OT: Home Brew

It can be as complicated as you want to make it. I've gotten pretty complicated with my rig. But you don't have to.

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How long is the process from start to finish?

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The absolute fastest from beginning to drinking it, minimum, 4 weeks, and that would be a hefeweizen, and that's if you are a badass.

Medium gravity ales (most recipes you'll find) are going to need 10 weeks.

Lagers can take months.

High gravity ales can take a year to actually taste good.


Can you drink all these sooner? You sure can, but then you get into the "Is the beer worth a shite?" question.

If you're starting, don't start with all grain. There is so much that can go wrong, and without knowing the basics, something will go wrong and you'll have no idea what it is. Start with a liquid extract at most.

Or if you really just want to get your feet wet and don't want the time or money commitment, go find a Mr. Beer kit for $50. It has everything you need (including ingredients for one batch!) to brew 2 gallon batches. $50 to brew beer, including ingredients for 2 gallons of beer. It takes a lot of the complexity out of the process. If you choose to upgrade, nothing you get from Mr. Beer will work in a more advanced setup, so that equipment is no good going forward. That's how I started ~3 years ago. Now I'm on all grain and after 10 or so batches of all grain, I'm only happy with about 50% of them. That's not because you can't brew good beer at home, it's because I'm still learning.

It's a technical process and something as small as a 5 degree swing in your brew (mash) can turn a beer to shite. If you don't care for craft beer, don't homebrew. No point in my opinion. If you do like craft beer and are willing to commit time both to research and spend the majority of a day brewing, then you can eventually make the best beer you've ever tasted, seriously. You can make any beer on the shelves at home, but you can do it better.

Money investment isn't a problem. Mr. Beer for $50 to get your feet wet. An all grain bottling setup will run $100-200. Time is the biggest investment. An all grain brew will keep you up and down for 5'ish hours on brew day and a couple hours on bottling day. The weeks in between you may spend some time monitoring fermentation, adjusting fermentation temperature, adding ingredients, moving from one fermenter to another, etc. It's a time investment, not a monetary investment. You can shorten the time investment by just doing rookie Mr. Beer batches, but that gets boring after 2 or 3 batches.