Homebrew Beer. The Basics of Home Beer Brewing
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Homebrewing is the brewing of beer, wine, sake, mead, cider, perry and other beverages through fermentation on a small scale as a hobby for personal consumption, free distribution at social gatherings, amateur brewing competitions or other non-commercial reasons. Both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages can be made at home.
Brewing on a domestic level has been done for thousands of years, but has been subject to regulation and prohibition. Restrictions on homebrewing were lifted in the UK in 1963, Australia followed suit in 1972, and the USA in 1978, though individual states were allowed to pass their own laws limiting production.
While legality of homebrewing varies from country to country, most allow homebrewing, some countries limit the volume an individual can legally brew. Fewer countries allow distillation of alcohol.
Brewing culture
People homebrew for a variety of reasons. Homebrewing can be cheaper than buying commercially equivalent beverages; it allows people to adjust recipes according to their own tastes creating beverages that are unavailable on the open market or low-ethanol beverages that may contain fewer calories.
Many people enjoy entering homebrew competitions, sometimes referred to as “craft brewing”, homebrewing has developed various homebrewing clubs and competitions. The Beer Judge Certification Program or BJCP is an American organization which sanctions beer, mead, and cider homebrew competitions, certifies judges, and offers categories for judging; these judging categories are called “Beer Style Guidelines” and are written by the BJCP Style Committee.
Similar British organizations are The National Guild of Wine and Beer Judges, who have judging categories for both beer, and wine; and the National Association of Wine and Beermakers (Amateur) – (NAWB), who have held an annual show every year since 1959.
Our lager,
Which art in barrels,
Hallowed be thy drink.
Thy will be drunk, (I will be drunk), At home as it is in the pub.
Give us this day our foamy head,
And forgive us our spillages,
As we forgive those who spill against us.
And lead us not to incarceration, But deliver us from hangovers.
For thine is the beer, The bitter, The lager.
Forever and ever,
Barmen.
Anonymous, “Beer Prayer”
He who drinks beer sleeps well.
He who sleeps well cannot sin.
He who does not sin goes to heaven.
Amen.
Unknown German Monk
Give beer to those who are perishing, wine
to those who are in anguish; let them drink
and forget their poverty and remember
their misery no more.
Bible (Proverbs 31:6-7)
There are two reasons for drinking:
one is when you are thirsty, to cure it;
the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it.
Thomas Love Peacock, English satirist, Melincourt
But the greatest love—the love above
all loves, even greater than that of
a mother… Is the tender, passionate,
undying love, of one beer drunken
slob for another.
Irish love ballad
When the beer bubbles, the masses forget their troubles.
The People’s Daily, China
He was a wise man who invented beer.
Plato, Greek philosopher
The mouth of a perfectly happy man is filled with beer.
Ancient Egyptian saying
In wine there is wisdom. In beer there is strength. In water there is bacteria.
German saying