Buckets - check
Bought a 6.5 gallon fermentor bucket, 5 gallon bottling bucket. Also racking and bottling canes and hoses. The bottle caps and a capper. Bottles if you need them
My beer journey
It has been a wild journey to this point.
I "discovered" the world of beer in college when someone shoved a Guiness into my hands and took one look at it and said WTF is this? But I tried it and after a few seconds I was hooked !
From that point on, I tried every beer I came across and went in search of the different styles. At that time in the late 1980s micros were unheard of and imported beer was scarce unless in a very large city.
Home brewing
While working on my career, someone at the company I was at told me about home brewing. I started to ask questions and do research on it.
After I understood it all and reading all the books of the day, this friend went with me to the local supply store and I bought my first brewing kit.
Ingredients
Grabbed up some liquid and dried malt extract, hops and yeast, Oh don't forget the priming sugar, AKA, Dextrose
Cleaning and Sanitizing
Got to have B brite or some cleanser to clean organics off everything and then some sanitizer to keep the unwanted germs and bacteria at bay
Brewit
Add the extract malt to the kettle water as you are heating it to a boil. After hitting boiling, add hops and boil for an hour to extract bitterness.
Cool it and pitch yeast
Cool it down below 80 degress, pour in fermenter bucket and add your beer yeast. Seal and set in cool place, wait a few days to a week to finish.
Rack or bottle
You can rack ( transfer from primary fermenter to a secondary if you have one to let settle or clarify for another week or so. Or you can just go straight to bottling bucket and bottle
Then set the bottles aside to self carbonate and the beer to mature a little for a few weeks for lighter ales and stouts to months for lagers or larger beers like barley wines
All grain brewing
You can get into all grain brewing and I did for a brief while before returning to extract brewing as I did not have the time to spend all Saturday or Sunday on brewing.
In all grain brewing you are buying the base malt, cracking it, mashing it in at specific temps and then taking those runnings off it and then boiling, adding hops and proceeding from there as you would with extract. Basically you are making your own extract.
The quality of extracts these days is excellent and you can make world class beer using them. The real benefit to all grain is some extra control over the wort produced and for making larger than 5 gallon batch sizes at a time.