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Beer recipe

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Written by EFW Staff

Homemade beer: beer recipes

A beer, many tastes

When you talk about beer, you always think about the classic blond beer, a clear beer perfect for who discovers this beer for the first time. Despite this, the experts know very well that beer means a wide world with plenty of flavours, colours and bodies, origins and alcoholic volumes.

Why does a beer have so many variations?

Because beer recipes are pretty different, as they use different ingredients or simply in different proportions. There are also different fermentation techniques, types of water, quantity of malt, but the taste of the brew master plays an important role, either for a craft beer or not.

Beer recipe for lovers

It is not easy to find the “perfect” recipe, given that the final result is influenced by many elements, not only by the ingredients. We can give, anyway, some basic rules for people that want to know something more about beer recipe.
First of all, the beer lovers can buy a kit for homemade beer to create the drink starting from the extract of hop. These kits supply all the necessary equipment for fermentation that is the most important part of preparation. All the kits to prepare homemade beers are pretty similar and are always sold with “instructions”, with the recipes for the homemade beers.

In any case, the process foresees to dilute a mix of must already hopped with water, adding sugar (usually barley sugar or extract of malt, but it is possible to use also home sugar). After this boil, cool down, add yeast (that is often given inside the kit) and leave to ferment keeping the temperature always the same, around 20°.

Beer can be bottled when it reaches the requirements of density and weight, given in the kit instruction. They can be measured with the tools given, always in the kit.

Beer recipe for the experts

If you want to prepare something more complex, you can create your own beer starting from a non-hopped extract. In this case, you will need malt extract (brew or bakery extract, that is cheaper but not less suitable), malted grains, yeast and hop for sure.

Malted grains are able to give origins to beers with different body and colours, being an ingredient that allows to have clear and dark beers. At the mean time they can be more or less structured. Hop can be chosen in flowers or grinded (pressed then in cones, pellets or plugs) and according to the preferences, can be boiled in the must or kept inside filtering bags.

According to the type of hop chosen (and the flavour), the quantity can vary, but not the boiling time that should be of around half an hour. Even the period of fermentation is the same, usually two weeks, in two different fermenters. The maturing time in cellar, instead, is different according to the beer that you want to produce. Often, despite the kit instructions, is the experience that allows to recognize when the beer is ready.

 

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EFW Staff