavors. Luckily you can harvest the yeast out of commercial bottles so about a week ago I started to build this up. If you ever have a beer that has weird stuff floating around at the bottom its probably yeast and its perfectly harmless, its actually full of Vitamin B, and can be fed an unfermented batch of sugary beer and grow. This is on a stir plate to keep the yeast in suspension and active.
Saccharification This is from the last batch I did but its the same idea, you are resting the grains at a specific temperature to extract sugars. You can see the thermometer has markings on it to tell you what sort of beer you will get, dry/medium/sweet. I was shooting for a pretty dry beer so I aimed for about 150 or so. Also shown is the filter for the grains that keeps the grain in place but allows water to pass through to both heat the grains and extract the sugars. If you're doing extract brewing this step is done for you and you get a can of syrup that is this stuff concentrated down to a syrup, think Easy Mac.
SpargingSparging is the fancy German word for rinsing the grains of the sugar that was exracted. The kettle that has the coil in it has the dual purpose of being used for this process, the water is pumped out and through the the coil and ontop of the grains. The water on the grains is drained and sent to the final kettle where it is boiled. I use a binder clip to mark where the water level is and adjust the rate of the water and 'wort' pumps so it stays about the same. I also marked the lines so I would know what went where, I wasn't expecting the painters tape to hold up but knock on wood its been just fine.
BoilThis is the easiest part, you boil the water to sanitize it and release the oils from the hops that are used. This is usually done for 60 minutes, where Dogfish gets its 60 Minute IPA from, sometimes up to 90 minutes for certain beers.
CoolingAfter you are done boiling you want to cool it down to about 70 degrees or so, this is basically a radiator that pipes the hot wort in one end and cold tap water the other direction. This took about 10 minutes today because the tap water was about 75 but in the winter it can be as short as 5 minutes to get to proper temp.
FermentingAdd the yeast that you built up earlier and add it to the fermenter and let the magic happen. This will take about 2 weeks for the yeast to eat all the sugar. This particular batch will probably age another two months after that point to mellow out. The tube coming out is an airlock that allows Co2 to leave but keeps air out.
SuccessAfter a long day of standing next to propane burners and dealing with chemicals enjoy some inspiration