Since days of old people have found it easy to make beer at home. You just need some basic ingredients and some basic equipment.
Why would you want to make beer at home?
Well there are a few reasons that spring to mind why many people make their own beer at home.
Price, you can make a pint of beer for a lot less than it will cost you to buy. There is the cost of making it, profit for the maker, profit for the distributer and profit for the seller which needs to be made and then there is duty which the government charge and then there is VAT which also goes to the government.
As of 5/2/2026 our cheapest beer kits are the Geordie Beer Kits at just £11.50. You will need to add 1kg of sugar and the cheapest I can find is at Aldi for £1.09. That means you can make 40 pints of great tasting beer for just £0.31 a pint! I'll say it again 31p a pint!
Satisfaction of making it yourself. It's a great feeling making something that looks and in the case of beer, tastes good. And if you share it with friends and they give it praise, you get this warm fuzzy feeling inside, and that's not just the beer.
Experimentation. Something a lot of traditional breweries don't do. They usually have a recipe that they have stuck to for hundreds of years and they aren't going to change it now. But you can have fun experimenting with styles, flavours, alcohol and lots more.
Fun, once you have the basics, it's a quick skill to learn and so very quickly it becomes fun to make. And lets not forget its fun to drink it too.
Convenience is another. You can always have beer on tap and not just one, you can have a few ready to go. So whether you just want a bottle on the odd evening, or you want a barrel ready for that quick tipple, it's there. No having to pop down to the off licence.
Community. Yes there are brewing clubs around the country where you can go and learn more about brewing, show off your beers, making new friends and possibly making collaborations into new styles and equipment.
Ingredients are your choice if you have allergies or need to be careful about what you eat. Alcohol sold in the UK does not have to have the ingredients listed, just the allergens, so you are never really sure what they have used to make the beer. If you make it yourself, you know exactly what has gone into making the beer.
So these are just a few reasons to make beer at home.
Ingredients To Make Beer At Home
Now let's talk about what goes into beer. There are lots of different types of beer, like stout, IPA, Pale Ale, Porter, Craft Beer, Belgian Beer, etc, but they all use the same process to make beer and you can use the same process to make beer at home.
Water, you'll need water. And that should be easy to get, just by turning on the tap. There are changes to the minerals in the water depending on what part of the UK you are in and where your water company takes it water from.
Here in Somerset, we have hard water that has lots of calcium carbonate dissolved in the water. A little further down in Cornwall, the water is a lot softer due to less calcium carbonate. If your water is taken from a river instead of a borehole in the rocks, you will have different levels of minerals again. Minerals like magnesium, fluoride, sodium, sulphites, iron and copper can all be found in drinking water, and depending on where your tap water comes from, it will have differing levels of those minerals.
These differences in the water will make your beer taste different, even if you use exactly the same ingredients. But don't let that worry you. There are lots of breweries around the UK and they use the water they have available and they make great tasting beer. Yes, you can adjust your water profile, but that's getting more technical and something for a little further down the line when you have better equipment and experience.
The good news is, tap water is great for making beer at home!
What about bottled water? Yes you can use bottled water, and again these will have different levels of carbonates and minerals dissolved, so you will get a different beer.
What about distilled water? Earlier I said that when you have more experience, then you can adjust your water. Using pure distilled water is not good for brewing. Yeast need minerals, to be healthy, multiply and ferment the sugars without creating off flavours. So if you use distilled water, you will need to add minerals to the distilled water. You may need to add acid too as the pH may not be suitable for a starch sugar conversion in the mash or a healthy fermentation. It also wont have the chloramines and sulphites that help the hops impart their flavours. So for now, use tap water.
Chlorine is added to drinking water at the treatment plant to kill bacteria. There can still be traces in tap water when you pull it off. The good news is that chlorine dissipates over time, so you can simply draw off your water 24 hours before you intend to brew with it and the chlorine will evaporate off. Add a crushed campden tablet (sodium metabisulphite) - per 4.5 litres of tap water - as this will neutralise both chlorine and chloramine (which is now used in some water treatment plants) and prevent bacteria from multiplying in the absence of the chlorine. It also adds important sulphites which help in the brewing process.
Grain. The main grain used in making beer is Barley. Did you know here in the UK pretty much all of the barley used in brewing is grown in the UK! But using barley that has just been picked from the fields is no good to brew with. It has to go through a process called malting.
In a malthouse the grain is moistened and warmed to encourage the barley seed to germinate.
In this process an enzyme is created. This enzyme causes the starch in the seed to begin to turn to a type of sugar. This sugar is the food the seed needs to make its root and its first shoot before photosynthesis takes over.
