Basic Bitter Beer Recipe

This is a basic Bitter Beer recipe for using malt extract and dried hops.

Brewing beer at home can be as simple, or as complicated, as you want to make it

Most folk start brewing with a kit but once they realise how simple the process is they soon want to start experimenting and personalising their brews..

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All the different styles of beer can be made in more or less the same way.

Just by tweaking the ingredients slightly you can easily produce a beer to suit your own palate.

And home brew shops these days can supply a wide selection of malts and varieties of hops to suit practically any taste.

So, here id the basic, simple recipe.

Ingredients:

Hops, 75 g (Golding type)
Malt Extract, 1.5 kg (medium)
Sugar, 750 g (white)
Ale yeast,
Water, 15 litres (wet)

Equipment

1 muslin bag (for boiling hops)
1 stainless steel pan for boiling the hops
1 fermentation bucket
Syphon tube
Bottles

Method

£9.99
Vacuum Packed Goldings Choicest Leaf Hops Place the hops in a muslin bag pop into a pan of water bring to the boil and boil for 10 minutes or so.

Strain off the liquid into the fermenting bin.

Repeat the boiling process twice more with the same bag of hops to extract the maximum flavour.

Stir the malt extract into the fermenting bin, use some warm water to rinse the dregs from the container.

Stir in the sugar then make up to 1.5 litters with cold water.

£10.25
Coopers 1.5Kg Tin Of Medium Malt Extract Allow to cool to about 18 to 20 degrees C.

Sprinkle the yeast on to the surface of the wort, cover, place the bin somewhere warm and leave it to ferment.

After about two or three days, skim off the froth and then recover for another two or three days.

By day five or six the primary fermentation will have converted all the fermentable sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

yeast

£2.99
Muntons Premium Gold Active Brewing Yeast Move the bin to a cooler place for another day or two, until the basic bitter wort has ‘thrown’ a thick sediment of yeast paste to the bottom of the bin.

Your beer is now ready for bottling.

During the initial fermentation all the carbon dioxide has been allowed to escape.

To put some fizz into the beer in the bottles we need to add some sugar to feed and restart the yeast.

To start this ‘bottle fermentation’ add one level teaspoon full of sugar for every one litre of beer as it is being syphoned into the bottles.

Fill each bottle of basic bitter to within 5cm of the top and cap or seal each bottle as it is filled.

Store the bottles in a cool place for at least two or three weeks to allow the bitter beer to mature before drinking.

This basic beer recipe can be varied to suit your own tastes.

Altering the amount or the style of malt extract will alter the malty taste, altering the amount or variety of hops will alter the bitterness.

Improve the hoppy aroma by keeping some of the hops back until the third day and then add them directly to the wort.

Don’t forget to label your bottles and keep a record of any variations so that you can repeat them or not depending on the results.