Homemade

Guide to Homemade Wine, Beer, Cider & Mead

Alcoholic beverages; commonly beer and wines and made at home. Most often brews are made from brewing kits purchased at shops specialized in spirits. Cheap Draft features homebrew recipes, equipment requirements, and best practices needed to deliver the perfect batch!

It is a fact that in an hour or so of your spare time once a week enough beer can be made to last an average drinker a fortnight. A four-gallon lot may be made in any kitchen and it takes only a moment or two to assess how long thirty-two pints of the best will last.

Home made beer is cheap - as has already been pointed out - but this does not mean that it is poor when compared with commercial products. On the contrary, many ales, stouts and such-like bought over the bar leave a lot to be desired. Once you have the easily-acquired skill you can make yours better than the stuff now costing more than it is worth. And you can learn by simple experiment how to make beers of all sorts which will really suit you rather than having to acquire the taste for some commercial product that has come your way owing to the merging of two brewery groups. The skill in making beers comes in learning how to make the very kind of beer you have been looking for. Therefore, I expect you may have to make several lots before you are able to say that ‘this’ is just what you have been looking for and that the recipe you used in the one for you.

This is how skill in home wine making is acquired. Too many novice wine makers make a batch of wine with fruit that has become available without giving a thought to what the wine will be like or whether they will like it or not. The fact that it is wine is all that seems to bother them. This sort of person would go to a wine merchant for a bottle of wine with not the faintest idea of what they wanted apart from it being a bottle of wine. No person with any sense would go into a pub not knowing what he wanted. Clearly, the home brewer must have a pretty good idea of what he wants before he begins and then choose the recipe most likely to produce it. If he does this he will very soon succeed at what must be one of the most interesting and rewarding home hobbies there can be.

No license is needed today and although this is an absolute boon that will make home brewing as popular as home wine making - there being more than half a million wine makers in Britain alone _ some operators who have been making beers without a license for as long as they can remember confess that now they are not breaking the law half the fun has been knocked out of it for them. It would seem that the beer was just that much better because in making it they were breaking the law. I suppose there is something in that, for as a child I remember that apples pinched from other people’s orchards always tasted better than our own.

Being able to make beers as strong as you wish should not be encouragement to make them stronger than need be. The amounts of sugar given in the recipes make for good strong beers, that is, beers with a comfortable percentage of alcohol. You can make them weaker or stronger as you wish by altering the amount of sugar accordingly. The table below will show you how much sugar to use to obtain a given percentage of alcohol. But over-strong beers should not be the aim of anybody simply because, if they are made too strong, they become malt and hop wines rather than beer and therefore too strong to be drunk by the pint or even half-pint. It is all very well to acquire a reputation for being able to knock up a knock-out drop, but if your friends are affected by strong beers as many people are - they roll up their sleeves and challenge perfectly innocent bystanders to a punch up - it would be better to make them at roughly the same strength as commercial beers. In any case, the flavor of over-strong beers is spoiled and they are no longer the long, cool, refreshing drinks one looks for in beers, but temper- and hangover-inducing shorts.

You will, naturally, choose the simplest form of beer making to start with; the method calling for the use of malt extract and hop extract. This method is becoming extremely popular amongst beginners and will continue to be so for a very long time with a vast number of home operators simply because the ingredients are ready to use and easy to handle. Very excellent beers are made with these materials which are, in effect, the same as malted barley and dried hops.

However, the more ambitious will want to use grain malt (malted barley) and dried hops, as the commercial brewer does. For this reason, recipes for using either ingredients are included; some calling for malt extract and hops extract; others calling for grain malt and dried hops. Using grain malt (malted barley) and dried hops does make for better beers, but this is a little more expensive. However, the expense - the little there is - should not bar you from going in for making the best possible beers.

Years ago, home wine makers put up with all sorts of disappointing liquors made from all sorts of unsuitable fruits and yeast and fermented them in anything but a fire bucket. Today, they are a fastidious lot insisting on the best ingredients, the best yeast and the most suitable utensils - and so they should. The result of this new outlook has been the complete transformation of the nature and quality of home-made wines. Years ago, hardly any home-made wine was worth drinking; yet today they are absolutely first-class products easily on a par with the best commercial wines.

So let us do as home winemakers have done and learn to make beers as good as those turned out by famous breweries.