Homebrewed beer is a tasty and cheap alternative to the pub and supermarket, says Malcolm Wheatley.
After finishing work late last night, I had a couple of pints of beer. Nothing exceptional there, you might think. But take a look at the cost: 70 pence. And no, that's not 70 pence per pint -- it's 70 pence for two pints.
Welcome to the world of homebrewed beer. Sales of homebrew kits and equipment have apparently been soaring during the recession, and I'm not surprised. Last October, as the credit crunch bit, I resumed brewing the stuff myself -- after a break of almost twenty years.
Homebrew isn't without its misconceptions. Taste, for one. My mate Brian accepted a pint of my homebrew last New Year's Eve with some trepidation -- trepidation doubtless fuelled by prior encounters as a student some time in the 1970s. In fact, he concluded enthusiastically, "this is all right!" The second pint went down almost as fast as the first. The bottom line: today's homebrew is very, very palatable.
Mess and complicated recipes are another misconception. Yes, you can boil up and mash your ingredients the old-fashioned way. But you don't have to, and I certainly don't. "Kits" -- containing hopped malt extract and a sachet of brewer's yeast -- eliminate all the mess and complexity, and all you have to do is add sugar, warm water, and stir. And it really is that simple.
Ingredients, equipment and prices
Kits typically make 40 pints. At my local homebrew shop, in a nearby market town, they vary in price from £7.99 to just over £22. In the world of homebrew, you tend to get what you pay for, and the beer I've always brewed is a mid-range product priced at £13.49. Add in the cost of a bag of sugar -- 75 pence or so -- and that's your ingredients sorted. Net cost: 35 pence a pint.
The beer is brewed in a fermentation vessel -- essentially a 25-litre plastic bucket with a lid. They cost in the range of £8-£10, and last for years. You'll need a long plastic spoon to stir it with. A hydrometer isn't really necessary: just wait until the foamy stage has passed, and bubbles are rising slowly and infrequently to the surface. This takes around a week.
After the brew has fermented, you'll need somewhere to store it. A basic pressure vessel from a homebrew shop costs between £25 and £30, or you can use beer bottles. I do both. Cleaning and sterilisation are important, and homebrew shops sell sachets of the appropriate agents.
A word of warning: don't be tempted to re-use lightweight empty beer bottles recycled from (say) beer bought at the supermarket. They might not be strong enough to withstand the pressure if your beer hasn't completely fermented before you bottle it.
Obviously, with your first batch of beer, the cost of the pressure vessel and bottles has to be added into the equation. But the more you make, the more the cost is spread -- I'm still using a pressure vessel and some bottles I bought 25 years ago. But I did buy another vessel last October, from which I've now poured half a dozen 40-pint batches or so.
Getting started
Homebrew ingredients and equipment tend to be heavy or bulky (or both), so buying locally tends to be better than buying on-line. Apart from anything else, you can usually get a better idea of which kit will produce an end-product that tastes most similar to the beer you ordinarily drink.
But on-line stores do exist -- here's one -- and Google reveals plenty of others. There are even "how to do it" videos on YouTube.
Amazon, too, has a good collection of books on homebrewing. So if you are tempted to brew beer in the traditional way, these books will tell you how. Another good source of advice -- for both kits and traditional beer-making -- is Jim's Homebrew Forum.