Home Brew

Being a keen beer drinker with a love of playing in the kitchen it was virtually inevitable that I would eventually start making my own beer. That and reasons of economy! It turns out that making one's own beer works out at about £1 per pint.

The basics turned out to be surprisingly straight forward. Furthermore, as far as specialist equipment goes, there isn't too much of that either. On the one hand this is great; my new hobby doesn't take up too much space (which my girlfriend approves of)but it does mean I have been deprived of a vast array of new toys! For very basic brewing all that is really required is a food-grade plastic bucket, a thermometer, an hydrometer, a siphon tube and some sterilising crystals. I have also chosen to bottle condition my beer so some caps and bottles (and a bottling tool) is also needed. Naturally the best way to acquire beer bottles is to drink plenty beer. It also allows one to hone one's palette!

At the moment, the brewing itself is turning out to be fairly straight forward. Admittedly this is partly due to the fact that, at the moment, I am using the "cheat's" method of pre-made, pre-hopped malt extract. All the activity needed is the addition of sugar, water and a bit of stirring. Job done.

The main reasons for opting for kits at the moment are principally lack of knowledge. I wanted to get my eye in with making something vaguely beery before playing too much myself. Secondly, the raw materials (certainly in the volumes I would be using them in) are quite hard to come by.

Unusually for me, the first time I made a brew, I followed the instructions to the letter. Hey presto, a few days later I had some brown liquid that tasted vaguely like beer. However I can report (with some degree of smugness) that the instructions weren't quite correct. The end product was a little weak for my palette making the whole brew taste a bit watered down. Also, it hadn't fully fermented by the time I transferred it to bottles (despite me leaving it for longer than the recommended length of time). Not only did this mean that some of the beer made determined bid for freedom when it was opened, it also had an overly fizzy mouth-feel more akin to champagne than beer.

More recent attempts have been much more successful. In my usual style, I started playing around with ingredients and proportions. First of all was less water. This meant the result tasted much more like beer and much less like the uriny output of a dodgy dive bar. It also resulted in the beer coming out at a rather pleasing 5% A.B.V. My second change was using normal sugar rather than brewer's sugar. My inner biologist told that they were chemically similar enough that the yeast would still be able to work and produce beer. Finally, I started leaving the mixture to ferment for at least a week. This ensures that fermentation is fully complete and yields a rich, full-bodied ale.

Obviously I wasn't happy with just one good batch so I set about trying to replicate my results. Happily this turned out to be relatively successful. A few batches later and I can usually produce a decent IPA with some confidence. My next step will be trying to obtain malted barley and hops to make the whole concoction from scratch and see if that improves the final outcome.

Cheers

TFB