Brewing Your First Kit Beer – Quick Start Guide

Introduction #

You’ve bought a beer kit. It’s sitting in your kitchen right now, surprisingly heavy and full of potential.

The internet will tell you that brewing requires perfect sanitation protocols, precise temperature control, and the ability to calculate IBUs while reciting the periodic table backwards. These people also probably iron their underwear. You don’t need to be like them.

Here’s what actually happens: you pour things into a bucket, add yeast who immediately begin the most productive party in your kitchen’s history, then wait two weeks while fighting the urge to open it every six hours.

This guide gets you from unopened can to fermenting beer in about half an hour. After that, patience takes over. Yeast do the real work. You’re just the person who provided the venue and the ingredients.

What You Need To Get Started #

Fermenter: A food-grade bucket that holds at least 25 litres. This is where yeast perform their life’s work, which consists entirely of eating sugar and producing alcohol. They’re very good at it.

Tap with Sediment Reducer: Fits to the bottom of your fermenter for easy bottling. The sediment reducer is a small plastic device that prevents you from sucking up the layer of dead yeast at the bottom when you’re filling bottles. Without this, your last few bottles end up cloudier than the first few, which creates an awkward hierarchy of beer quality.

Airlock and Grommet: A small plastic device that lets CO2 escape while preventing the outside world from contaminating your beer. Think of it as a very specific bouncer who only stops certain molecules.

Beer Kit: A can containing concentrated wort (unfermented beer) plus yeast.

Sanitiser: This is not optional, despite what optimistic beginners believe. Beer loves being beer. Bacteria love turning beer into things that are definitely not beer. Sanitiser settles this dispute decisively.

Thermometer: For checking temperature without resorting to the finger-dipping method, which is both inaccurate and unhygienic.

Kettle: For boiling water. If you’re reading this guide, you probably own a kettle. If you don’t own a kettle, brewing beer is possibly not your most pressing concern.

The Process (Or: Five Steps Between You And Fermenting Beer) #

Step 1: Sanitise Everything #

Mix your sanitiser according to its instructions. Sanitise your fermenter, lid, airlock, spoon, tap if you have one, and anything else that will touch your beer. Be thorough about this in a way you’re probably not thorough about most household cleaning.

This step prevents contamination, which creates off-flavours ranging from “vaguely disappointing” through “aggressively unpleasant” to “I’m pouring this entire batch down the drain while questioning my life choices.” The difference between good beer and contaminated beer is about ten minutes of proper sanitisation. This seems like an easy choice, yet people regularly skip it while being surprised by the results.

Let everything air dry or rinse with sanitiser solution. Do not use tap water to rinse unless you enjoy undoing all your careful sanitisation work, which would be an odd hobby but not technically illegal.

Step 2: Mix Your Wort (The Bucket-Filling Bit) #

1. Boil your kettle. You’ll need about 1.5-3 litres of boiling water. Most standard kettles hold this comfortably. Using less boiling water means your wort cools faster – particularly important in Australian summers when waiting for hot wort to cool becomes an exercise in patience you didn’t know you lacked.
2. Pour your boiling water directly into your sanitised fermenter. The fermenter will not melt. It’s designed for this. Trust the engineering.
3. Open your kit can and pour everything into the hot water. The contents have the consistency of treacle that’s been left in a refrigerator and has decided it would rather stay in the can. It will glug out reluctantly. This is expected behavior from concentrated wort. Be patient. It’ll come out eventually.
4. Pour a small amount of boiling water into the now-empty can (about 100ml – just enough to cover the bottom), swirl it around vigorously to dissolve the remaining syrup stuck to the sides, then carefully pour this into your fermenter. The steam helps loosen everything. Repeat this process a few times until the can is clean – this is safer than filling the can with water, which makes it dangerously hot to handle.
5. Add cold tap water to bring total volume to 23 litres (or whatever your kit specifies). The cold water cools everything down to yeast-friendly temperatures. You don’t need fancy filtered water. Tap water is fine. Yeast have been successfully fermenting things for millions of years without access to bottled spring water from Norwegian glaciers.
6. Stir vigorously for 30 seconds. Splash it around. Be aggressive about it. This dissolves oxygen into your wort, which yeast need for reproduction. This is the only time in brewing where splashing is not just acceptable but encouraged. Enjoy this brief window of sanctioned violence toward liquid. It won’t come again until your next brew.
7. Check temperature. You want 18-24°C before adding yeast. Above 30°C and you’ll kill yeast before they accomplish anything useful, which seems unfair but is simple biology. Below 18°C and fermentation will be sluggish while you spend two weeks wondering if anything’s happening (it is, just slowly, like a bureaucrat processing paperwork). If it’s too hot, wait for it to cool – patience now prevents disappointment later. If it’s too cold, either add more warm water or accept that your beer will ferment on a relaxed schedule.

