When you want to make your own beer because you like the taste of a good brew you couldn't have chosen a better hobby. Brewing your own beer helps you control the flavor of the beer. In the end the product will taste exactly how you want it to taste, at least after a few tries it should. It's a great hobby if you have been visiting beer festivals and started to tell the specific differences between the beer variations out there these days. And having a hobby like beer brewing is the perfect way to take it just one step further.



What you put in you will get out

When you learn to brew your own beer you will start to understand the importance of the ingredients you use. The ingredients you put in the brew is what makes the beer, shapes it body and gives the color. When your ingredients are of low quality then the chances are your end product be will also be. It's better not to brew then to brew with poor ingredients.

Malt, what you need to start making beer at home, is the ingredient that is the most important of them all. Malt is what gives color to you beer and also gives it body and flavor. You need a lot of fermentable sugars and that is what is in in malt and make that the beer has a bit of a sweet taste. To balance that sweetness we use hops. Like we said we use hops to balance the sweet taste from the malt because they provide the bitter to the brew. But there is not just one sort of hop. There are many kinds of hops you can use all with their own specific flavor and aroma to a very bitter kind.

Because of the use of different grain types while brewing your own beer you will see all kinds of changes in the flavor and color. You may even be surprised to hear that you could use rice, corn and oatmeal give your beer a specific flavor. Rice and corn will give your beer its own color and body, oatmeal on the other hand will give your beer a smoother texture. If you are after a more dark and rich tasting beer then you should try out some malted barley that need to be brought to a high temperature. If its a stout you are going for than use a lot of almost burnt malt barley.

There is of course one ingredient that is right up there next to malt when it comes to importance and that is yeast. Without yeast there would not be a brewing process. Without yeast you would end up with a very flat beer that would not taste nice and would not have the fizz and buzz you would expect in a beer. There are different types of yeast you can buy and the choice of yeast also is an influence on the flavor of the beer. There are yeast types in a liquid culture that would give your beer an interesting taste but you have to keep in mind that you can't keep a liquid yeast culture in storage as long as a dry culture. Also, there are enough type of dry yeast cultures to keep you going in your quest for the perfect beer taste.