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Home Brewing QuickStart

Brew a real, drinkable beer on your stovetop. One gallon. One afternoon. No fancy equipment.

Start at your local homebrew shop

Before anything else: find your nearest local homebrew shop (LHBS) and walk in. They'll sell you a starter kit with your first batch of ingredients for around $150, and — more importantly — you get a knowledgeable human who will answer every dumb question for free, forever. It's the single best piece of advice the r/Homebrewing community gives, and it's right.

No LHBS nearby? Any reputable online homebrew supplier sells equipment-only beginner kits in the $70–$100 range. Get the cheapest reputable one — the fancier fermenters and "better bottles" aren't worth the upgrade until you know you'll stick with it.

Start with a 1-gallon extract kit

Five-gallon all-grain brewing is the classic, but it's a lot — big pots, lots of cleanup, 50 bottles to manage. A 1-gallon extract kit teaches you the entire process with a fraction of the mess, and every skill translates directly to 5-gallon batches later. You can get started for as little as $50 using a soup pot from your kitchen.

The minimum you need

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• A beginner equipment kit (1-gallon)

  Fermenter, airlock, racking cane/auto-siphon, hose, bottling wand, sanitizer, and usually a recipe. Northern Brewer and Brooklyn Brew Shop both make solid ones.

  ~$60–100
  Shop options

• A brew kettle — 3 gallons minimum

  Any 3+ gallon stainless stockpot works for 1-gallon batches. A 5-gallon pot (~$30–35 on Amazon) is a small upgrade that sets you up for full-boil extract batches later.

  ~$0–35
  Shop options

• A hydrometer

  Tells you when fermentation is actually done — not when you think it is. Skipping this is the fastest way to ruin a batch with bottle bombs.

  ~$10
  Shop options

• Swing-top bottles (10 × 16oz)

  Easier than crown-cap bottles — no capper needed. Grolsch-style bottles are the classic.

  ~$25
  Shop options

• A stick-on fermenter thermometer

  Fermentation temperature is the single biggest lever on beer quality. A few-buck stick-on LCD strip is fine to start.

  ~$3
  Shop options

Your first brew day

1. Sanitize everything. This is 80% of brewing. Anything that touches your beer after the boil needs to be sanitized. Follow your kit's instructions exactly.
2. Steep the grains. If your kit has specialty grains, steep them in warm water like a giant tea bag for 20–30 minutes.
3. Boil the extract and hops. Add malt extract off heat, stir until dissolved, then boil for 60 minutes. Add hops per the recipe's schedule.
4. Cool the wort. Bring it to ~70°F as fast as you can — an ice bath in the sink works. Speed matters here.
5. Transfer to fermenter, pitch yeast, and seal. Yeast is sensitive to temperature — never pitch into hot wort.
6. Ferment for ~2 weeks. Bubbles will slow to a stop. Resist peeking.
7. Confirm it's done with a hydrometer. Take a gravity reading, wait 2–3 days, take another. If both match, fermentation is complete. Bottling early is how you get bottle bombs.
8. Bottle. Add a measured amount of priming sugar, siphon into bottles, cap. Wait 2 more weeks for carbonation.
9. Chill and drink. You made beer.

Where to go next