Brew It Yourself - Homebrewing - Hastings Handbook September 2007

If you’ve never tried your hand before, you’d be surprised at just how good the stuff you make at home can be. Apart from the obvious rewards awaiting you at the end of your labours, the process of home-brewing makes a satisfying hobby, and picking your own fruits and berries even gets you out into the countryside and fresh-air in search of raw ingredients. It might take a little experimentation to get it just right, but that’s part of the fun and once you’ve got a few bottles of Chateau Hastings/St Leonards on the wine rack and a couple more gallons bubbling away merrily, you might well be hooked.

Homebrewing has a 7,000-year history; as soon as people found that natural yeasts turned sugary liquids to alcohol (making them safe to drink in the process) basic brews were routinely fermented and drunk. Mead, made from honey and water, is supposedly the oldest alcoholic drink of all. The Hindus, Greeks, Africans and Anglo Saxons were all beekeeping and mead-drinking thousands of years ago, and it was enjoyed by nobility and peasants alike. Meanwhile the Greeks and Romans were cultivating vines and discovering wine, but mead kept favour in Britain thanks to our lovely temperate climate, as so well demonstrated this summer.

When you hear wine you think grapes, but you can take almost any fruit or vegetable as your starting point for a ‘country-wine’. The variety and depth of flavour you can achieve is remarkable, as is the range of colour for your finished bottle. Some ingredients need more balancing than others, but visit a specialist homebrew shop for the necessary equipment, ingredients and follow a tried-and-tested recipe, and you can get a thoroughly drinkable result from pretty much whatever takes your fancy: from parsnips to pea-pods, bananas to strawberries, there isn’t much you can’t turn into wine. Even if you can’t be bothered with the collecting and messy fruit preparation (enjoyable though it is), you can just buy a can of ‘concentrate’ - add some sugar and yeast - and let those little micro-organisms do all the hard work for you.

Making other drinks like beer, cider, perry or mead (which is delicious but costs a fortune to buy from shops) involves a similar process; again it can be as difficult or as simple as you’d like to make it, with plenty of ‘starter kits’ available - and that’s how most people start out. Buying the equipment is a modest initial investment that will pay for itself time and time again.

The one thing you will need if you’re going to start brewing is patience. Although it’s possible to get quite drinkable wine and beer in just a few weeks, particularly with some of the rapid kits available, wines and mead in particular benefit from maturing for at least a year to get a good flavour, and twice that long if you’re waiting for something really special. So if you get some on the go this autumn, you’ll be sitting back to enjoy it just in time for Christmas 2008.

So don’t let the fruit rot on the boughs - now is the best time of year to reap nature’s free harvest and transform it into next year’s festive cheer!

Recipe for Apple Wine (medium):

Get hold of the ingredients and equipment listed in the two boxes below, then follow these instructions. Sterilise all your equipment according to the instructions that come with the sterilising solution. Wash the apples, chop into small pieces and put into the plastic fermenting bucket with the water, which won’t completely cover them. Add the yeast and nutrient (quantities specified on the container, or you can get a sachet with just the right amount for one gallon). Stir vigorously. Leave the bucket in a warm place for a week, stirring two or three times a day, moving the apples from top to bottom. You should notice some frothy bubbles as the yeast starts fermenting. Keep it closely covered at all times to stop little fruit flies from getting in (they appear from nowhere, and they’ll turn it to vinegar!). After a week, strain the pulp through a muslin bag, pressing any liquid from the apples. For each gallon of liquid you now have, add 3lbs sugar. Using a funnel, transfer to a demijohn and fit with the airlock (which should be part-filled with water). Once the liquid has cleared and there is sediment on the bottom, carefully siphon the liquid into another demijohn without stirring up the sediment (this is known as ‘racking’ - if you only have one demijohn, you can rack it into the bucket, clean the demijohn, then return it through a funnel). Fit the airlock and leave to stand. It will be ready in six months, but much better after a year.