But we don't want the barley shooting, so as soon as a its first tiny root appears, the heat is turned up to kill the seed and stop the germination process. But not hot enough to destroy the enzyme as we'll need that when brewing the beer.
Now we have malted barley. Perfect for making beer.
We can roast that malted barley to add different flavours. Roasting the barley can make its characteristics change, different amounts of roasting cause the grain to go through stages. First it starts to crystallise, making crystal malt, great for adding toffee notes to the beer, keep roasting and you get amber malt, great for adding colour and nutty flavours to a beer, keep roasting and your get chocolate malt, great for stouts to add (you guessed it) flavours of chocolate to the beer. Keep roasting and you get black malt, great for adding liquorice flavours and colour, but add to much and the beer will taste burnt and acrid. The roasting destroys the enzyme.
We tend to add the roasted barleys in small amounts to add flavour and colour. The main grain you will need to make beer at home is plain malted barley as this has the amylase enzyme.
There are also lots of other grains used in brewing beer, wheat, oats, barley (not malted), maize, rice and rye. These add extra flavours and textures to the finished beer, but like the roasted barleys above, they are used in small amounts, in addition to the malted barley.
1kg of malted barley, used to make 4.5 litres of beer will make a beer with an approx ABV of 5%. So if you want to make 40 pints of beer (23 litres) you will need 5kg of malted barley to get a beer of approx 5%. If you want to add flavours, then you'll need to add the extra malts above, but this won't have very much affect on the ABV.
Hops add more than just bitterness to a beer. Hops add bitterness, aromas, flavours, textures, oils, mouthfeel and colour to a beer. And depending on how you use them, they can add all those characteristics or just 1 or 2.
If you add hops into the boil, then lots of their delicate aromas are destroyed, leaving just the bitterness. This is normal for traditional real ales and stouts where the grain is providing most of the flavour.
With craft beers, you would still add a small quantity of hops to the boil to give the bitterness, but the majority of hops go in at the end of the boil, during fermentation and even post fermentation. This allows you to keep all those delicious mouth watering aromas and flavours.
Since the craft beer revolution, there has been a surge in hop varieties. Instead of just the traditional hops that added the bitterness (such as Fuggles and Goldings), you can now buy hops that add amazing aromas and flavours, (such as Galaxy, Sabro and Krush) think grapefruit, pineapple, mango, pine, blackcurrant, banana, bubble gum, coconut, passionfruit, orange, lemon, herbs, even marijuana aromas.
If you add lots of hops, the lupulin (pollen) adds an amazing yellow golden colour and haze to the beer. This also adds body.
If you add too many hops that are very strong in alpha acids, then you can create hop burn, where the oils in the hops lupulin stick to the inside of your mouth and create a weird feeling.
So choosing the right hops and the right quantity are crucial to making a good beer at home.
Use online recipes and get a feel for what hops are added when and why. Your knowledge will grow in time and brewing beer is about experimenting. Trying single varieties for a beer, then mixing up a few hops next time to add their different flavours and qualities to the finished beer.
Craft beers don't like oxygen. Oxygen causes a beer to turn brown and causes any haze from the hops to drop out of suspension, so ideally when making a craft beer, you would use equipment that means that the beer never comes into contact with the air. Saying that, with careful movement and purging with CO2, you can create a great craft beer without oxidisation. But again, that's potentially a little further down the line. For now, lets talk about how easy it is to make beer at home.
Yeast are needed to turn the sugars from the grain into alcohol. There are a lot of strains of yeast out there, so simply choose a variety that suits the style of beer you are making.
You might think all yeast do are consume the sugar and turn it to alcohol, but you would be wrong. Yeast eat many other compounds too, transforming them into new compounds. This is why wine tastes nothing like grape juice. The same goes for beer.
A process called biotransformation means the yeast transform flavours and aromas and make new ones. They can even make compounds that add texture as well as their own flavours.
Different yeast strains biotransform compounds differently, so choose a yeast that suits your beer.
Method To Make Beer at Home
Let's Make Beer At Home.
There are 3 ways to make beer at home, 1 - Using grain and hops; 2 - Using liquid malt extract and hops; 3 - Using beer kits.
Lets start with the most rewarding. Making beer from grain and hops. Then we'll tell you how to make beer with liquid malt extract, and then we'll tell you how to make beer with a beer kit.
1 - Make Beer At Home with Grain and Hops
The process is simple, but takes time. Heating and cooling such a large quantity of water takes time, and even with a powerful system, it still takes time to make beer at home.
