I have a little experience with homebrewing. I've done a whole two batches of extract brewing and have the ingredients and equipment on hand to do my first "all grain" brew (a Belgian Dubbel recipe).
In all-grain brewing, you mill the grain and "sparge" it with hot water, which leaches out the sugars in a liquid called "wort". In EXTRACT brewing, you take the extract syrup and add it to water to make the "wort". It is more like making "canned soup" than all-grain brewing is, but it is valuable in learning the other steps (especially good sanitation practices). As others mentioned "gypsum" adjusts your water chemistry. Hard/soft water can have various effects on the finished brew and how it tastes. Normally it is used in "soft water" environments. If you are using hard water, you could probably safely omit it from your recipe. Corn Syrup (or simply sugar) is used in the bottling phase (you'll notice it says "for priming"). When the beer is bottled, there is still a bit of life in the yeast, but it needs some more "food" to do its thing. Sugar is that food. The result, in the bottle, is carbonation (and a bit more alcohol). Too much and you will get "bottle bombs" (enough carbonation to explode the bottle). Making your own beer is great fun and while extracts may be considered "short cuts" to all-grain brewers, they are how most all-grain brewers started themselves. Most homebrewers make 5 gallon batches (equiv. to a couple of cases) and it can be ready to drink as soon as 6 weeks after bottling. I recommend checking out a local homebrewing club, if this interests you. In the U.S. one of the big homebrewing suppliers is Northern Brewing, and you can request their catalog here: http://www.northernbrewer.com/catalog-request/ They make a lot of kits, in either Extract or All-Grain, to produce whatever style of beer you may have a hankering for. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
