Sanitation

Before you make beer, you need to sanitize all your equipment. This helps to prevent unwanted bacteria from interfering with the process of the yeast converting the sugars to alcohol in your beer. Here are some methods for accomplishing this:

Household bleach is by far the easiest sanitizer to obtain and the cheapest. Basically any brand of household bleach should get this done. I usually use about a capful in a gallon of warm/hot water for a sanitizing solution. While bleach is effective, you need to be careful to rinse whatever you soak it in with plenty of water. I find that usually bleach will leave an aftertaste to the beer I make, and is generally not worth the low cost. Although, if you're out of any other sanitizer options and you're in a pinch you can rely on bleach.

There are a few varieties of this sanitizer available. The basic idea is a solution, sometimes based on peroxide, that will sanitize without any rinsing needed - hence the clever name ;) I do like using the no rinse sanitizers because they leave no noticable aftertaste and there's no worry about "did I rinse this off enough?" Of course, the concern here is to always keep some on hand, as you won't find this available in just any grocery store and your local homebrew shop (if your area even has one) may not be open at the time you need to purchase some sanitizer.