Step 3: Add Yeast (The Bit Where Fermentation Begins) #

Once temperature is safely between 18-24°C:

1. Sprinkle yeast onto the wort surface. The entire packet. Don’t stir it in. Yeast don’t need your help sinking – they’ll manage this themselves while you’re not watching, possibly while judging your lack of faith in their abilities.
2. Seal your fermenter with the lid. Ensure it’s actually sealed. A loose lid defeats approximately 80% of the purpose of having a lid, which makes you wonder why you bothered putting it on in the first place.
3. Fill your airlock with sanitiser solution or cheap vodka (vodka being approximately 40% alcohol, which kills most microorganisms while being drinkable if you’re having a really bad day). Never use plain tap water. When temperature changes occur – and they will, because you live in a place with weather – the airlock liquid can get sucked back into your beer. If this happens (and it probably will at some point), you want it to be something that won’t introduce bacteria. Plain water contains bacteria that would absolutely love to make your beer taste interesting in all the wrong ways. Our fermentation troubleshooting guide explains this in excessive detail if you enjoy that sort of thing.
4. Place fermenter somewhere with stable temperature (18-22°C is ideal). Away from direct sunlight. Away from dramatic temperature swings. Away from anywhere you’ll constantly open it to check if anything’s happening, because it is happening, you just can’t see it, and opening the lid risks contamination while providing no useful information.

Step 4: Wait (The Hardest Part, Despite Requiring The Least Effort) #

This is the difficult bit. Not technically difficult – you’re literally doing nothing – but psychologically challenging. You’ve finished all the active work. Now you must wait while yeast do their work. Most humans are terrible at waiting. You probably are too. Accept this about yourself.

Within 12-24 hours, your airlock should start bubbling. This indicates fermentation is occurring, yeast are reproducing enthusiastically, and sugar is being converted to alcohol through a process that would require several paragraphs of biochemistry to explain and approximately zero paragraphs of biochemistry to appreciate.

For the next 7-14 days:

Leave it alone. Don’t open it to check. Don’t constantly worry about it. Don’t concern yourself when bubbling slows after a few days – this is normal behavior. Most fermentation happens in the first week. After that, yeast are doing cleanup work and settling down, which looks like nothing’s happening but is actually the final important stage of fermentation. Your beer doesn’t need checking on. It’s not a soufflé. It’s not a child. It’s yeast eating sugar. They’ve been doing this longer than humans have existed. They’re good at it.

Keep temperature stable. Check occasionally that it’s still 18-22°C. Otherwise leave it alone. Temperature stability matters more than absolute temperature. A fermenter at 24°C constantly produces better beer than one swinging between 18°C and 28°C daily, which stresses yeast in a way that creates off-flavours while making them wonder why you can’t provide consistent working conditions.

After 10-14 days, fermentation should be complete. How do you know? Ideally, by taking gravity readings with a hydrometer. If you don’t have a hydrometer yet, wait the full 14 days at proper temperature and proceed – most kit beers finish within two weeks assuming you haven’t accidentally refrigerated or baked them.

Got a hydrometer? Read our gravity testing guide to learn when fermentation is genuinely finished rather than just making assumptions based on airlock behavior, which is about as reliable as predicting weather by looking at clouds.

Worried something’s wrong? Check our fermentation troubleshooting guide. Most concerns turn out to be normal fermentation behavior that just looks suspicious to anxious first-time brewers. You’re probably worrying about nothing. Read the guide anyway – it’s reassuring.

Step 5: Bottle Or Keg It #

Once fermentation is definitely complete (gravity readings stable for 3 days, or you’ve waited 14 days at proper temperature):

About bottling vs kegging: Most beginners bottle because it’s much simpler to start, cheaper, and you can easily share bottles with friends. If you have a keg and CO2 system follow your keg system’s instructions for carbonation and serving.

If you’re bottling:

1. Sanitise bottles, caps, and bottling equipment. Yes, every bottle. No, that one that looks clean doesn’t get special exemption. Sanitise them all.
2. Add carbonation to each bottle. You have two options:
   • Carbonation drops: Add 1-2 drops per bottle (follow packet instructions – different beer styles need different carbonation levels)
   • Brewing sugar: Use a sugar measure (a small scoop that fits in the bottle opening for easy filling without spillage). Add one level scoop per bottle (or otherwise directed).

Both methods create carbonation through a small secondary fermentation in each bottle. The yeast consume the sugar and produce CO2, which dissolves into your beer. Get the amount right – too little and your beer is flat, too much and you’ve made small carbonated grenades.

3. Fill bottles to about 3cm from top, cap immediately. A bottle filler (a rigid tube with a spring-loaded valve that you press against the bottom of the bottle) gives you better control over the flow and reduces splashing and oxygen exposure. It doesn’t speed things up, but it makes the process less messy. Repeat for all sixty bottles. Put on some music, even jazz if that’s your thing – you’ll be done before you know it.
4. Store bottles at 18-22°C for 2 weeks. Yeast consume the priming sugar and create CO2, which dissolves into your beer. This is carbonation.
5. After 2 weeks, your beer is technically drinkable. It will taste significantly better at 4-6 weeks, which is excellent advice that you will almost certainly ignore. You’ll drink one bottle at 2 weeks to “check if it worked” (it did), discover it’s drinkable but a bit rough around the edges, then drink several more over the following week while telling yourself you’re just “monitoring the batch.” By week four, you’ll notice the remaining bottles taste considerably better and wish you’d listened to the advice about waiting. This cycle is as old as homebrewing itself.

Beyond Your First Batch #

Once you’ve successfully brewed a basic kit, the world of brewing enhancements opens up: extra malt for more body, hops for better aroma, different yeasts for varied flavour profiles, additives for specific styles. This is when simple kit brewing transforms into a hobby that requires spreadsheets, equipment storage solutions, and patient explanations to family members about why you need another fermenter. But for now, focus on getting this first batch from can to glass successfully. Complications can wait. They’re very good at waiting.

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Written by Arthur Density, Head of First Batch Encouragement at H&S Brew Supplies
“Turning anxiety into beer for over two decades”