Organised by the job it does, not by what a shop wants to sell you.

The cheapest instrument that tells you whether fermentation finished. Read it at the calibration temperature or correct it, because a hot sample reads low and that is the usual reason a brewer thinks their efficiency collapsed.

Reads gravity from two drops instead of a full sample, which matters when you are checking pre-boil gravity and do not want to lose 200 ml of wort each time. It goes wrong after fermentation starts: alcohol distorts the reading and it needs correcting.

Mash temperature decides how fermentable your wort is, which decides how dry the beer finishes. Two degrees is the difference between a crisp beer and a sweet one.

Mash pH controls enzyme activity, extraction and how harsh the bitterness lands. The strips are not precise enough to be worth using.

Hop additions and salt additions are measured in grams and tenths of grams. A scale that rounds to five grams makes a recipe unrepeatable.

Bigger than you think you need. A vigorous boil in a full kettle is how you get a boilover, and boilovers are how you lose both the beer and the goodwill of whoever else uses the kitchen.

Holds the mash at temperature for an hour without a heat source. A cooler works because it is designed for exactly this, which is why so many brewers convert one.

Milling your own grain fixes the two things that ruin efficiency: crush that is too coarse leaves sugar in the husk, and grain milled weeks ago has gone stale.

Getting from boiling to pitching temperature fast reduces the window in which anything else can colonise the wort, and gives you a cold break that drops out the haze-forming proteins.

Headspace is not wasted volume, it is where a vigorous krausen goes instead of out through your airlock and across the ceiling.

Lets CO2 out and keeps oxygen and insects out. Buy several: they are cheap and the one you need is always the one you cannot find.

The single biggest upgrade in flavour per dollar. Fermentation temperature controls ester and fusel production, and a beer fermented warm tastes of solvent no matter how good the recipe was.

Under-pitching is the most common cause of a stalled or off-flavoured fermentation, and a starter is how you fix it without buying four packets of yeast.

Moves beer without splashing it. Oxygen after fermentation is what turns a good pale ale into wet cardboard within weeks.

A bench capper does not crush bottles the way a cheap wing capper does, and it works on the thinner glass that most bottles now use.

Weigh it, do not guess it. Priming to the wrong figure for your beer's temperature is how bottles turn into grenades.

Ends bottling day. Also lets you carbonate to an exact volume and serve without opening the whole batch to oxygen.

Sanitising is not cleaning. Clean first with a percarbonate cleaner, then sanitise, and do not rinse the sanitiser off with unsanitised water.

Removes the protein and hop residue that sanitiser cannot get through. Anything organic left behind is somewhere a bacterium can hide from your Star San.

The film at the shoulder of a carboy is where infections start, and it does not come off by rinsing.