Home Brewing Beer

A Page about my homebrew setup.

I am currently buying my supplies from Wine Workshop and Brewing Center. They can store grain at about the price I would, and I don't have to Deal with It.

Brewing a batch of wort consumes about 6 hours. If I start at 09:00:

Start	Finish	Task
09:00	10:00	Pull equipment from basement, grind grains, heat sparge water
10:00	10:30	Strike! ( Add heated water to grains )
10:30	12:00	Steep! ( Let the malt do its Magic. I usually go buy ice at this time )
12:00	12:30	Sparge! ( Drain out the wort and rinse the Spent Grains for all the delicious sugar )
12:30	13:45	Boil! ( Add hops and boil the wort for an hour or so to let the wondrous hop oils dissolve )
13:45	14:30	Cool! ( Quick-cool the wort from 200F to around 80F with my rube-goldberg cooling apparatus)
14:30	14:35	Pitch! ( Pour the cooled wort into the Primary, add the magical yeast )
14:35	15:30	Clean Up ( Put the Primary into the basement, mop everything up, rinse everything out, and put it all away )

Cooling the Wort

My Truly Awesome Wort Cooling Apparatus. A coil of copper tubing and a stirrer are in the boil pot itself. The stirrer is mounted on a stand made of 2x4s and bolts, weighted to the ground with two cinder blocks (top). The coil is connected by plastic tubing to a small electric pump immersed inside an ice bucket ( orange bucket, bottom). Cold water gets pumped into the wort, where it carries the heat back into the ice bucket. It takes about 20 minutes to cool the wort from 200F to about 80F.

After Pitching

24 hours after my brewing day, the wort is already turning into beer.

After a week or so, it calms down.

Bottling

Then I settle in for about a 2-hour session with my Capper to produce:

This all sits in the basement for another month or two before it's truly ready to drink.

And here's the first glass. Cheers!

-- CharlesShapiro - 2 Oct 2026