Your goal here is to sanitize everything that comes into contact with your beer after is has cooled down such as the racking tubing, cane and vessels, fermentation equipment, air locks, bottles, lids and so on. Sanitization is extremely important as bad sanitization can make a great batch of homebrew turn into vinegar. Apart from sanitization, you would notice that a lot of home brewing kits and guides stress not to use chlorinated water. In the brewing community, this is referred to as city water.
This is because the finished beer can have high levels of chloroprenes which end up altering the taste of your beer making it into something that tastes horrible. So by all means, avoid chlorinated water. Use instead charcoal filtered water. Coming into the list of what not to use is liquid malt extract. Liquid malt extract of LME should be replaced with dried malt extract or DME as it has a better shelf life and it makes your beer lighter. When adding malt extract, remove your brew pot away from the heat source.
This will avoid the malt being burned and stick to the bottom of the pot. Also, stirring your concoction when adding the malt is essential so that the malt never hits the bottom of the brew pot. Any beer kit on the market makes at least 5 gallons of home brew. If you are planning to have exactly 5 gallons, our recipes should be formulated to achieve 5.25 gallons as some will be lost to trub, racking or spilling.
It is also advisable to keep track of your homebrew recipes. Keeping a detailed record of the ingredient information and the processes used will help you for future referencing. With this detailed record, you can go back a few steps to determine where you went wrong the last time and help you in achieving the perfect brew for your beer.
