Simple beer recipe

Does anyone have a simple beer recipe like they made in the old days? Just beer, nothing fancy. Just wondering.

Extract? Partial Grain? All Grain?

What styles do you like?

Define 'they' - historically, the type of beer varied significantly by geographic location...

Look up 'SMaSH' beer recipes - single malt and single hop recipes. These are simple recipes...

What old days are we talking about? Beer is quite old, and has progressed continuously through time. So do you want ancient Mesopotamia? Ancient Egypt? A gruit? 9th century? 14th century? A porter from the 1700s on England? a trappist? A German lager? a light American lager from the 70s?

Beer has a pretty wide margin, give us a style or a time period or a location to go on.

and I'm guessing extract. (the easiest way to make beer)

Upper Midwest basement style lager. You know without all the modern science, just more sterile. The kind our grandpa's and great grandpa's used to make.

Fill a pot with 3 gallons of water
0.5 ounces of pellet hops at the beginning of your 60 minute boil
0.5 ounces of pellet hops at 20 minutes left in the boil
Throw in 6lbs of plain light DME at this point too.
after the boil is done, pour into a sterilized plastic bucket.
Add another 3 gallons of really cold water (refrigerated gallon bottles from the store work best).

Pitch whatever yeast you want (lagers require lager yeast and a long cold storage) wait 5 or 6 weeks, prime it, and bottle it.

Just a very rough recipe since we don't have much to go on, a google search for "American lager extract recipe" might be more specific.

Define what you mean by "simple beer like they made in the old days." Some scholars say the Sumerians had over 300 varieties of beer over 4,000 years ago.

Most recipe items that are commonly added to homebrew today have been used in beer for over a century. Even the techniques we use, with few exceptions are actually quite old. If you want a simply beer recipe then that is a different question.

Matt3989 said:

Fill a pot with 3 gallons of water
0.5 ounces of pellet hops at the beginning of your 60 minute boil
0.5 ounces of pellet hops at 20 minutes left in the boil
Throw in 6lbs of plain light DME at this point too.
after the boil is done, pour into a sterilized plastic bucket.
Add another 3 gallons of really cold water (refrigerated gallon bottles from the store work best).

Pitch whatever yeast you want (lagers require lager yeast and a long cold storage) wait 5 or 6 weeks, prime it, and bottle it.

Just a very rough recipe since we don't have much to go on, a google search for "American lager extract recipe" might be more specific.

Click to expand...

Thanks, I will give it a try.

Before doing that you can save yourself a lot of time fill your fermenter (bucket or carboy) with water and let it sit long enough to get a good temp reading. You can use one of those stickers on the side of your bucket to tell you the temp.

In my Midwestern basement in the furnace room it was 72, in the utility sink 66-68, under the enclosed porch 52. Knowing your temps will dictate what yeast to use and that will open up what your brewing options are. If you ferment at a temp too high your beer will not taste good, if you ferment too cold with the wrong yeast it wont do anything.

Get a good idea of what your environment is before brewing it will save you wasted time and money.