Nearly everything you can think of that is produced at home is better. Take, for example, home made apple pie, lemonade or home grown vegetables. We take the best ingredients, using a proven method that was taught to us by one of our grandparents, and we put our heart and soul into it to produce something that is fresh, delicious and unique.

Homebrewing done right can produce some of the most interesting, exciting and enjoyable beers you have ever laid your lips on. With a little practice, care and planning… even you can make great brews at home!

But what exactly is homebrewing?

The answer to this question might seem self-evident… and it is! Homebrewing is the process of making your own brew at home. However if we break the word down into its parts we might find more of a question to answer, particularly the question: what is brewing?

According to most definitions, brewing is a process where we take a grain, fruit, or sugar and infuse the mixture with a liquid–usually hot water–to either get the sugar out, change the sugar or dilute it. We then boil it and let it ferment.

But the thing that enters most peoples minds when we talk about homebrewing is, well, beer. So let’s focus on homebrewing beer for the most part from here on in. Brewing beer in one’s home is as old as humanity itself. In-fact in times not long past, most beer was brewed at home. Even presidents brewed their own beer. Thomas Jefferson being the most famous homebrewer and President Obama the most recent. While you don’t need to have a home the size of the White House to homebrew, you do need a home. Having a cool space to sit your fermenting beer is probably the only prerequisite.

Let’s once again focus on the three main processes involved in brewing according to our trusty dictionary (we’ll learn later that there are a few more steps involved in brewing beer)

All three of these processes can easily be achieved in the home. Not only will these steps be easily achieved, but they will often times happen quite spontaneously, without us even knowing. If you leave a glass of orange juice out for a few days you will be well on the way to completing the third process on this list – fermentation. Your alcoholic orange juice won’t taste too good though, and there’s a good reason why. The process is not controlled.

The brew (orange juice sitting on the counter) fermented because some bacteria or yeast hitching a ride on a dust particle happened to land in the “brew” and had a great time using up all the available sugar to grow and reproduce, and in the process produced alcohol, gas and a lot of other chemicals that don’t taste particularly good. We will learn time and time again throughout this book that while it is surprisingly easy to brew your own beer at home, controlling the process is the hard part. In the case of the orange juice brew, if we had introduced a yeast or bacteria that we had chosen, one that produced great fruity chemicals, we might have made an orange juice brew that was a hit with the neighbors. And it’s not only homebrewers that face this challenge. Commercial brewers strive to control their process too–but things don’t always go perfectly even with the latest technology on their side. So if your first or third or even one hundredth brew doesn’t turn out quite right, don’t despair. You can be guaranteed that every head brewer in any brewery in the world has faced the same problems as you–only their problems are much bigger!

You may hear some disparaging comments when you mention that you’re going to homebrew, mostly from the type of people that don’t like to do, but do like to criticize. Some might even say that it’s dangerous to brew your own beer. In-fact beer is a very stable and safe drink. It has many properties that make it resistant to harmful bacteria, and the yeast that make the alcohol, only produce the safe form of alcohol–ethanol. The harmful alcohol–methanol is only ever produced in minute quantities by yeast and bacteria, so no matter how badly that problem batch tastes (as long as you didn’t put something else in by accident) it is always safe to drink. This book won’t teach you how to make the perfect beer, you’ll have find that out through lots of practice and experimentation, but it will help you control the process and give you some ideas to start that experimentation process.

Let’s conclude this opening chapter now by reviewing what we’ve learned so far.