Booze

I once had a chemistry set but even in the health-and safety-free 1960s it did not include ingredients that could be used to make rockets and bombs (you could get those at the gardening shop). Still, I had fun with test tubes and crucibles and flasks and, on one occasion, slightly poisoning my sister.

Mucking about with glassware and chemicals was a great joy that now finds expression in the only slightly safer processes of home brewing. The dining room, the kitchen, the loft and the shed sport arrays of bottles and potions, tubes and presses, and rows of demi-johns bubbling away melodiously.

I started home brewing over thirty years ago when I moved to West Dorset. I found myself living in a farmhouse where you could gaze for thirty miles over the hills but still not see another house. It was a very old-fashioned farm on which my landlord, Snowy Eyre, a colourful gentleman farmer who would have been more at home in the eighteenth century, bred beef cattle. It was, and mostly still is, an untamed wilderness; more a nature reserve than a farm.

If there was a place designed to encourage the nascent home brewer, this was it. Here I could spend hours picking blackberries, elderberries, dandelion flowers, crab apples, hazelnuts, haws, sloes, rosehips, redcurrants and more. There was so much free food that the temptation to pick was irresistible. But what do you do with 50 kilos of blackberries once you are thoroughly sick of blackberry crumble, what can be made with crab apples other than jelly, and what can you do with sloes and elderberries in the first place?

I bought all the brewing equipment and began. I took the principle of learning by my mistakes very seriously and, it seemed, made as many mistakes as I could. But some of my wines and infusions (I had yet to enter the worlds of beer and cider) turned out very well indeed. Some did not, even though I tried to fool myself into thinking they had. This is a common and lamentable trait among home brewers; they think everything that comes out of their demi-johns and fermenters is ambrosia and worthy of first prize at any county show. Worse, as I know from long and bitter experience, they insist that people try their noxious brews and are affronted if anyone dares tell them it is anything less than a joy to the palate. Few invitations are more unwelcome than one to pop in and try some peapod wine. I am afraid that I lost a few friends in those early days as the risk of coming to see me must have seemed too great. Now the mistakes are much less frequent but I do attempt new and unusual recipes from time to time and try to be painfully honest with myself and ask my guests to be painfully honest too.

Despite setbacks, glorious triumphs are often won and the home brewer soon develops a fine if small repertoire of things he or she actually likes and the best way to make them. For some it is a matter of making only one brew a year – sloe gin being a favourite in this regard and elderberry wine another. I regularly make half a dozen favourite wines and four or five beers, but I also take a more experimental approach and try to brew anything that looks remotely promising and even a few things that don’t. I try exotic sugars, ancient brewing techniques and unusual fruits and plants. For example, my attempt to make milk wine was a resounding failure – imagine sweet, fizzy, sour milk with a dash of surgical spirit – but then it was bound to be. Nevertheless I learned something – in this case that you should not try to make milk wine. I also talk to people about their own experiences and have been informed and inspired by their adventures. How you pursue your home-brewing career is entirely up to you. Just remember to have fun and that you need please no one but yourself.

I hope that you will find something to please you within these pages. I cover recipes and methods that may already be familiar to you and many that you are unlikely to have come across before. Some are so new that at the time of writing I am the only person to have ever tried them – these are the fruits of my more successful experiments. On the whole I have been fairly conservative in my choice of recipes, striving for simplicity wherever possible and avoiding over-complicated or unlikely combinations. There is, for example, a recipe for dandelion wine but none for dandelion and banana wine.

There are four main types of home brewing: infusions, wines, beers and ciders. Distillation is, sadly, illegal in this country without a licence, not that this minor technicality has stopped people doing it; they just do it very quietly. Of our four available varieties of home brewing, infusions are by far the easiest to make at home. They require almost no equipment and some can be ready to drink in 24 hours or even less. Wines are considerably more complicated, and some ciders need a great deal of attention to detail if you are to end up with the type you want. Beers can often be the most difficult drinks to brew but being, to my taste at least, the easiest brews to drink are worth every last piece of effort. I use some of the old techniques for brewing beer but also some of the newer, much less time-consuming and less equipment-heavy methods.

