Homebrew

I like making beer. It´s really pretty simple. You steep (called mashing) some malted barley in hot water for a period to convert starches on the malt to fermentable sugars. You then boil this liquid (called wort - say "wert") with some hops (for flavour/aroma/bitterness) for an hour or so, let it cool and then add yeast. Wait for a week or so a voila you have some beer! OK, it's a bit more involved than that, but this is the basic process.

I have been using the freeware Qbrew in order to formulate my recipes. Working out the alcohol by volume etc. is fun a few times, but then it quickly gets quite tedious.

Crush the grains...

First crush the grains to expose the endosperm. I use a Corona corn mill for this.

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Mash the grains

Mash grains in a "mash tun" which is simply a container to hold your grains and hot water and hold for about 1 hour. I use a cooler box for this with a filter/tap arrangement in the bottom. At 75 C the cooler box looses about 1.5 C in an hour. Pretty good.

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Boil wort with hop additions.

Boil the wort to sterilize it, isomerize the hops, denature proteins & deactivate enzymes, coagulate proteins, remove volatiles ....

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Fermentation

Cool & ferment in a suitable carboy. I usually do 15 l batches and so a 20l carboy is fine. Leave for a week or so (checking the fermentation process with a hydrometer) to ferment.

You can then either proceed to bottle or put it in a keg.

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And that is essentially the process. Of course, it is more nuanced than this but those are the basics. For all your homebrew questions, check out homebrew.stackexchange.

Also, another nice site for formulating recipes is beer calculus. I like the sliding bitterness scale on the right!

This is a nice video of harvesting and washing yeast from your primary. Evolution in action!