The best home brewing equipment
From simple kits to shiny stainless steel, beer expert Melissa Cole walks us through home brewing gear.
Like your real ale? Have a canny knowledge of craft beer? Ever wanted to make the leap into home brewing?
In the UK we now have more breweries per capita than anywhere else in the world, so perhaps it’s time you gave it a go yourself.
Before you start
Before we start, let me just offer some pieces of advice that stand true at any level of brewing: clean once, twice, three times, and if in doubt clean again. Make sure you sterilise everything with Starsan or something similar. After all, cleanliness is the path to beer godliness!
- Next to cleanliness, temperature control is king. This is the surest route to great brews.
- Use homebrew forums, learn from others' mistakes, and don’t be ashamed to share yours. It’s how you learn.
- Good lager is hard to make. Seriously, don’t go there until you have experience and have got to grips with your kit.
Have some bottle
Of course, you’ll need something to put your beer in, so don’t forget to invest in bottles and crown capping equipment and perhaps some labels that you can personalise.
Simple starters
The Muntons kits (see the top of the page) offer a very simple way into home brewing and the Connoisseurs range is a good place to start. With different styles from around the world, you can create everything from a bock to a bitter – plus there’s lots of good advice and a stockist finder on the website. Prices start from around £14 and you’d be wise to get a simple brewing set-up like this, which starts at around the £50 mark, to make it in. Shop around homebrew shops and websites to get the best price.
Stepping it up
Want to move on from kits? There are a lot of books out there that describe how to brew beer at home. Charlie Papazian’s Complete Joy of Homebrewing, which has just been updated to its fourth edition, is widely acknowledged as the bible of home brewing.
I’m also very fond of Andy Hamilton’s Brewing Britain, which is far more simple, but no less excellent for it. There’s also Ted Bruning’s Home Brewing, which offers a guide to making cider too.
A grain of truth
Now you’ve mastered the basics, to be a proper home brewer you’ll need to step it up to a full grain set-up. While a lot of people will customise Ikea cooking pots and elements from the simple kit for the main vessels, there are a few things that I think are essential for you to buy.
The first bit of kit I’d suggest to really make your beer spring to life is a copper wort chilling coil – prices are around £55. Cooling your wort as quickly as possible is one of the keys to making great beer.
And the second is a temperature-controlled fridge (here’s a very good guide on how to build one from Berry Brew). This is an indispensable piece of kit for two of the best home brewers I know, Chris Taylor and Emma Victory, known collectively as Crema Brewery (@crema_brewery on Twitter).
“We invested in a fridge, a small heater and a temperature controller,” they explain. “This has really helped improve the consistency of the beer we make and has also allowed us to replicate processes used in commercial breweries such as chilling to drop out hop matter, proteins and yeast sediment to clarify our beer.”
Distracted by shiny things
If money and space are no barrier then you could go all-in with a one-vessel 20-litre Spiedel Braumeister kit.
The real joy of this kit is that is requires a lot less cleaning, but at £1,275 – plus the need to buy a lot of the additional kit above – this really is a serious investment for the serious home brewer. But my is it shiny!
Have you ever tried home brewing? How did it turn out? Will you be brewing up another batch this year? Let us know about your brewing experiences in the Comments below.
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