Oh, yeah, a question for you home brewers in this thread… I have heard that the quality of the water used in the process is really crucial – one person even told me that he doesn’t use tap water at all for making beer (!!)
Is it that essential? Tap water here in The Hague is OK, doesn’t taste like chlorine or anything. It is rather hard, though.
So… What is your (expert) opinion? 
Almost every water is good for something. “Hard” water, depending on why it’s hard can be great for pale ales, as an example.
99% of beer is water, so it is important, but you’ll have to get really good as a brewer before it makes a difference for you.
Brewing with extract is so much nicer than when I started and your choices were dark, light, or canned. I brewed a wit using wheat malt extract a month ago and you can’t tell it from a grain-brewed beer. It’s quicker than using my grain setup, too!
My husband and I brewed a couple of batches years ago. The beer came out really dark and strong (this was before so many designer beers and dark beers came into fashion). We did try an India Pale Ale, too. It was a lot of work, calling for a lot of equipment, but it was fun.
I’m sorry, I have no advice as I was mostly on cleanup and decanting duty, but read up on it, have a plan, and just DO it! We just cooked it up in our kitchen in the summer and stored it in our basement.
Be careful, now - no pets or kids underfoot!
Last year I built a mini brewery station for my son. Converted an old freezer to hold 5 kegs, I pump the cold air from the freeezer into a fermentation box so we can keep a steady temp durring the fermentation process. I also welded him up a 3 tier brewers tree for cooking. The beer is outstanding!
Tap water is fine. Like August says, some styles go for hard water, some go for soft water. If your water is particularly chlorinated, that will cause off-flavors in the finished product, but I just use straight ol’ Chicago H2O in my beers and have never had a problem. A lot (most? all?) municipalities provide water analysis if you ask. The City of Chicago, for example, has all its chemical analyses online, which is helpful if you want to supplement the water to brew closer to a certain style.
Take it FWIW - but based on the experiences of an old roommate it seems like the big downside to beginning homebrewing is the PITA of dealing with the damn bottles - storing, cleaning/sterilizing, filling, capping, etc - if you’re committed and can afford the extra up-front outlay it seemed to me like kegging (which he eventually progressed to) is really the way to go.
We’re homebrewers; nearly all of our brews (except one!) have been from kits. We use bottled water in our brews - our water is very hard but tastes fine, but we decided to err on the side of caution. We can get purified water from the grocery store in 2.5 gallon jugs for not much money, so it works out.
If I were you, I’d do what everyone else is telling you: locate the local homebrew store and ask them for help. They’ll be enthusiastic and will point you in the right direction. If there aren’t any local homebrew stores, maybe try Midwest Supplies. They’re my local homebrew store, and they’re awesome - I unabashedly recommend them highly. They’ve got kits (both brewing hardware and ingredients) for nearly any beer type you could think of, and a bunch of “knock offs” so you can brew your own Sierra Nevada IPA or Surly Bender or Guiness (or whatever). They also include a DVD with any order that’s a great intro to brewing. That said, I’ve no idea whether they can ship internationally or not, and I’m not finding that info on their website.
Brewing isn’t particularly difficult. Cleanliness is key, but we’ve not found it onerous. There’s sanitizers available (One-Step is one) that take any of the guesswork out of things. Be careful, but don’t worry that sanitation is too hard. It isn’t.
Go for it! Its as easy as boiling water. Keep stuff clean and dry and you’ll have no problems. I’ve done 270+ batchs and never had one go bad, but did have one go Guiness! 
Dry Malt Extract (DME) and dry yeast keep well, are cheaper and work just as good as the more expensive stuff, in my opinion. I actually prefer the dry yeast to the liquid.
Master the ales first, (no cold fermentation req) then move on to other types.
Experiment with Dry-hoppiing for extra tasty results.
Get yerself some swing top bottles, preferably 1 liter or larger. Filling and capping 12 oz bottles is a tedius and horrible chore.
I used to work for a guy who brewed his own beer. There were a few times when he had to leave work during the day because of something he had to do with the beer.
What was going on that he had to be there for his beer?
(I’m not grousing about him leaving the office; he was a lovely man. I’m just curious about the process.)
Was he allowed to drink it at work? If not, there’s one thing I can think of.
My MN neighbors grow hop vines and used to brew their own beer. I remember them mentioning bottles exploding in storage. Good luck!
Exploding bottles are a sign of sloppy procedures, poor sanitation or sub-standard equipment. If you exercise a little bit of intelligence, such things are very rare.
