The fun of any private hobby or passion knows the secret language that goes with it. So, if you had someone come to you and say, “You are really into that zymurgy stuff, aren’t you”, you may not know whether to thank him or slap him.

But if you are beginning to get excited about the art of making beer at home, not only are you getting into “that zymurgy stuff“, you probably know a few major zymurgists as well. Zymurgy, for the trivia buffs, is the art of fermenting that leads to the production of beer.

There is a lot of fun in the hobby of making beer. Not only is it not a difficult process to learn, it’s rewarding to bring out bottles of rich tasting beer for your family and friends that you made yourself.

And since most batches of home made beer produce five gallon brews, you will have plenty of beer for a small fraction of what you would pay for commercial beer.

But there is another level of fun about becoming an amateur brewer and that comes from discovering this whole new world of other brewers who are out there spreading the gospel of home brewing far and wide. The network of people who love to brew their own beer is extensive and well organized.

In tough economic times, we all look for ways to save money. With gas prices going up constantly, the prices of everything just goes right on up with them.

Unlike the government, we can’t print up money so anything we can do to cut costs without giving up quality of life is a good move.

And if quality of life includes having a nice tasting brew every so often, well then there is definitely something we can do and maybe you are already starting to do that is not only great fun but a very good cost cutting move for you.

Here are the three great benefits of home brewing:

The great thing about taking up home brewing that you get three great benefits all in one great hobby.

First you get a new passion in your life that will keep you busy and learning a side of beer making that you never knew could be so fascinating.

Second, you inherit an entire society of fascinating people who are zealots for this hobby and life style of home brewing.

The great thing about beer making is that you can be good at it starting out and get great at it over time. You can make each and every batch tasty and enjoyable but at the same time always be driven to make a better brew.

Part of the function of home brewing contests and being part of your local brewers club is that you get those tips and learn from the old pros at brewing so month by month and year by year, your beer gets better and better.

Here are the things that the real beer making gurus should know:

One important thing that the real beer making gurus know is what great chefs know and that is the quality of beer comes down to the freshness of the ingredients you use. One area you can improve on freshness is with the yeast you use for fermentation.

Dry yeast is simply not as fresh as liquid yeast so that is where one small change can dramatically affect the freshness of your beer.

Use this same approach with the grains, the hops and all the perishable ingredients that you need for a quality home brewed batch of beer.

The rock music artist Tom Petty had a hit song that went, “The waiting is the hardest part”. And when it comes to brewing your own beer, maybe the most difficult step of them all is the fermentation and aging process. After all, the steps leading up to the time when you wait for beer to mature is full of activity.

From shopping for new equipment and ingredients, to cleaning and preparation to boiling the wort to cooling and preparing for fermentation, it’s a fun process. And that is what you want from a great hobby.

But once you have used all of your skills (so far) to make great worth that is ready to ferment and age, storing and waiting for that process to finish seems to take forever. If this is one of your first batches or if you tried a new grain or hops, you are eager to see how good the beer will taste.

And you are eager to serve ice cold home made beer to friends and family. But you also know that if you break in and interrupt the process too soon, the beer you drink will be unsatisfactory and not nearly as rich and flavorful as how it will be when the aging process is done. So you wait, sometimes impatiently.

Lots of time the urge to finally take the plunge into home brewing comes when you went to the brew pub and paid ten dollars for an imported beer of one that was brewed in their pub.

And even if that beer is good, it’s easy to start to suspect that you could do as well making beer and that your beer would be perfectly fresh and would cost a lot less than ten dollars a glass to

Enjoy this flavor all the time. When that thought crossed your mind, the home brewer in you is born.

The community of beer lovers is very large as documented in the huge beer sales that stay consistent around the world. That is why it is almost a shame and a crime when beer is mass produced and bad beer is sold so widely. It’s a crime because it is so easy to make really good beer with use of beer making kits.

