Hood Richard - Brew it yourself: make your own wine, beer, and other concoctions

Ingredient Guides

For too long, the making of homebrew has been a pastime more commonly associated with folk of a certain age: those that favor sandal/sock combinations and hairy sweaters. Seen as a 70s throwback, this genteel pastime has long been mocked by the ignorant and uninformed.

This is all about to change...

We have bravely taken it upon ourselves to brew, ferment and infuse vast amounts of drinks from ingredients foraged, grown and scavenged in our gardens, on our allotment and sometimeswhisper itfrom the store.

Along the way, we have created gastronomic disasters too awful to recount, but that has all been part of the learning process. And we did it for you.

This book contains a selection of our very best recipes, designed for a new generation of home brewers. It will provide inspiration for you to turn your own surplus harvest into tasty alcoholic beverages, explain how foraged ingredients can transform ordinary drinks into something wonderful, and demonstrate how anyone can create their own uniquely flavored booze. This book will debunk myths, celebrate experimentation and take the fear out of the science of fermentation.

With ingredients varying from parsnips to pears and dandelions to damsons, well be furiously fermenting, boldly brewing and magically mixing a weird and wonderful array of alcoholic drinks.

Rise up, embrace the carboy and join us on our homebrew odyssey... its going to be one garden party you wont want to miss!

THE BREW-IT-YOURSELF
MANIFESTO

You dont have to be a science expert or a Michelin-starred chef to get fantastic results through making your own booze, but we do try to follow a few guidelines to maximize the merriment.

Here is our simple manifesto, which we have nailed to the door of our brewing shed to keep us on the straight and narrow.

Experiment! Swap ingredients to invent recipes, change base spirits in your liqueurs and add herbs and spices to just about anything. Try fermenting unusual produce... that unwanted vegetable lurking in the corner? It might just work!

Make copious notes, and keep them safe. All of your experimenting will go to waste if they are accidentally mixed up with the recycling, riding on the back of a cereal packet.

Taste is subjective. Remember, one persons Chablis is another persons drain cleaner.

Dont get hung up over quantities. Treat measurements as a rough guide. Slightly more or less is rarely a problem.

Homegrown or foraged ingredients are best, but stores offer alternatives. There is no shame in purchasing produce in the pursuit of boozy beverages.

Sometimes being patient will reward you with improved drinks, but if it tastes good, enjoy it early.

Be generous and share your drinks. Receive feedback and take criticism graciously, no matter how misguided it may be.

ALWAYS treat alcohol with respect. Your hard work deserves it.

T o make decent booze you need decent ingredients. The freshest, most flavorsome produce will always reward you with a higher quality of drink. We go into more detail about some of our favorite ingredients later, but here well deal with the three main ways of acquiring them: grow them yourself, track them down when foraging... or buy them.

A lot of people begin their brewing journeys when they realize that surplus homegrown produce can be converted into alcohol. We know many gardeners with substantial rhubarb plants who are harvesting stalks long after theyve tired of rhubarab pies, but dont know what else to do with them. Point out how easy rhubarb wine is to make and theres a good chance theyll soon be scouring garage sales for their first carboy.

Turning homegrown produce into tasty beverages is a hugely rewarding experience. And unlike most forms of cooking, where your hard-grown food is cooked and gobbled within hours, a bottle of booze will keep those flavors preserved for weeks, months and even years.

What youre able to grow will depend largely on where you live and how much space you have. But even people without a yard can often manage a few pots of herbs on a windowsill, which can go into any number of drinks.

If youve got more space outdoors, you have a few more choices. Among the considerations for plant selection might be the following:

What will save me money?

What can I grow thats hard to buy?

Whats the most versatile?

How much cost and effort will it take to grow?

What will give me the biggest harvest?

These answers will be different from person to person, but were certain that whatever criteria you base your decision on youll enjoy the resulting booze just that little bit more.

Growing your own ingredients is rewarding, but foraging for them can be even better. Nature has done all the hard graft of sowing and nurturing, leaving you to grab the spoils for free. Foraging puts you back at one with nature and takes you down seasonal brewing paths that have been followed by generations of home brewers. For us, few sights are more exciting than the mass arrival of elderflowers, signaling the start of summer and a long season of increased fermenting and infusing activities. When fall arrives, a whole new selection of fruit and berry flavors will send brewing addicts into a giddy spinwe struggle to complete any car journey without emitting excitable yelps every time we drive past a previously undetected apple tree.

Its obvious, but worth reinforcing, that many wild plants are poisonous, so only pick what youre 100 percent certain is edible. Fortunately some of the most abundant foragable goods are easy to identify, making them worthy of a boozy dabbleleaves from mighty oak and beech trees, spruce needles and the common weeds dandelion and nettle all fall into this category.

Many wild flowers are edible and make interesting flavors for wines and infusions. If you want to test to see if you like a particular flower in a boozy context, start with quick sparkling drinks before progressing to wine.

Some roots, such as dandelion and burdock, are worth looking out foralthough you should seek permission from landowners if youre considering taking the garden fork with you. Berries can often be harder to identify, as many species have poisonous lookalikes, so take extra care. However blackberries, elderberries, sloes and damsons should be familiar to most people.

Its important to look after nature and, in return, shell continue to provide you with bountiful brewing goods. Try not to damage plants when picking, and dont strip bare the first tree or bush you seemany birds and mammals rely on these same fruits for survival, so make sure to leave enough to go around.