OK, just giving a little update on things – I have brewed my first batch of beer (got all my materials and everything in very early October), and I bottled it last sunday. Gotta let it rest in the bottle for a few weeks, and then it should be ready to drink!
I went for a very simple “kit” beer, and ended up brewing enough for 37 330cc bottles (roughly 12 and 1/3 liters, or if you want it in US gallons, roughly 3.25 US gallons). I went for the kit because I wanted to try my hand at the fermentation aspect of the beer, before getting to brewing straight from the malted grain and such.
I will let you know how it tastes! I am rather excited – my first batch of home-brewed beer!
Thanks a lot for all the advice and comments I got here, as well
That was going to be my advice… I never got more sophisticated than kits, and the results were fantastic (of course my taste isn’t so sophisticated either).
The one thing to watch out for is to properly cool the wort before pitching the yeast. It’s hard to wait for the wort to cool when you’re excited and maybe pressed for time, but it’s important to get it down to the right temperature. Otherwise it may ferment too fast, create odd flavors, blow out the airlock, and make a big mess.
I am so going to use this line. “I have to leave the office, because, um, because of the beer.”
It would be like whipping up a batch of bread dough at 9AM, rushing home to put it in the oven at 1PM, then rushing home to take it out of the oven at 2PM. Like, dude, just wait until you have 4 hours on Saturday.
A couple of years ago I started putting together a home brewing operation for my son. I built what is called a 3 tier brewers tree for cooking and cooling. For the temp control and beer storage I bought a used freezer for $25.00. I built an extension for the top about 12" high and moved the door up so we can hold 5 kegs and a 20# co2. I cut a hole in the side of my extension on the freezer and pushed an insulated box up against it with a temp controlled fan blowing from the freezer to the fermenting box. I sealed the space inbetween them with foam. The beer has been comming out great and I doubt we have spent over about $300.00 total.
OK, guys… Here I am again!
The beer spent a few weeks resting in its bottles, a couple of days ago I put some of them in the fridge, and yesterday <Light Yagami> I opened one … and tasted it!! </Light Yagami>
It was nice. Pale yellow colour, just foamy enough for my taste. Light, slightly fruity and rather yummy. No off-flavours that I could detect, but a really complex taste with a lot of notes. There was a thin layer of deposit at the bottom of the bottle.
I have the feeling that those 37 bottles I filled will be gone rather soon ^.^
Thanks everybody for your help and your advice – now, ON TO THE NEXT BATCH!!
The thin layer of deposit on the bottom is yeast (in case you don’t know and are wondering). If you buy bottle conditioned beers, you will see it there, too. You will always have a little bit of yeast settling out if you bottle condition beers (as far as I know–I can’t think of any way of avoiding it if you bottle condition.)
Sorry for resurrecting a zombie thread, but I thought I’d share a bit more of my adventures in beer-brewing.
I have become a member of the “hopblossom club” at my office (yes, we have a club dedicated to the appreciation, making and drinking of beer – my office is awesome ^.^). With the help of a semi-professional brewer, tomorrow we are going to carry out an interesting experiment: We intend to brew beer according to a Sumerian recipe thousands and thousands of years old! The recipe (well, more like a list of steps in rather flowery and poetic language) appears in a clay tablet that contains a “hymn to the goddess Ninkasi”.
Of course, there is actually no guarantee that we are going to follow the exact same procedure the Sumerians had! To begin with, we are going to be using modern equipment. Also, the recipe is going to be as exact and as accurate as the assyriologists who translated it in the first place are.
But it should, nonetheless, be an interesting endeavour. The ingredients are kinda “different” (instead of malted barley you use a special kind of barley bread called “bappir”), and to kick-start the fermentation you use date wine (ideally fermented from the natural yeast present on the skin of the fruit; in practice we’ve given it a bit of help in the form of a bit of powdered yeast).
I will keep you informed about the results, and will let you know how the brewing went
Also, I want to thank silenus here for graciously sending me a few of his favourite recipes for me to try I tried one (“Wake of the Flood”) and it was de-li-cious.
Also, thanks to everybody here for encouraging me and setting me on my path of beer-brewiness!
All the best,
JoseB
That sounds like a lot of fun! I’m glad that you’re enjoying homebrewing so much-- Acid Lamp and I homebrew mead and sake, and sometimes the “experiment” meads are more fun than doing the stuff that we know will be reliable. Let us know how the recipe turns out, as it sounds like it could be really good; I like dates and “oddball” beers, so this might be a fun experiment for us to try.