Can you save money by brewing your own booze? Oh yes, undoubtedly. Of course, you could save even more by giving up booze altogether but that would be a flight from wisdom. Infusions will always be expensive to make because you have to buy the spirits, although you will be able to make some liqueurs much more cheaply than they would be if you bought them. However, with wines, beers and ciders the savings are substantial. A bottle of commercial blackberry wine may cost around £7, compared to just a few pennies for the homemade version. Beer, too, costs pennies a pint, surpassing by a long way even the cheapest supermarket beers. For the enthusiastic drinker this can amount to a great deal of money over a year. The true joy of this is that you are not paying the sin taxes, which, we are told, are imposed for our own good. Home brewers decide for themselves what is good for them.

Yeast bubbling contentedly

Brewing is an ancient art and one of the greatest achievements of man. Although there is still something magical about the process of brewing, in the past it was considered by many cultures to be pure magic. A sugary liquid was prepared, maybe from malted barley, grapes, berries, tree sap or apples, and left alone. Then something wonderful happened to it. The magic, we now know, comes in the form of a microscopic fungus called yeast.

Although there are many, many species of yeast it is Saccharomyces cerevisiae, brewer’s or baker’s yeast, that is of chief interest to us. And how extraordinarily interesting it is. This organism occurs naturally in several strains and many more have been developed, each with its own blend of talents for producing a variety of good flavours, reducing bad ones, tolerating high alcohol levels or low temperatures, conveniently falling to the bottom of the brew when their work is done (flocculation), and so on. These varying abilities will suit different types of brew – wine, cider and beer – helping to produce the various flavours we like.

Yeast is a microfungus, more closely related to truffles and morels than many moulds. Its cells are tiny, comparable to the size of fungal spores, at 5–10 microns across. That means 100–200 cells placed side by side would form a row 1mm long.

Yeasts feed directly on solutions of the simple sugars glucose, maltose and trehalose, and indirectly on the more complex fructose, sucrose and others, creating by-products of ethanol and carbon dioxide. Yeasts prefer to have access to oxygen but if the oxygen supply runs out they change their lifestyle and live without it.

In all brewing processes it is necessary to employ an aerobic phase (oxygen present) so that the yeast population can develop quickly, followed by an anaerobic phase (oxygen excluded, which in practice means fitting a lid or air lock to keep the air out), during which time the alcohol is created. Once the fermentable sugar runs out, or the alcohol reaches concentrations that the yeast can no longer tolerate, fermentation stops. Lack of trace nutrients can also limit yeast growth.

You need an awful lot of yeast cells to turn all the sugar in a brewing recipe into alcohol, but they reproduce asexually at an energetic pace provided the conditions are to their liking. The amount of alcohol in a finished brew is expressed in terms of the percentage of absolute alcohol by volume (ABV). If the alcohol from 100ml of a 40% ABV drink was removed there would be 40ml of it. Carbon dioxide, the other by-product of fermentation, is a bonus in most beers, some ciders and a few wines as it produces the fizzy quality we love in many of our drinks.

As well as the fermentable sugars mentioned above there are other sugars which yeasts are unable to digest – unfermentable sugars. Unfermentable sugars are left in the brew to sweeten and round the flavour. They are much more prevalent in beers than in wines and ciders.

Specific gravity is of central importance in home brewing so it helps to understand what it is. The sugar content of a must or wort or apple juice (the various concoctions you start with prior to fermentation) is indicated by its specific gravity (SG), which can be measured with a hydrometer. Specific gravity is the ratio of the density of the must, wort or juice to the density of water. Water has (quite obviously if you paid attention at school) a specific gravity of 1, or 1000 as it is usually rendered.

As the sugar level in a must, wort or juice is increased the solution becomes denser and its specific gravity rises, and as the sugar is fermented out by the yeast to be replaced by alcohol, the specific gravity decreases. If, for example, you have 5 litres of must ready to be fermented into wine, and it contains 1.2kg ordinary sugar, then the original gravity (OG) will be about 1092. I say ‘contains’ because adding 1.2kg sugar to 5 litres water will give a different, lower, figure.

