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1. Add the required amount of sanitizer to your carboy or plastic bucket with 5 gallons of water. Many sanitizers such as B-Brite, Star San, and 5-Star are available. you can also use common, unscented household bleach at 1oz. per gallon of water. Also, fill your bottling bucket or another bucket with a sanitizing solution for sanitizing additional equipment later in the process. If using liquid yeast, take it out of the refrigerator and allow it to warm to room temperature.
2. Add 2-3 gallons of water to a 5-gallon pot and turn on the heat. If using a 7.5 gallon, or larger, kettle fill with 6 gallons of water. Place kettle on stove and turn stove on.(Steeping: Optional)
3. If you have any cracked flavoring grains (usually crystal, chocolate, roasted barley, or black patent malts, etc.) put them into a large nylon mesh bag and place into the heating water and allow to steep for 30 minutes. Let the water reach, but not exceed, a temperature of 170 degrees. If you reach 170 degrees in less than 30 minutes, turn the heat off and let the grains steep until a total of 30 minutes has passed.
4. Remove the grain bag and heat the water to a boil. Turn the heat off and stir in the liquid malt extract, dried malt extract (DME), dextrin powder, candy (rock) sugar and/or lactose as called for in the recipe. Continue to stir so the ingredients don't stick to or get burned on the bottom. Do not add any corn sugar that might have been included in your kit. That will be used for the bottling process. This solution is now called sweet wort. (Pronounced wert)
5. Turn the heat back up and add your bittering hops. Add the hops, use in a fine mesh nylon bag if available, according to the recipe. If you do not have a bag add them directly to the boil.
6. Do not leave the boil unattended! If during the boil foam starts to rise turn down the heat until the foam drops, reapply heat and proceed to boil for 1 hour.
7. You must sanitize any equipment that will come into contact with the beer once it drops below 160 degrees including lids, airlock, funnel, thermometer, hydrometer sample taker, all stoppers, and anything else that will come in contact with the cooling beer. Put all this equipment into the sanitizing solution that you made earlier in step 1.
8. Add the Whirlfloc tablet or Irish MossWith with 20 minutes left in the boil. Whirlfloc and Irish Moss are natural fining agents that will help to clear your beer by attaching to protein molÂecules, which then precipitate out of solution. If using a wort chiller (for larger kettles) place wort chiller into boiling wort at this time.
9. Add your hops according to the recipe, with 10, 5, or 1 minute(s) left in the boil. The last addition of aroma hops will steep while your wort cools. Use fine mesh nylon hop bags if available.
10. Cooling hot wort if using a 5 gallon kettle, doing a Partial-Boil: Create a method for cooling your wort to around 130 degrees. For example, you can put the pot, with the lid on, in the sink and run cool tap water around it or you can put the pot in an ice water bath in your sink or bathtub. While the kettle is cooling, empty the sanitizing solution out of your fermenting vessel and fill it with 2 gallons, depending on how much you boiled, of cold water and/or ice. If using ice, you might want to use use store bought so you won't transfer flavors acquired from your freezer. also note that when using water from your tap and/or ice your beer is subjected to whatever flavors or contamination is in the water to begin with. If you are using dry yeast you should re-hydrate the yeast in accordance with the directions on the packet. When the temperature reaches 130 degrees, transfer the wort into your fermenter and top up to 5 gallons with cold water and/or ice. Do not attempt to strain during this transfer. While transferring from kettle to fermenter there is no need to strain the wort. Use fine mesh hop bags to retain most of the vegetable matter from the hops.
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