I've lived in Munich for a year – 2016, 2017 – (there's still old posts of mine on here with Germanyball) and developed a taste for beer there. Next year I met some old friends of mine who picked up brewing and it got me intrigued. Dad was interested too and we started early 2019.
>>45694The simplest recipe? Probably pale ale: you pick some basic malt, mash it like I did here, take malt out and turn heat up, add hops (see pic 4, they're in that sock), cook for an hour, add some more hops for a short time right at the end (like if you were brewing tea), cool down, ferment for a week. Add a little more malt extract (or sugar) and bottle (this is for carbonation). Then let it temper for a couple weeks and it's good to drink. (Fresh is drinkable but tastes a bit off, also it's barely carbonated, more like mošt – you know, the pre-wine)
Or if you're really lazy, get malt extract and skip the mashing – taste might be blander but it will ferment just as well (and extract is quite a bit more expensive than just grain – I use it mostly because my pot is too smol and don't want to mash basic grain separately). The quality of an ale comes not so much from the complexity of the process, as from getting the ingredients, and ratios just right.
Anything else adds a layer of complexity. Lager? You will ferment at cellar temperature and store in fridge. And takes about 3 times longer. Oh and you probably want to do longer multistep mashing, since here the proper maltiness is a major taste quality you want. Weißbier? That's an ale, but since you're working with wheat, all that gluten will foam horribly when fermenting, might leak out. And if you have wrong room temperature, it will have weird aroma - wrong ester balance. IPA? It's a pale ale, but you are extremely likely to fuck up the multistep hopping process and it will just taste like dishwasher (like most IPAs on the market do). Porter? Yeah, it's technically just dark ale, but mashing becomes increasingly hard as you increase the amount of roasted malt, as the sugars are roasted already and don't extract as well & roasted malt can't break down its starch either. Anything above that is just additional steps where you can fuck up.
A simple way to spice it up (literally) though is to use some other herb beside hops. You can use all sorts of stuff – juniper, spruce tips, rosemary, wormwood, in Africa I read they use quinine – most don't add extra complexity.