Nearly every recipe that involves fermentation will require you to keep a close eye on the specific gravity. Knowing how much sugar is in a must, juice or wort will give you a fair indication of how much alcohol will be in your finished drink.

If we fermented out the must mentioned above we would end up with a specific gravity of around 990–995 depending on a number of variables such as the type of yeast used. This is known as the final gravity (FG). Since we know how much sugar has been consumed (all of it in this instance) we know roughly how much alcohol the wine contains. Incidentally the specific gravity of the finished wine is below 1000 because alcohol has a specific gravity of less than 1000.

An approximate figure for alcohol content can be obtained from the original and final gravities, using a simple formula: (OG – FG) x 0.13. For example: (1090 – 0995) x 0.13 gives a figure of 12.4% ABV.

While it is easy to add a precise amount of sugar to a wine must, this does not necessarily result in the specific gravity you want; fruit, for example, can add or even take away sugar. It is very important therefore to test a must before fermentation and add sugar or water as needed to adjust the original gravity.

Yeasts are only able to tolerate a certain level of alcohol before they stop working. Had the amount of sugar in our must been much higher, say 1.5kg, then some sugar would have been left over. Having leftover sugar enables us to make sweet wines – there are other ways of making a sweet wine, but we will come to that in good time.

With cider it is essential to know how much sugar is in your apple juice and to add sugar or, preferably, some sweeter apple juice should it be necessary.

Beers are a little different because they contain high levels of unfermentable sugars – up to 25%. They generally have a much lower original gravity and a much higher final gravity than wines. A typical beer will start at around 1045 and finish at 1010. The fact that they finish at around 1010 indicates the existence of sugar that has not fermented out.

As well as telling you where sugar levels should start and end, specific gravity readings will indicate how things are going during fermentation and, most importantly, when fermentation has stopped. If the specific gravity remains the same for two consecutive days, then it has indeed stopped and you can proceed to the next stage.

A hydrometer for testing the specific gravity of alcohol is so essential a piece of kit that I keep several in my cupboard as I could not bear to go without should one get dropped. Every hydrometer is calibrated to measure the specific gravity at 20°C and if it is used at temperatures much more than a degree higher or lower it will give seriously misleading readings.

When you buy a new hydrometer it is well worth testing it in water at 20°C. The figure where the marked gauge enters the water should be 1000. If the reading is 1000 then all is well, if not then remember to add or subtract the difference in all subsequent readings; better still, send it back to the shop. Note that the water will rise up the stem of the hydrometer owing to surface tension; this should be ignored.

Left: Hydrometer in a trial tube

Right: SG read from bottom of meniscus

Whatever it is you are making, things can go wrong and nearly always it is a matter of poor hygiene. The good news is that with infusions you can get away with hygiene standards that would have you closed down if you were a restaurant and still have a perfectly respectable drink at the end. The high alcohol, and sometimes sugar, levels that are used in infusions such as sloe gin protect them from all the bugs that would otherwise spoil the drink.

With wines, ciders and beers it is quite different and a great deal can go wrong quickly, easily and often irretrievably. Nearly all problems encountered in brewing can be laid at the door of contamination with one micro-organism or another. At the heart of the matter, you are trying to create the perfect conditions for micro-organisms to grow, while being extremely choosy about which one; that is, the particular strain of yeast needed for the task. With beers, unsterilised equipment is perfectly acceptable until after the boil (see here) but wine-making seldom involves boiling your ingredients, and everything needs to be scrupulously sterilised right from the start. Fermenting buckets, demi-johns, siphons, air locks, corks, caps, bottles and anything else that touches your brew must be sterilised.

With the exception of infusing equipment and the buckets and pots used in the early stages of beer-making, everything used in home brewing must be sterile, so when I say something like ‘Pour the wort into the fermenting bucket’ just assume that I really mean ‘Pour the wort into a fermenting bucket which has been cleaned and sterilised until it squeaks’.

Steam cleaning I have a domestic steam-cleaner and it works wonderfully well and very quickly, blasting away dirt with ease – though it is possible to crack glass bottles and melt polypropylene containers if you are not careful. I bought one after an unfortunate experience with a bottle of elderflower sparkly. I was about to open it when I noticed a large dark lump floating at the top. The bottle remains unopened to this day because I’m fearful of what it contains – I hope it is a lump of sediment left over from the bottle’s previous contents that I failed to rinse out, but it looks awfully like a pickled shrew to me. Although it’s very good at cleaning I do not trust a steam-cleaner to thoroughly sterilise my equipment. For this you need chemicals.

