What ingredients to use for brewing?



Photo credit:Venn Diagram Flickr.com


Main physical ingredients you need for any home brewing alternate depending on what you intend to make.
Here is a list of the various Ingredients usually used in brewing

Hops for Beer Brewing
These will have different alpha acid contents.
A low alpha acid content will be around 3-4 % which will give you a softer flavour with scents with a more floral scent.
A high alpha acid content 6-10% will produce a stronger flavour of beer
similar to dark ales which have a slightly more bitter tatse than a softer beer.
Hops usually come in vacuum packaging as seen in the photo.

Yeasts
The type of yeast you buy will determine what sort of taste you will get,
typically the kind of yeasts you can buy are for
red wine
white wine
Beer yeast
Ale yeast
Fruit wines
The grade of grade of yeast you use heavily determines your end product.
Fruit wines and red wines usually require a quick fermenting yeast at lower tempratures mainly because the grapes naturally contain yeast and lots of suger which helps during fermentation.
Beer yeast produces different results depending on whether you use a top cropping yeast for lighter beers as apposed to bottom cropping yeats which have a slower fermentation rate to produce lagers(less sugar remains).

Grains and Malts
Liquid malt extracts are used as the starting product for most beers,asles and lagers.
Grains and crushed malt usually come in half kilo bag mixed with all the other necessary ingredients will give you about 5 gallons.
Larger malt extracts of 1.5kg are available but thats for more than one batch at a time, if your planning to use this then your gonna need a bigger bucket!

Nutrients
These are used to jump start your yeasting, yeast food basically.

Chemicals
Stearilising your equipment before home made brewing is an importannt step,  chemicals can be used if you don't wanna use a hot water and a scrubbing brush.
Finings are used at the end of the brewing process, they work by preventing protein coagulation to remove any organic matter.
There are naturfal alternatives, but more modern examples are available.
Finings are especially important if your using non- alcoholivce beverages.

Additives
These are for additing to your beverage afterwards, things that come under additives include:
colouring- to change the look of beer
as metion before yeast food
flowers, to improve the notes of wine
sloes for sloe gin or vodka. sloes are a variety of plum.
european varietys of sloe (dark plums) are used to make šljivain the Baltic nations such as Serbia and Croatia.
Elderberries are used as are Elderflowers when they are in season , make very fragrant wines.
I'll be covering the additives and how to use them at a later date.