It's 9am on a Tuesday and I'm thinking about beer. Not drinking it. Making it. It's a daunting prospect: despite a long-term passion for malt and hops, I've never tried making beer before.

All the equipment I'll need is in front of me on my kitchen table: a cooking pot, a huge plastic fermenting bucket, a long white stirring spoon and some ingredients: vacuum-packed hops, tins of malt extract (unlike real brewers, I'm not using all grain) and a small sachet of something called Safale S-04, an English ale yeast. I've logged on to a website called How to Brew – By John Palmer, which is proving inspirational and intimidating in equal measure.

Looking for reassurance, I email Evin O'Riordain at the Kernel, one of Britain's most respected new breweries. I remembered him telling me before about how he began brewing at home after a trip to the US left him dissatisfied with the quality of the beer in Britain. "Keep an open mind," he advises me. "Pay attention to the details. And aim high. The higher the better."

I was aiming for "just about drinkable", but plenty of others share O'Riordain's ambition. Homebrewing has undergone a revolution in recent years as a younger, more open-minded generation of brewers and drinkers has emerged. The days when it meant kits from Boots are long gone; the easy availability of high-quality ingredients and useful information on the internet means some truly stunning beers are being brewed in increasing numbers of kitchens up and down the land. Phil Lowry, who writes a column on homebrewing for Camra's Beer magazine, reckons there are at least 15,000 homebrewers in the UK. That figure seems conservative given homebrew manufacturers Muntons sold more than half a million kits in 2012, almost twice as many as in 2007 (each kit represents a single brew, normally of around 40 pints).

Significantly, this growth has helped fuel the boom in microbreweries, with O'Riordain not the only entrepreneur to make the jump from amateur to professional. In this respect, Britain is following America, where the homebrew scene is larger and more sophisticated. The American Homebrewers' Association estimates that as many as a million Americans make their own at least once a year.

Brewdog's James Watt and Martin Dickie, who started out as homebrewers.

This has helped transform American beer, as high-class homebrewers set up their own breweries. Now the same thing is happening here. James Watt and Martin Dickie, the men behind Aberdeen outfit Brewdog (founded in 2007, and just moved into a new £7m brewery) started this way, too. Brewdog sold more than twice as much beer in 2010 as in 2009, success that gives hope to an industry battered by high taxation, pub closures, which are now running at 18 a week, and the decline of beer drinking overall.

My own ambitions are less life-changing, even if the rich marmalade aroma of the homebrew could well imperil my marriage (later on the day of the brew, my wife sniffed the air with evident distaste). I've decided to enter one of a growing number of homebrewing contests, run by Thornbridge, the Derbyshire brewery, with the winner having their beer on sale at Nicholson's pubs up and down the country. Competition is expected to be fierce. "We launched it last year," says Simon Webster, chief operating officer at the brewery, "and there were some bloody good beers."

Ali Kocho-Williams, organiser of the UK's national homebrew competition, says a desire to produce the sort of high-quality, high-flavour American-style beer that is still hard to come by in some parts of the country is driving the boom. "For some people it's a cheap way to produce beer in hard times," says the 34-year-old Kocho-Williams, a lecturer in 20th-century Russian history at Aberystwyth University. "A lot of it is fed by the craft-beer market in the US and increasingly in the UK. People are saying: 'Well, these people started out in their kitchen. They make beers I like, and I can do that, too."

You don't have to want to run a brewery to make beer. Jane Peyton, beer sommelier (a qualification that marks her out as a beer expert's beer expert) and the woman behind beer-education organisation School of Booze, says some people are just keen to understand how beer is made. "People want to experiment," she says. "Brewing is cooking, but with different utensils and more washing up. It's food but with more water in it."

Britain's attitude to beer is changing: no longer is it simply a drink to be swilled down the pub. For many years, beer has meant either Camra-endorsed real ale – generally a brown, bittersweet drink served cellar-cool – or lager, the quality of which has rarely been high. British drinkers are beginning to understand that the world of beer has more to offer. Organisations are springing up across the country: London, Bristol and Leeds are brewing hotspots, according to Kocho-Williams. The average age of those attending meetings is significantly lower than you might expect, according to Paul Spearman, chairman of London Amateur Brewers, who says more and more young people are going to beer festivals. Younger people such as Alex Heeton, 24, and Zara Hale, 23, who brew a beer every six weeks or so in their small Hackney flat. Not only does it save them money – web developer Heeton estimates that it costs about £1 a pint – but they clearly enjoy it. "A big part of it is having fun – experimenting, working with big flavours," Heeton tells me. Hale says that meeting Heeton inspired her interest in the current generation of British beers and she now works at Brewdog's bar in Camden, north London. "I brewed real ale with an old boyfriend but I found it to be really boring," she says.

"Zara has a better palate than me," Heeton adds. "My brewing has become more sophisticated since I met her. She'll say: 'Have you tried this? Can we make something like it?'" The couple recently brewed a beer with elderflower they picked in London Fields. "You don't have to stick with hops," says Hale.

Zara Hale and her homebrew. Photograph: Neale Haynes for Observer Food Monthly

For all Hale's passion, her interest sets her apart from most of her female contemporaries. Homebrewing is still a primarily male pastime, even if there are more female brewers, such as Sue Hayward at the Waen Brewery in Wales, or Tara Mallinson and Elaine Yendall at Mallinsons in Huddersfield. It helps that there's an open-minded culture around 21st-century beer, but it's a slow process. "It's a complicated subject," says sommelier Peyton. "There's this idea that beer is a blokey, male drink, that it's fattening – which it's not; that it's all bitter – which it's not.'"

I fear it may not just be women with an unfair downer on beer who wouldn't fancy my home brew. Having resisted the urge to have a look at it for two weeks while it fermented in the cupboard under the stairs, I'd carefully bottled it, having added brewing sugar for condition. A further fortnight on and it's time to taste my creation. It smells "interesting" at best: there are hedgerow fruits and, it must be said, a certain staleness. I was hoping for a full-flavoured, resolutely bitter, clean mouthful. In reality it's thin and too sweet, although the bitterness is there. Thank God I'd chucked in far more hops than the recipe recommended. That said, it's drinkable, despite other evident flaws (I should have used a mixture of hops rather than just Bramling Cross, a blackcurrant-tinged English variety; the beer is too dark and the flavours too muddled). For a first go, it's good enough, but next time I'll be aiming higher.

How to get started

Find decent equipment

A beginner can assemble the basic kit for about £60: you can add to it as your brewing gets more sophisticated. There are few homebrew shops these days, but plenty of good websites (try brewuk.co.uk, hopandgrape.co.uk or themaltmiller.co.uk).If you're looking for the sort of punchy, tropical-fruit bitterness you find in many craft-beer pale ales, seek out American or Antipodean hops.

Decide on your recipe John Palmer's How to Brew (howtobrew.com) is useful, while Charlie Papazian's Complete Joy of Homebrewing is an excellent guide for beginners.

Start with something simple such as malt extract, and don't try too many different hop varieties.

Set aside a day for the brewing

There's lots of waiting around and cleaning – and I do mean a lot.

Be patient

Your brew will take about two weeks to complete fermentation, and then another two weeks to condition in the bottle.

If at first…

If you don't quite get it right, have another go.