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• 2 x 5 - 6 gallon containers & little airlocks (either plastic buckets with lids and/or glass carboys with stoppers; stoppers/lids need to be drilled for airlocks)
• rigid tube and flexible tubing for siphoning from one container to another, and into bottles.
• a hydrometer is helpful, but not strictly necessary

You will also need:

• about 50 clean & sanitized 12 oz beer bottles (pop-off, not twist-off, brown glass is best since light harms beer)
• ~2 gallon cooking pot (preferably stainless steel, aluminum is okay, enamel over steel is okay as long as there are no chips in the enamel - you do not want to expose your beer to regular steel; it will cause flavor problems)
• bottle capper (you'll probably need to buy this, a wine bottle corker generally won't do the job)

You can get prepackaged ingredient kits or order a la carte. For $30 - $45US, you should be able to get a kit that contains the following, which should be all you need to brew 5 gallons of beer:

• malt extract syrup and/or dried malt extract
• hops
• dried yeast
• muslin bag
• priming sugar
• bottle caps
• perhaps additional misc stuff
• instructions

There are homebrew books that are helpful in figuring out what to do and how to do it. In my experience, This is one of the best out there, and I highly recommend it for brewers of all levels. Fortunately, there is a huge amount of excellent info freely available on the internet. (Google, as always, is your friend)

The outdated look of hbd.org is misleading - you'd never know that it holds an excellent beer recipe development tool (click on "Spreadsheet") and recipe database.

Forums worth checking out:
http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/

Good luck to you, and enjoy!

• 2 x 5 - 6 gallon containers & little airlocks (either plastic buckets with lids and/or glass carboys with stoppers; stoppers/lids need to be drilled for airlocks)
• rigid tube and flexible tubing for siphoning from one container to another, and into bottles.
• a hydrometer is helpful, but not strictly necessary

You will also need:

• about 50 clean & sanitized 12 oz beer bottles (pop-off, not twist-off, brown glass is best since light harms beer)
• ~2 gallon cooking pot (preferably stainless steel, aluminum is okay, enamel over steel is okay as long as there are no chips in the enamel - you do not want to expose your beer to regular steel; it will cause flavor problems)
• bottle capper (you'll probably need to buy this, a wine bottle corker generally won't do the job)

You can get prepackaged ingredient kits or order a la carte. For $30 - $45US, you should be able to get a kit that contains the following, which should be all you need to brew 5 gallons of beer:

• malt extract syrup and/or dried malt extract
• hops
• dried yeast
• muslin bag
• priming sugar
• bottle caps
• perhaps additional misc stuff
• instructions

There are homebrew books that are helpful in figuring out what to do and how to do it. In my experience, This is one of the best out there, and I highly recommend it for brewers of all levels. Fortunately, there is a huge amount of excellent info freely available on the internet. (Google, as always, is your friend)

The outdated look of hbd.org is misleading - you'd never know that it holds an excellent beer recipe development tool (click on "Spreadsheet") and recipe database.

Forums worth checking out:
http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/

Good luck to you, and enjoy!

I know quite a few people already responded to your beer methodology, but the beer nerd in me can't help but put in a few words along with them.

First of all, you're absolutely right that his beer is probably gonna taste like crap (or "sparkling pond water" as John Palmer puts it). That said, there's nothing wrong with using extract, or "beersyrup" as you call it (though admittedly the pre-hopped stuff is worthy of derision). A lot of award-winning beers have been made from extracts with steeping grains. Most people start out doing a few extract beers, then move on to all-grain. Some people never move on to all-grain because they're happy with the beer they get from extract and don't want to go through the extra work that all-grain takes. On the other hand, all-grain is cheaper and gives you a lot more variables to tweak to control how your beer will turn out. It really just amounts to how cheap you are and how much time you want to spend.

As far as your methodology... either you're not articulating it well, or you don't really have the method down (at least not the method most people tend to use). Straining for clarity? What? Are you actually boiling the wort or not? I'm not going to lay out the precise steps that need to be followed as some people seem to be trying to do, but I will add on another recommendation for John Palmer's How to Brew, as well as Denny Conn's batch sparging instructions, Basic Brewing Radio, and The Jamil Show. There are also various forums that can be incredibly helpful as well.