Chlorine-based bleach I recommend that you use this as the core of your sterilising regime. If you don’t wish to use domestic bleach, chlorine-based agents are available from home-brew stores. Using 10ml bleach per 5 litres cold water is effective in killing just about everything you do not want, and it does so almost instantly.

First of all everything needs to be cleaned with weak detergent, bottle brushes and so on. Make up a batch and pour a small amount into the fermenting vessels, demi-johns or bottles immediately prior to using them. Swirl it around so that all the surfaces are sterilised. Empty the solution and rinse the containers several times to remove the chlorine smell. It is quickly rinsed away if you avoid the viscous varieties of bleach and stick to the cheap watery stuff. It is well worth using a dilute solution of sodium metabisulphite (1 tsp in 1 litre water) for the second rinse as it neutralises the smell of the chlorine – and is a sterilising agent itself.

Hydrogen peroxide This is another excellent sterilising agent. Content as I am with bleach, I have never used it but would nevertheless recommend it based on the experience of others. At the very low concentrations you will be using, it will be perfectly safe and has the advantage over bleach of having no smell at all. Follow the instructions on the packaging, make up a solution and swirl around the inside of your demi-johns, fermenters, bottles and so on. Rinse with tap water.

Sodium metabisulphite Although not quite so powerful as the two chemicals above, sodium metabisulphite can be employed on its own as a steriliser. I use it just for awkward things like siphons, air locks and corks. It can be bought cheaply in crystalline form.

When taking the lid off the container, do not be tempted to sniff the contents – it will literally take your breath away because the sulphur dioxide it gives off turns to sulphuric acid in your respiratory system and can cause an asthma attack in susceptible individuals.

The normal concentration used is 2 tsp per litre. Always make a fresh solution every time you use it as the sulphur dioxide soon escapes. Soak the items to be sterilised in the solution for a few minutes, then rinse with tap water. As noted above it is excellent at neutralising the odour of chlorine.

Bottles used for infusions simply need to be clean, not sterile. However, wine, cider and beer bottles need to be completely sterile otherwise any number of nasty things can happen. Both reused and new bottles need to be sterilised.

The only drawback with second-hand bottles is the old labels. The best way to remove them is to leave the bottles in a bin or bath full of water for 2 days then peel off the labels. The glue comes away easily with coarse wire scouring pads.

Rinse the bottles with hot water, then part-fill one of them with a solution of bleach (see here), place a funnel in another bottle and transfer the solution. Continue until all the bottles have been treated. Drain the solution from the bottles as much as possible. The solution lasts for about two dozen bottles – any more and a fresh solution should be used. Now perform the same process using first hot water, then a solution of sodium metabisulphite (1 tsp in 500ml hot water), then hot water again, shaking the fluids in the bottle at each stage.

One thing that used to cause me perpetual annoyance was the impossibility of draining every last drop of cleaning fluid and rinsing water from my washed bottles. Then I came across a bottle tree (pictured right) and my life was complete.

Finally, even if everything is clean, it is possible, in fact likely, that airborne bugs will find their way into your brew if it is left uncovered. One particularly nasty aerial menace is the vinegar fly, also known as the fruit fly. My difficult relationship with this tiny organism began when my mother, unable to face telling me the facts of life, bought me an equally shy book, which unhelpfully explained matters of a delicate nature by talking at length about fruit flies (they have very large chromosomes, don’t you know?). I was confused for decades. Now that damn thing has come back to haunt me by flying into my brews bearing various bacteria which turn my brews to vinegar. The moral of this story is to always keep your demi-johns air-locked and your fermenting buckets covered with a lid, and to tell children the truth.

