1. Make sure you have everything you need.To start brewing your own beer at home from a kit, you only need some very simple equipment. Essentially you need a kettle, a can opener, and a fermentation vessel. It's also handy to have, some sterilising powder, a thermometer, a syphon tube, a hydrometer, a funnel, a long spoon, and something to put your finished beer in.
A fermentation vessel can be purpose made or any bucket with a tight fitting lid. Just make sure it is smooth inside and scratch free as bacteria can live in the smallest of scratches. I've seen perfectly good beer fermented in an old putty bucket! If you have a local home brew shop then a purpose made vessel is best. Some have airlocks or a hole to fit one, but I find this unnecessary and the only batch of beer I've ever had go bad was through a badly fitted airlock.
You'll need to be able to clean everything to a sterile condition. It's true you could just use good old fashioned boiling water but it's much easier and more convenient to a sterilising powder.
Any thermometer will do, it's just for checking the mix is not too hot before you add the yeast (known as "pitching the yeast"). You can buy one from a home brew shop but I just use a jam thermometer. You will need a home brew shop to get a hydrometer though. A hydrometer can be used to work out the approximate strength of you finished beer.
How you store you finished beer is a personal matter, you can buy plastic home brew bottles, use old plastic pop bottles, or use a keg. It's probably best to avoid using recycled glass bottles as you'll get some CO2 pressure build up inside the bottle and they have been known to explode!
You can also buy some or all of your equipment as part of a bundle, this will usually include your first beer kit too.
2. Choosing your beer kit.You can buy cheap kits or expensive kits, for a 40 pint kit you can pay anything from £8 to £30. Just as you can make a reasonable beer with a cheap kit, if something goes wrong you can end up tipping an expensive kit down the drain so if it's your first brew I'd stick to the lower end.
Pick a kit that is something you like but I'd recommend starting with an Ale or a Bitter. These work better and give good results. If you're a fan of commercial lagers then you should know that you're not going to brew a perfect pint of Stella Artois from a kit! I'm not saying that you can't make good lager, just that it's not so easy from a kit. Cooper's Australian Lager is one of the better ones if you insist!
I'm going to use the cheapest I could find, a "Young's Definitive Bitter" which cost me just £8.47 from Wilkinson, so with a 80p bag of sugar from Aldi that would make it just 23p a pint, even if you used more expensive brewing sugar or beer enhancer it would still come in at around 24-25p per pint!
3. Cleaning.
Ok, so you've got your equipment and you've got your beer kit, now it's time to clean! This is probably the most important step of the beer making process. Everything that comes into contact with your beer should be sterile.
If you're using sterilising powder, mix it up according to the instructions. I do this in the fermentation vessel, put the lid on and give it several good shakes, opening the lid to let the gases out in between each shake. Then I pour the solution into a bowl or sink and use that to soak everything else. If anything has dirt visible on it wash it or soak in hot water and scrub it clean before sterilising it. Don't use anything abrasive on plastics though as you may put scratches in that can harbour germs and bacteria.
Make sure you remember to clean your can opener as this is often missed and also remember to clean your hands, I wash them and then dip them in the sterilising solution for a while just to be sure.
Get in the habit of being clean. As you use each item, take it from the sterilising solution and rinse it in clean cold water, you don't want your beer to taste of steriliser. Then drop it back in the steriliser before you use it again, don't leave it sat out on the kitchen surface.
4. Making the mash.
On with the brew but first of all, this is only a general guide so read all the instructions that came with your kit (sometimes printed on the back of the label) and if they differ from these instructions use the ones that came with your kit!
When you take off the plastic cap off your kit, you should find a sachet of yeast under it, put this to one side. The stuff inside your can is probably mostly Malted Barley Extract. Once your happy with kit brewing you may move to brewing from extracts. If you do then Malted Barley Extract is going to be your base ingredient. It comes in several varieties, dried, liquid, light, dark, but that is what most of your can contents will be. It may also contain some other ingredients such as isomerised hop extract.
Fill your kettle and put it on. If the can has a label remove it and put the can in a bowl of hot water deep enough to cover the can. Leave this for 5-10 minutes as this will soften the contents of the can which will otherwise be tricky to remove.Once softened, open the can using the sterile can opener and empty it into your fermentation vessel, not all of it will come out but that is fine just empty it as much as you can. Half fill the can with boiling water, give it a swirl and empty that into your fermentation vessel, then half fill it again and empty it into the vessel. Wrap the can in a cloth or use oven gloves as the metal can will get hot!