Back on topic... the Bender statue is pretty much awesome, even if all it looks like all it really does beer-wise is hold a 5 gallon plastic bucket. Now, a temperature controlled stainless steel conical fermenter Bender, that would really be something...

Or, just get some Iodophor. There's a good article about Iodophor here: http://hbd.org/franklin/brewinfo/iodophor.html.

Iodine does quite a good job at sanitizing, and at 12.5 ppm needed for sanitization, it's well under the taste threshold.

You have never seen homebrewers online they are the geeks of beer .Im a profesional brewer so that must make me a uber beer geek.

http://hbd.org/ Slashdot for Homebrewers ha ha

Sure you can controll the cooling system with one of those Johnson Controlls Thermostats wired for Homebrewers and its nice and low tech solution .

Im a brewer and this would be great, so you could monitor the temprature remotely even better would be to have a alarm set up on a remote PC if the temp went above or below set limits, if there is a problem with your Refirgeration equipment you will be alerted instantly and be able to remedy the situation possibly .

It would also be good for monitoring heat exchangers in a small brewery so the wort will be at the right temprature for the yeast .It would also be handy for setting mash tempratures also with a timer simmilar to a RIMS system .

If you think Slashdotters are geeks you should out Homebrew Digest @ http://hbd.org/ beer geeks are well and alive .

For a simpler (albeit less sexy/techie) solution check here

Works fine for me, but only during warm temps, since it only turns the fridge off/on, and doesn't control a heat source.

And as for "open source" beer, there are recipes aplenty freely available on the 'net (e.g., HBD). All you need is a couple buckets with spigots, an airlock, a kettle, some malt, and some yeast. Far less difficult, and much more rewarding, than open source s/w!

Even more info can be found on Home Brew Digest.

In case you are too young or didn't notice (while guzzling your Bud Lite and thumping your chest at what a totally unique and studly american you were) hundreds of small brewries emerged over the past couple decades in the USA. Many offered true to the spirit, even abiding by the German Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot), producing quality ales, stouts, lagers, etc. This, as anyone with a lick of sense could see, could lead to serious encroachment of Mega-Brew markets. So they did the american thing and bought a pile of them to hedge their bets and those small brewers who realised they could do fun things with a lot of money sold out.

I have the hunch the big web content sites are aware of how such a similar loss of page views to tiny, informative sites could be attractive. I know some have already sold out, even years ago. However, I also expect that some of these big sites could, and maybe are, running their own mini-sites, to capture that interest in focused, quality content and service. After all, who wants to wade through all the crap they have on their main pages? Not everyone, so why not be all stealthy and play both ends of the field, thus hedging their own bets.

what Bavarian beer is really made of

The same thing as all German beer: barley, hops, water, yeast.

The actual law.

I wrote (sarcastically) about doing this in the Home Brew Digest (HBD) back in 1992. Still tempted to give it a try: a clothes washer does almost all the stuff you need except throw away the spent grain. Check the article in the HBD Archives.

Would you have anticipated computer-driven washing machines back in 1516?

I have been brewing my own beer for close to 20 years, and I'm a computer geek, so I feel qualified to comment on this thread.

There are a lot of similarities between DIY beer and DIY computers. Making beer offers many opportunities for fabricating equipment (to enable more advanced brewing methods), writing software (to help calculate recipies), surfing the 'net (for recipies, supplies, advice, etc), and the list goes. And as with Linux, there's a single individual (Charlie Papazian) who is very influencial in shaping the direction of the field.

The Internet and it's predecessors have played an important role in the homebrewing community. As other posts have mentioned, the Homebrew Digest and rec.crafts.brewing are two long running forums for discussing homebrewing information. It's neat that several important advances in homebrewing (and commercial brewing) were first introduced, and refined, through discussions on these two forums. Beer making is definitely a field, like computers, where the home experimenter can make a difference.

I should also put in a plug for the American Homebrewers Association, which dispite it's name it a worldwide organization that promotes homebrewing.

Relax, don't worry, and have a homebrew!

A long running forum is The HomeBrew Digest. There's only about 14 years worth in the archives.

You may also want to try: nntp://rec.crafts.brewing
It's been awhile since I read that newsgroup but it was also useful for me.