Is there more than one type of Hops? Does it matter which I add to my homebrew beer?

Yes, the Home Brew Shop has a nice selection of organic grains and hops.

http://www.the-home-brew-shop.co.uk/acatalog/Organic_Grains.html

Good luck with your beer - I hope it turns out well.

No - don't throw it out. You can try and sweeten it a bit. The yeast has consumed all the sweetness in the beer but you can add sugar (a little bit at a time) and taste it as you go along.

I would avoid twist off bottles as it can be hard to get a really good seal on them. The beer might leak from the bottle and you could be left with flat beer which would be a real shame after all that effort making it.

Yes it actually alters the taste of the beer depending on when you add the hops. If you add it at the beginning of the boiling process, it will add bitterness to the flavor but not so much aroma. If you add it at the end, you will get the aroma but not much bitterness.

Hops come from the female flower of the Humulus Lupulus plant. Hops add a kind of spice to the beer flavor. They can be quite bitter in taste but this provides a balance to the sweetness that beer would otherwise have, which would be overwhelming.

If you want to increase the alcohol content to your beer, you need to add more fermentable sugar to the yeast. Fermentable sugars include; malt, honey, molasses and corn syrup).

This will increase the alcohol but you shouldn't go crazy as there is a limit to what you can add before you mess it up.

Brewing your own beer requires you to boil and make beer with a wort extract. Extract brewing is where you use reconstituted wort to make your own beer. This method is much quicker and requires a lot less equipment than all grain brewing, which involves creating your own wort from the beginning.

It's a great thing to make your own beer from scratch but it's a much more complicated and involved process than brewing your own from wort that you purchases.

Yes! If you want your beer to taste good and not have 'beer swill' which tastes horrible - you should clean and sanitize your equipment really carefully after each brewing session.

All of these beer styles are quite hoppy and bitter. They are not too different from one another, as they are within the same beer family; however they do have a few distinctive variances.

• Pale ales - brewed with lightly roasted 'pale' malts and have a nice balance between hops and malt

• IPA's - much hoppier than pale ales - can be found in both English and American styles, with the Americans making a more hoppy version

• Double IPA's - an American style take on pale ales that loads the beer full of hops, sometimes doubling or even tripling the normal amounts found in traditional pale ales