To start home brewing beer you are going to need a few things that are not already in your kitchen. Here is a basic list to get you started.

Boil kettle – Your boil kettle can be anything that is large enough to contain the total volume of water that you need. Most beginning home brewers start with five gallon batches, and then you want a little extra room so you don’t have a boil over and make a huge mess. A good starting size is probably a 7-8 gallon pot .

Chiller – This might not seem that mandatory but it will make cooling your beer off faster and reduse the likely hood that you will contaminate your beer.

Fermenter – you can get a fancy glass carboy for this but for primary fermentation I prefer to use a six gallon plastic bucket. They work great and are easy to handle, where as glass carboys are easy to break and harder to clean out. You will also need a airlock on which ever fermenter that you use so that your beer does not get contaminated.

Bottles or Kegs – You will need something to put your beer in when it is done fermenting. For the beginning brewer bottles are a easy option as they are readily available and not expensive. Many people find that bottling is tedious and quickly upgrade to kegging .

Of course you are going to need some other misc. equipment like Sanitizer, bottle brush, Thermometer, transfer tubing, Funnel, stirring spoon, hydrometer.. Most people have some of these items already laying around the house so look around and make a list of the things that you will need to purchase to get ready to home brew beer. Many home brew shop have kits that contain all of the items that you will need and depending on what you already have in the kitchen they range in price from $80.00 to a couple hundred. Some of the basic kits do not come with a large boil kettle, but if you think that you are going to enjoy brewing I recommend that you get a pot that you can do a full boil in and also expand into brewing all grain without having to upgrade your equipment.