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Home Brewing Supplies - Start Brewing Today!

By: John Gergets


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Maybe you've you been thinking about brewing your own beer? It sounds like fun, but you don't know where or how to get started. Don't worry about it! Home brewing supplies are available just about everywhere. In addition, there is a ton of easily understandable, step-by-step information available to walk you through the brewing process. It's really not that hard to brew a batch of your own delicious beer when you're using the right home brewing supplies.
This is a good time for a beer lover to be alive. In the last twenty years, micro and craft brewing has exploded in North America. Things have actually gone full circle in the world of brewing. Brewing at home with home brewing supplies was where it all started.
Hundreds of years ago, beer was the beverage of the common man. It was enjoyed with every meal and at all hours of the day and night. This occurred because water supplies were usually so contaminated that drinking water on a regular basis was a death sentence. The alcohol in fermented beverages killed all these water-born pathogens. As a result, everyone brewed beer with the available supplies of grain, usually barley, rye and sometimes wheat - these were the very first home brewing supplies available.
In every neighborhood, someone was usually better at brewing than everybody else. News of the quality of their beer spread quickly, and these people soon began to sell beer to their neighbors. These were the first commercial brewers. (In addition, these "brewers" also allowed their customers to consume the beer right there on their premises. These "alehouses" were the first taverns.)
Over time, because of the local nature of brewing, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of local beer varieties all over Europe. Eventually many of these brewing families emigrated to North America and brought their brewing traditions with them. The end result was that the varieties of beer here rivaled those available in Europe. It's estimated that, just prior to Prohibition, there were 1400 breweries in the United States alone. That's a staggering amount of varietal beer. Unfortunately, that all changed.
Prohibition put a great many of these local brewers out of business. When Prohibition was repealed, the market for beer slowly began to be controlled by the larger breweries. Over time, these larger breweries either put the remaining smaller regional breweries out of business through competition or by buying them outright. This trend continued, so that by 1980 there were only 82 active breweries in the U.S. Eventually, the only beer readily available in North America was the style of beer now known as American lager. This is the beer we all grew up with basically because large corporate brewers had homogenized the market and were producing nothing else.
However, a small number of people remembered or heard about the "golden age of" American brewing - a time when thousands of local beer varieties were available. These people began experimenting with producing and selling craft beer on their own and a beer revolution was born. People began to see that beer could be much more than American lager. In addition, home brewing also became more popular and home brewing supplies began to appear on the market.
Today, there are over 1500 active breweries in the United States alone. That's more breweries than in any other country on Earth and rivals the number of breweries that existed prior to Prohibition. The beer world has gone full circle and the golden age of brewing has returned again.
So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and grab your own home brewing supplies. With the right home brewing supplies, you can bring some of this golden age right into your own home.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

John Gergets is a former attorney turned stay-at-home dad and works as a content writer at Class Act Content. An avid home brewer, you can read more about home brewing at John's website, Beer Brewing Information.

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