Allow 6-8 hours to brew the wort. Once you have pitched your yeast, it takes another 7-10 days for the beer to ferment. If you are adding hops post fermentation, it can take another 2-4 days.
Brewing the wort is what takes the time. Well, it doesn't take much of your time, once its cooking, boiling and cooling, you can leave it and get on with other things, perhaps a bit of DIY around the house, but don't think you can just put it on and go out for the day. You need to be there so you can regularly go back and check on how its doing.
Day 1 - Brew Day. Start early in the morning, so you have enough time.
One of the easiest ways to make beer at home is using the Brew In Bag method, but some equipment with straining discs mean you don't need the bag, but it depends on your equipment which we will get onto later.
Take your water and put it in a big pan / water heater and bring it up to 70C.
Put your grains into a mashing bag / Mashtun and add your water.
The cool grain will drop the temperature down to the mid 60's which is perfect. We want to cook the grain in the water between 60-69C for 60-90 minutes.
Remember that enzyme - amylase - we talked about earlier? Well, this now starts to work on the starch in the grain and starts turning it to dissolvable sugar. The sugar dissolves into the water.
Go higher than 70C and the enzyme starts to break down. Lover than 60 and it starts creating sugars that the yeast can't eat.
This above process is called the MASH.
At the end of the mash we need to rinse the grains to make sure we have all the sugar. This is called SPARGING.
To sparge the grains, we drain of the sweet malty liquid which is now called WORT so just the grains remain.
Fresh hot water at 70C is gently sprinkled on the grains so any remaining sugar is dissolved and taken away by the water. The water then joins the wort.
The wort now has to go through the next stage - the BOIL. In the boil, hops are added and some chemical processes take place. the wort darkens and condenses as some of the water evaporates. The aromas in the hops are boiled off.
The boil is a traditional process, but we have proved with our No Boil Beer Kits that this stage is not always necessary if the recipe is amended.
Getting the wort from the mashing temperature up to the boil takes time and once at the boil, it has to be boiled hard - not simmered - for 60-90 minutes depending on the recipe.
Once the boil has finished, more hops can be added, or just left to cool.
COOLING 23 litres of wort form 100C to 20C naturally would take many hours, so the process is sped up. Using a heat exchanger we can cool the wort quickly. A wort chiller can be immersed into the wort and cold water passed through the wort chiller. The cold water picks up the heat from the wort and cools the wort quickly, but this still takes around 1 hour.
AERATION is needed as all the dissolved oxygen has been knocked out of suspension. Yeast need oxygen to grow and multiply, so oxygen needs to be added back into the wort. This is the only time in the process that air should be incorporated into the wort.
To aerate the wort, you need to stir it vigorously. There are tools that fit on the end of a drill to make the process easier, but it has to be aerated for at least 10 minutes.
Now we need to test the wort with a hydrometer to check the amount of dissolved sugar which will give an indication as to the potential ABV. Write the reading down and keep it safe.
FERMENTATION - Now its time to pitch the yeast. Sprinkle the yeast on top of the wort and then put the lid on.
Keep the fermentation between 18-22C for 7 days. You should see a big frothy head for the first few days which should subside.
After 7 days, take a look, if its still bubbling, leave it for a few more days. if its still, take a sample and use the hydrometer. The reading should be around 1.012, possible a little lower.
It's now time to syphon the beer from the sediment into bottle or a pressure barrel.
You'll need to add a little priming sugar to each bottle, usually 1/4 teaspoon, or if barrelling, then 100g of sugar into the barrel.
Cap and leave at 18-22C for another week. The is the secondary fermentation and in the bottles it will cause the beer to have a light fizz. In the barrel, it will create a head of CO2 that will keep your beer flowing from the tap.
So that's how easy it is to make beer at home with grain and hops.
2 - Make Beer At Home with Liquid Malt Extract
With liquid malt extract, mashing the grains, sparging, boiling and the cooling has all been done for you. The manufacturers then concentrate the wort, so all you have to do is add water and hops.
You can steep some grains in hot water if you wish to add extra flavours and colours, but this can be done in a small pan on the hob.
The hops need to be added too, and you can choose from a huge range of hops. These need to be boiled, but again this can be done in a small saucepan on the hob in a couple of litres of water. Then the infused water can be added to the Liquid Malt Extract.
You then top it up with water and add your yeast. From that point on, the fermentation is the same as with brewing from grain.
We have a range of Liquid Malt Extracts that you can use to make beer at home.
3 - Make Beer At Home with Beer Kits
With a beer kit, all of the work has been done for you. The manufacturer has mashed, sparged, boiled, added hops, cooled and concentrated the hopped wort.