This is a fine case of asking people to ‘do as I say, not as I do’, for I am an appalling record-keeper. But it is truly worth the effort. If something comes out too sweet, too flat, too sharp or just terrible, your records will enable you to avoid the mistake in future. You should write down everything you do to provide you with a good record of how the brew was made. Ingredients and their quantities, timings, specific gravities, temperatures, tastes – everything you can think of should be recorded. I have several notebooks (only because I keep mislaying them) with reasonable records contained therein and they have been invaluable. But do try to be better at this than I am.

A rather obvious but important part of record keeping is to put labels on things. I was not very good at that either but as the number of demi-johns and subsequent wine bottles of unknown contents grew I realised that things must change. Even though you think you will never forget what that demi-john contains I promise that you will. I still have countless bottles of wine labelled ‘Parsnip??’ or ‘Gorse??’ – don’t let that happen to you. The big turn-around for me was the purchase of a label printer, which is attached to my computer. Now I can print out dozens of identical labels with ease.

Bottle-drying tree

Adding hops at copper-up

Aeration Introducing air into a (usually) unfermented brew by whisking or stirring to provide oxygen for primary fermentation of yeast.

Air lock A plastic or glass device which allows carbon dioxide to escape from a fermentation while not permitting air to enter.

Alpha acids A component of hops, which after boiling impart bitterness to beer.

Autolysis The decomposition of dead yeast, generally producing off-flavours but sometimes beneficial.

Base malt The malt, usually pale ale, used in beer-making to provide the bulk of the sugars in a wort.

Cheese A construction of pomace and straw used in traditional presses to filter out the juice in cider-making.

Cold-sparge To pass cold water through the used beer hops when liquoring down.

Conditioning The continued fermentation of a brew, generally in a sealed container so that the carbon dioxide produced is retained in solution under pressure.

Demi-john A container with a narrow neck in which wines and ciders may be fermented, typically 4.5 litres capacity.

Diacetyl rest A period when the temperature of a beer is increased slightly to enable yeast to absorb and thus remove diacetyl.

Diastatic power The power of the enzymes in a malted grain to convert starches into sugars.

Finings Chemical used to clear a wine or beer at (or near) the end of fermentation.

Hops Flowers of the hop plant, used to impart bitterness and/or aroma to a beer.

Infusion An alcohol flavoured by steeping a fruit, plant or other ingredient in it for a period of time.

Invert sugar Sucrose which has been split into a mixture of glucose and fructose.

Keeving The removal of nutrients from a pomace to limit fermentation in cider-making, to leave sweet cider.

Liquor down In beer-making, adding cold water to the boiled wort to attain the required specific gravity or volume of the wort.

Malt Cereal grains germinated to release enzymes that will convert the starches to sugar in beer-making.

Mash tun Container in which the sugars are extracted from the grains in a mash.

Original gravity The specific gravity of a brew immediately prior to fermentation.

Parti-gyling Making two or more beers from a mash by drawing off progressively lower-gravity worts.

pH meter An instrument used for measuring the degree of acidity of a liquid.

Pomace The pulp from milled apples or pears from which juice is extracted to make cider or perry.

Primary fermentation The period when the yeast cells in a must, wort or apple juice reproduce rapidly in the presence of oxygen.

Priming Adding sugar to a fermented brew to continue the fermentation process to produce carbon dioxide.

Racking/Rack off The transference of a fermented brew to a fresh container, to remove it from the lees.

Rumble Rolling a cask or barrel of beer to aid the distribution of flavour when it is dry-hopped.

Secondary fermentation The period when yeast produces alcohol from sugar in the absence of oxygen.

Sparging In beer-making, applying water to mash grains to extract the sugars.

Speciality malt In beer-making, this is any malt other than a base malt. Speciality malts provide colour, toasted flavours, acidic flavours and smoky flavours. They sometimes supply unfermentable sugars, but little in the way of fermentable sugars.

Specific gravity In the context of brewing, an indication of the amount of sugar in a liquid.

Underletting The addition of hot water to a mash in beer-making, in order to change the temperature and create a different sugar profile.

Unfermentable sugar A sugar which is not digestible by yeast, thus remaining to sweeten a drink.

Wort The sugary liquid from the mashed grains prior to the fermentation of beer.

Yeast In the context of brewing, a fungus which converts sugar into alcohol.

A guide to the best times to prepare wines and infusions from seasonal ingredients.