Everything is measured, so it's time to get brewing. No two brewers' setups are the same. Learn from how others create their beer and watch how their equipment impacts the product.

Pots and Kettles

As a beginner, you need a twenty-plus quart for steeping/boiling and another for heating quarts of rinse water. A large soup/lobster pot or enamel canning pot does the job.

As your brewing operations grow, so do your kettle needs. Full-kettle boils of extract or all-grain beers require a boiling kettle of at least 7 gallons in capacity. Buy kettles a few gallons larger than your batch size to boil vigorously. All-grain brewing needs pots for heating sparge water and one for soaking grain.

Specially built brewpots come with a number of features of varying usefulness. You can rack boiling via a metal siphoning tube, but it is much easier to crack open a valve spigot. Other features include thermometers, sight glass tubs for measuring volume, false bottoms, diverter plates, and more.

Brewers debate between stainless steel or aluminum pots. Stainless steel's toughness and resistance to cleaning chemicals makes it a natural choice, but they are expensive. Large aluminum kettles cost much less, but they react to strong chemicals and some worry about health safety. Brewers report great success with their aluminum kettles when they clean gently.

Mash Paddle/Big Spoon

Never underestimate the power of a big spoon. You need something strong to thoroughly stir thick, sticky heavy mashes and make boiling beer whirlpools. It needs a long handle to keep your fingers from the beer.

To feel like a brewmeister, invest in a stout wood mash paddle and beat the mash into submission. The modern brewer can choose steel, but avoid plastic paddles. They're flimsy and bend while stirring thick mashes.

Coolers

An alternative to big brewing pots are modified coolers. The big, insulated boxes hold preheated water hot for hours and hold thick mashes right on the dot. Many models are easily modified by replacing the preinstalled drain with a standard ball valve. Look online for more instructions.

Burners

Unless you have a professional stove in your kitchen, your range tops out at 12,000 BTUs/hr, inadequate to bring five gallons to a timely vigorous boil. Thanks to fried turkey's popularity, cheap high-BTU propane burners are available. Units range from 30,000 BTUs to rocket-like 200,000 BTUs to power the boil. Pick one with sturdy legs and a base wide enough to accommodate your pots.

Wort Chillers

Sticking a pot of boiling wort in a sink of ice water quickly becomes impractical and tedious. Several water-powered chilling options can speed up the vital chilling step. Why vital? It produces clearer beer by causing proteins to coagulate into the “cold break.” Also, faster cooling preserves fresher hop aroma and flavor. Finally, the faster you cool, the faster the yeast gets to work fermenting, keeping bacteria at bay.

Immersion Chiller

Looking like a still's coil, an immersion chiller sits in the pot of freshly boiled beer. Cold running water wicks away the heat, leaving cool wort behind.

Sanitation is a breeze. Clean the coil of obvious debris and drop into the boil for 15 to 20 minutes. Cover the kettle and run the cold water. Rock the immersion chiller for greater efficiency.

Counterflow Chiller

Take an immersion chiller and run it in a hose and you get a counter-flow chiller. Instead of running cold water through hot wort, you run hot wort through a copper pipe surrounded by flowing cold water. The result is a remarkably fast chill from 180°F to 200°F to 70°F to 80°F in 20 to 50 feet. The major downside is cleaning and sanitation. Before every use, you need to run cleaner through, rinse with hot water, and sanitize with a no-rinse sanitizer (Iodophor/Star-San). Once you get the habit, it's a snap.

Plate Chiller

Straight out of the professional brewery are the plate chillers. New to the market, they work like counterflow chillers but use thin layers of metal plates with water and wort on opposite sides. More compact and more efficient than a counterflow, these chillers require diligence to keep clean.

Grain Mill

If you buy in advance of brew days, you'll want a good roller grain mill. Whole grains store longer and preserve their flavor better. A mill allows you to crack malt at the last minute and adjust the grain crush to your needs. Choose a unit with two rollers and a hopper. Unless you have Popeye arms, buy a mill that you can power with a drill.

Electric Pump

Gravity is great and reliable, but lifting pots of scalding liquid is dangerous. To the rescue is the high-temperature impeller pump. You can pump wort, sparge water, or cleaner all over the brewery. To prevent damage to the pump, always run the input line wide open, restricting the output to control flow.