After the hot water most of the extracts will have come out. Give the whole thing a good stir and try to dissolve the extracts into the water completely. At this point add any extra sugar required (usually 1kg), then top up to 26 litres with cold water. I use the can that the kit came in, filling it from the cold tap, as this makes sure you get all of the extract out! Until fermentation starts this mixture is called "wort".
You need the temperature of your wort to be between 18-25c for the fermentation to start. Lower temperatures will not start fermentation and higher temperatures than this could kill and halt your yeast. I check the temperature periodically as I add the cold water. It's much easier to let a warm wort cool down than to try and heat one up! If it's a little too warm then just leave it standing, with the lid on to keep and infections out, and the temperature should come down.
There is one more job to do before you pitch the yeast, that is to take a hydrometer and measure the original gravity (OG) of your beer. The hydrometer will float so you can drop it in but there will often be a fair amount of bubbles. As you can see in this picture I made a small clearing, my hydrometer staying in the clearing just long enough for me to take a reading before it swam off to the side. You may also have to add one mark to the reading as the liquid will naturally cling to the side. 
5. Primary fermentation.To get your wort to ferment into beer you will now need to pitch the yeast, this is done by sprinkling the contents of the packet over the surface of the wort and giving it a gentle stir. Put the lid back on your fermentation vessel, press down the seal and move it to somewhere that it will maintain a temperature between 18-25c. If you are brewing during the winter months you may want to buy a heater. You can get a specialist pad that you sit your fermentation vessel on or a belt that straps around the fermentation vessel. Both are fairly cheap and don't cost very much to run.
During primary fermentation the yeast will multiply and consume the sugars turning your wort into beer. This process produces two new things, carbon dioxide (CO2) and alcohol. The alcohol we want to keep and we also want some of the CO2 as this will provide a protective layer of gas over the surface of the beer. If your fermenter has an airlock most of this gas will escape, if you have a plastic bucket with a air tight lid, it should start to bulge with the pressure of the gas. This is a good sign as it means fermentation has begun. You can open the lid slightly to release the gas periodically, a process know as "burping", or you can loosen it very slightly. I tend to just burp it once a day and take a look inside at it's progress. Don't be alarmed if it's covered in a thick brown yeasty crust like the one pictured here, that's good news! Only open the lid slightly as you don't want anything getting in that isn't sterile.6. Conditioning.
After 7-10 days your beer should have stopped fermenting, it may still be producing gas though so don't use that as an indicator. If you want to be 100% sure you can take a hydrometer reading, wait a day and take another, if it is unchanged then the yeast is no longer consuming sugar and you beer is done. It won't harm your beer if you leave it a little longer, in fact up to 21 days is good and will settle your ferment out nicely.
By done I do mean ready to bottle or barrel not ready to drink. It's not poisonous and I encourage you to taste your beer at every stage of the process but it won't taste great. You need to allow the beer to clear.
If you measure the gravity of your beer again now you can work out roughly how strong it will be. This measurement will be the Final Gravity and the formula you need is (FG - OG x 131). Lets say your OG was 1.038 and your FG was 1.000.
1.038 - 1.002 = 0.036
0.036 x 131 = 4.716
So that an ABV of 4.7%, not bad at all! You may need to adjust this figure up by 0.1% if you use priming sugar to aid carbonation as there will be a little extra alcohol produced.
Next you will need to syphon the beer into bottles or into your keg. I prefer a keg but it is more difficult to get the beer to carbonate. You need to lift your fermentation vessel on to a table, kitchen counter or anything that will give it some height. So long as the top of your destination container is below the bottom of your fermentation vessel all will be fine. Put one end of your sterilised syphon tube into the beer and the other end into your mouth and suck, watch the tube and when beer is coming toward you, move the end of the tube into your container. Gravity will do the rest. If you're using bottles don't fill them right to the top, leave a gap.
Once your beer is in the bottles or keg you can add a little priming sugar. Mix 75g of sugar with a little warm water and stir until it is clear. Pour this into the keg or share it out between your bottles. You could also add some beer finnings at this point to try to speed up the clearing process but this is not really required, time will do a better job of this and your beer will taste better for it. You should leave it 3-4 weeks (longer if you can) before you drink it. This will give it time to condition, for any sediment to settle and for some level of carbonation to take place.
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