Now that the mash, boil, and chill are all done, it's time for fermentation. Treated carefully, your basic fermentation gear can last your whole brewing career.

Fermenters

• Buckets — The old reliable, buckets are cheap and unbreakable. They scratch easily, leading to high risk of infection. Clean carefully with a soft sponge. Additionally, they are oxygen permeable, unsuitable for long storage. Some buckets come with spigots to eliminate siphoning. Thoroughly clean and sanitize these spigots.

• Glass carboys — Glass water bottles, impervious to cleaners and oxygen, they make great fermenters. Use a brush to clean thoroughly. They are fragile to thermal shock and seriously dangerous if dropped. For that reason, care should always be taken when moving a carboy.

• Better Bottle — Better Bottles look like the plastic office water bottles. The bottles have special brewing accessories. They also combine the challenges of cleaning a carboy with the care needed for a plastic bucket.

• Conicals — Mimicking tanks used by professional brewers, miniature steel conical fermenters are the ultimate fermenters. With a conical, you can harvest yeast for immediate repitching like the pros. The downsides are their complicated parts and price.

Fermentation Locks

To keep oxygen, bacteria, and flies at bay, you have a few options. They depend either on liquid barriers or the positive pressure of fermentation to keep the beer free of contaminants.

• Airlocks — Airlocks use a little water or vodka to prevent gas from seeping in. CO2 evolved during fermentation escapes by bubbling out.

• Blow-off tubes — Vigorous fermentation can spew yeast, gumming up the works, making a mess, and spraying beer everywhere. Fit a piece of tubing over the airlock spigot or jam a 1"-diameter hose into the carboy opening. Drop the tubing in a bucket of sanitizer. The yeast will come crawling out of the pipe.

• Foil cap — Incredibly cheap and easy to use. Sanitize a piece of foil and fit tightly over the carboy mouth. Leave a channel for overflow. When the fermentation recedes, remove the foil and cap with an airlock.

Racking Gear

Moving the beer around requires a deft hand with a siphon. To siphon liquid, make sure your source vessel is above your target container.

• Racking cane — A long, straight tube with a crook. Made either of inexpensive plastic or impervious metal, a racking cane can be confusing to use at first. Fill the cane and attached hose with sanitizer and hold both ends up. Pinch the tubing and drop the cane into the source vessel. Drop the hose into a pitcher to catch the sanitizer. Switch to the target container and let the beer flow.

• Auto-siphon — A racking cane in a manual pump. A few pumps starts the siphon, but the complicated parts make the plastic gizmo prone to breakage.

Yeast

Your yeast needs toys too. These few things will help you get stronger yeast and stronger fermentations.

• Magnetic stir plate — This tool consists of a motor spinning a magnet. When combined with a Teflon-coated magnetic bar inside a vessel, it creates a vortex. This adds oxygen and keeps the yeast in suspension. The combination yields five times as much yeast.

• Aeration/oxygen — Add oxygen to freshly chilled wort by pumping air or pure oxygen through a diffusion stone to grow strong yeast. The oxygen kits use the little red torch tanks of O2 found at your local home improvement store.