All you have to do is empty the beer kit malt extract into a fermenter, add water, add yeast and wait for 7 to 10 days, just like the fermentation with the All Grain method above.
Because of the advances in technology in concentrating the wort, these beer kits make beer just as good as you would get on a pump in a pub.
We have a large range of beer kits you can use to make beer at home.
Equipment to Make Beer at Home
You will need some equipment to make your beer, so let's delve into the equipment you need to make beer at home...
Making beer at home can be complicated or simple. Hundreds of years ago, grain was steeped in pots on an open fire, cooled and left for natural yeast to ferment the sugars to alcohol in glazed clay pots with a cloth tied over the top. It worked and people would go to houses where the women made beer and gave them money for their beer. This is where public houses came from.
But now we have access to amazing technology and machines that can pretty much do everything. All you have to do is flick a couple of switches, or valves and the app on your phone does the rest. These machines aren't cheap and take some learning, but you are almost copying what happens in a modern brewery.
But we can keep it simple too. Not as simple as 1000 years ago, but still simple compared to the machines.
The size of your equipment will depend on how much beer you want to make or the amount of beer you can make will depend on the size of your equipment. Most people make beer in wither 9 litre or 23 litre batches. Some homebrewers make beer in 100 litre batches and at that point you are verging on professional brewery equipment.
You will need the following equipment to make beer at home if you are making it from grain. To ferment the beer, you will need to use all the equipment in this list
Boiler to heat the water. This can be a large stock pan for smaller batchers or a tea urn for larger batches.
Mash Tun to steep the grains. A well insulated and modified cool box works well for many people, or you can buy a mash tun / boiler in one, with a temperature controller so you can keep the grains steeping at the correct temperature and less need for syphoning / transferring between vessels.
Boiler to boil the wort. Again, for small batches this can be done in a large stock pot on the hob. If you have a combined mash tun / boiler, once the grain has been removed, it can be used to boil the wort too.
Wort chiller to chill the wort. This can either be a coil of copper / stainless steel pipe that you submerge into the wort and pass cold water through the pipe. Or a heat exchanger, were the wort is pumped through a box with one set of pipes and another set of pips carries cold water. The heat exchanger is very efficient.
Mashing and Sparging Bag. This useful bag holds the grain in the mash tun / boiler and means it is very easy to remove the crushed grains from the machine and makes for much quicker clean up.
Sparging Arm. When sparging, hot water is slowly sprinkled onto the grains, so a pipe from a boiler, connected to a copper arm that spins slowly, sprinkling all the grains with the water to rinse them.
If you are making beer at home from liquid malt extract or a beer kit, you will just need to use the following equipment:
Fermenter. This can be as simple as a bucket (fitted with an airlock if you like), or you can upgrade to a stainless steel fermenter or even a pressurised fermenting vessel.
Hydrometer. This will tell you initially how much sugar is in your wort before you begin fermentation. It will tell you how much sugar is left at the end of fermentation. Remember earlier I said that there are sugars created in the mash that the yeast can not eat. This is what makes beer slightly sweet. We can then perform a calculation from the 2 readings and work out the ABV of the beer.
Thermometer. It is needed at all stages of making beer. From getting the right temperature in the mash, making sure its cool enough to pitch the yeast, and making sure the fermentation temperature is correct and stable. A Thermometer is a very important piece of equipment when making beer at home.
Stainless Steel Spoon / Plastic Spoon. These are easier to sanitise than wooden spoons so helps prevent infections.
Syphon. This is used to move the wort to the fermenter and the beer in to bottles or a barrel or a keg. You can get a simple syphon which you suck on to start the flow, or you can get auto-syphons which has a built in mechanism to start the flow.
Beer Bottles. These have to be pressure bottles as when bottling the beer becomes fizzy, so the bottles need to be able to handle the pressure.
Beer Barrel / Beer Keg. A pressurised container where you can condition your beer and prepare it for pouring.
There is a lot more equipment that you can use when making beer, but these are the basics.
Now you have a good understanding of how to make beer at home whether you are using a beer kit, liquid malt extract or grain to make your beer. Of course once you have the basics, you can start delving deeper into the detail of brewing if you so wish, or you can keep it simple.
Brewing at home can also cause you to become more creative. Inventing solutions to problems due to the layout of you home. Inventing products to make your brewing easier or more efficient. Coming up with new recipes. Conjuring unique ways to stage your equipment to improve your brew day. Even building your kegerator. Creating an ideal fermenting environment. And even creating your own mini pub in your shed.
It's a fun hobby and you can take it as far as you want. There are lots of breweries out there that started from a person making beer in their shed, will you be the next?
Cheers & Happy Brewing