Using a good beer making kit:

If you have that desire to enjoy the finest of this ancient recipe and maybe crossing the line to want to be a maker of great beer, you will find that getting started on this great hobby with use of beer making kit is far easier than you may have thought.

Assembling the equipment and the ingredients for making beer is a cut and dried operation.

The process of making beer at home isn’t really a mystery. That is one of the reasons that making beer at home has become so popular.

Because you can get set up for making beer at home with a relatively low investment in equipment and ingredients, it’s easy to get started on making beer of your own.

And when you finish that first batch of making beer and it is stored away to be sampled in a few weeks, the excitement that you soon will be drinking your own beer is a unique feeling and one you want to repeat often.

Once you have confirmed that you can indeed make beer, the next question comes up is – can you make good beer? When you tasted that first batch of making beer, you were pretty excited because it really was beer. But you may have noticed some aspects of the beer you would like to improve.

The beer may have been too bitter or have too strong a hops flavor. The clarity of the beer may have been imperfect or you could see stuff floating around in your beer.

There is always an urge when you get started in a great new hobby like home brewing to go out and buy the most expensive equipment and supplies and dive in head first.

That instinct may come from watching an “old pro” at home brewing working his or her own elaborate set up to make some great beer.

So, naturally when you start learning how to brew beer at home yourself, you want to strive for the best, which is to make beer as good as the old pros make. But the instinct to over commit should be resisted.

The home brewing industry is a big one and it has gotten much more able to support new recruits to this exciting hobby and passion to get you just what you need when you need it.

And if you go out and spend a fortune on home brewing kit that is just not right for you starting out, not only can you get frustrated but if your love of home brewing doesn’t “stick”, you can end up feeling badly about such a huge investment.

Before you really get oriented to what home brewing is all about, it’s easy to think home brewing is a process that is set in stone and there is only one right way to do it.

And it is true that the brewing and fermenting process has some steps that must be followed with some discipline if you wish to enjoy a great home made beer.

Here are some great things about home brewing:

one of the reasons that home brewing is such a passion to many people who enjoy this way of making beer is that there as so many varieties of recipes and styles of making home brewing.

You can easily get a feel for what a huge variety there is in ways to brew beer and in recipes for ingredients when you visit your local beer supplies retailer, go to home brewing web sites or sit in at home brewing club meetings in town.

And the great thing about the social side of the home brewing culture is that you will come home with a notebook full of ideas of things you can try on upcoming batches of beer.

We tend to think of “malt” as a thing. Of course there is the candy malt and there is the old fashioned “malted” that was the stable of 1950s “malt shops”, which in our mind is more like a modern day milk shake.

But when it comes to beer, just about anyone, even people who are not involved in home brewing can list the ingredients as hops, malt, and grains.

So, as part of our quest to become more familiar with all of the aspects of beer making, it’s a good idea to explore more deeply what exactly the malt in beer is all about.

What exactly the malt in beer is all about?

When you hear the word “malt” in regards to the brewing of beer, the reference is actually to malted barley. Malt is the outcome of the process of malting, which starts with pure barley grain, the same grain you might use to make muffins or barley soup. That is a good way to ground the concept of malting to something very familiar.

Can you remember the moment you first got the idea in your head to take up home brewing? For many it is a tour of a brew pub or some other behind the scenes exposure to all that happens when good beer is made.

Before that one pivotal moment, you may have never even thought about beer being made at all.

The origin of beer was the liquor store or the market and that was that.

But when you realized that not only does beer go through a fascinating transformation from grains, hops and malts to this delicious brew you enjoy but that you can make your own beer if you want to, that is when the idea of becoming a home brewer started to become a reality in your mind.

For others that moment of realization that home brewing could be a whole new world may have happened when you first were exposed to “real” beer, as the home brewing enthusiasts call it.

That is when you sampled a brew that was not made by one of the big retail beer makers like Budweiser, Coors or Miller and you discovered what beer tasted like when it came directly from the brewing process to your glass.