Last updated
05 February 2012
Quest for the Good Life 
Beer Making
Home brew beer can be made in several ways. Shop bought kits can be excellent, reasonable or to be frank, a waste of time. So we favour the most natural route possible to make a reasonable drinkable beer, not too strong but quick and cheap to make.
What’s in a shop bought kit?
The largest ingredient is the malt extract. The tin of thick, dark brown gloop that takes forever to get out of the tin. This is the basic flavour and sugar from the barley. Then there is a packet of yeast. Perhaps a specialised brewing yeast. That’s it and you can pay from £9 to £19 for one of these. Now some are excellent and make great beer, and even if you pay £19 for a kit, then £1 for some sugar, you are still only talking about 50p per pint (40 pint kit).
However, we are always looking for the most cost effective way of making a reasonable drink, so we would like to reduce these costs even further. How? By sourcing malt extract from the chemists and using yeast we already have for bread making. This will never win brewer of the year awards, but can compete with cheap supermarket beer we hope.
Home made beer with a difference?
Here’s out attempt to produce a super economical beer that taste good.
Basic Nettle Beer
This uses nettles and malt extract from the chemist. A bit of sugar and some bread making yeast.
Recipe for 16 pints (2 gallons).
900g (2lb) jar Malt Extract
450g (1lb) Sugar
1.8kg (4lb) Fresh nettle tops
9 litres (2 gallons or 16 pints) Water
Use the water in batches of 4 pints.
Dissolve malt and sugar in 4 pints of warm water
Boil nettles in 4 pints of water
Drain nettle water into malt liquid
Use another 4 pints of water and boil same nettles again
Pour into mixture
Use another 4 pints of water to boil nettles again and pour in with the rest
Allow to cool
Start yeast off in a jug of warm water and teaspoon of sugar
Once wort is cooled enough pour in active yeast
Stir and cover
Skim after 3 days
Allow to complete fermentation
Pour into bottles with 2 teaspoons of sugar (more if using larger pop bottles)
Clears within a week
Cool in fridge before using.
Cost to produce this?
Malt Extract £4.65
Sugar £0.45
Yeast 5p
Lets add 50p for electricity
Total cost £5.65 . . .that works out at 35p per pint.
But is it worth drinking?
17th April 2009 -
Yes we have decided to crack one of the bottles open. Verdict? Pretty good, still a little immature but good colour, nice bubble without being too fizzy and a definite scent of the green nettle. Taste wise, you don’t get as much of the nettle, but more of a rounded malt flavour with a green after tang. Overall we rate this as 8 out of 10.
How could we improve it? Well the nettle flavour is good, almost right, but I think for our own personal taste we could use the same amount of nettles (4lbs) with double the quantity, i.e. 32 pints. So that’s the plan now to produce a bigger batch whilst the nettles are at their best.
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This year (2011) we had our first crop on our hop vine. Not a huge crop I’ll admit but enough to use in our own brew. As ever we keep costs down and things simple in the hope we get an honest and pure result.
We added:-
2 jars of malt extract from the chemist (1lb jars) [just plain malt extract -
1 bag of sugar
Hops boiled in water for 15 minutes
Bread Yeast
Water to make up to 2 gallons
Now how simple is that? Pour the malt into the brewing bucket. Add the boiled hop
water. Add the sugar and mix. Add water to make up to 2 gallons and if cool enough
and some yeast. Leave for a week or so until it virtually stops bubbling. Bottle
in old drinks bottles (plastic 2 litres best -
Done
Result -