Start with the version of him only a sibling sees
Everyone in the room knew a version of your brother. His friends knew one. His coworkers knew another. His wife or partner knew a third. You knew the one nobody else gets to see. The brother version. The kid he was. The teenager he was. The person who sat across the dinner table from you for the first eighteen years of his life.
Lean on that. The eulogy works best when you bring something into the room that nobody but a sibling could.
Start with one piece of paper. Write three things you know about him because you grew up with him. Specific things. The thing he always did when he was nervous. The way he laughed. The argument you had a thousand times. The thing he did at fourteen that you both still laughed about at forty.
Those three things are the spine.
What to actually say about him
Concrete details, in plain words. Not "he was funny." Say "he made me laugh harder than any other person on earth, often at things that made nobody else laugh, and that is what brothers are for."
Not "he was loyal." Say "he showed up at my house at two in the morning the day after my divorce was finalised, with a bottle of whiskey and no plan, and we did not talk about it, and that was exactly right."
Not "he was generous." Say "he gave me the watch our father gave him, on my fortieth birthday, and would not take it back even when I tried, and I am wearing it today."
Two or three of these moments and the room knows him.
A structure that fits a sibling
Open by acknowledging the room and saying who you are. If there are several siblings, name them briefly so the room knows the family.
Tell who he was, in your honest words. Three to five sentences. The brother. The man. The father, husband, friend if he was. Lean into the brother part because that is what only you can speak to.
Tell two or three short specific stories. Childhood. Adolescence. Adulthood. The one phone call. The one road trip. The thing you still cannot believe you both got away with at fourteen.
Close with what he leaves. The phrase your family still uses that came from him. The way his children look exactly like him at the same age. The way his absence sits in every family meal from now on. Then stop.
What to avoid
Avoid the inside-jokes-only-three-people-get problem. Brothers have a thousand of these. Pick one or two and set them up briefly so the rest of the room can laugh too. Resist the urge to include all of them.
Avoid making him into a saint. He was not. The room knows. A line about a fault you loved him for is more powerful than five lines of polish. "He was the most stubborn man I have ever known and he would have argued with you about that too." That line gets a real laugh and a real tear at the same time.
Avoid sympathy card phrases. "He passed away too soon." "He is in a better place." None of these are your voice. Plain language hits harder.
Avoid airing things between the two of you that he would not have wanted aired. The funeral is not the place to bring up the argument you never finished. If the relationship was complicated, there is a separate guide on this site for that situation.
How long it should be
Three to five minutes for a brother's eulogy is right. About four hundred to seven hundred words.
If multiple siblings are speaking, two or three minutes each is plenty. Coordinate so each of you takes a different angle.
A brother's eulogy delivered with a real laugh and a real tear, in the same five minutes, is what people remember. Trust the small honest moments. Do not perform.