Ted Bruning - Home Brewing: A Guide to Making Your Own Beer, Wine and Cider

First published in the United Kingdom in 2011 by
National Trust Books
10 Southcombe Street
London W14 0RA
An imprint of Anova Books Company Ltd

Copyright National Trust Books, 2011
Text copyright Ted Bruning and Rupert Wheeler, 2011
Illustrations by Alan Hancocks

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

First eBook publication 2013
eBook ISBN: 978-1-90789-257-8

Also available in hardback
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-90789-203-5

The print edition of this book can be ordered direct from the publisher at the website www.anovabooks.com, or try your local bookshop. Also available at National Trust shops, including www.nationaltrustbooks.co.uk.

The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, National Trust (Enterprises) Ltd and Anova Books are not responsible for the outcome of any recipe or other process in this recipe book and other than for death or personal injury caused by our negligence we do not accept any liability for any loss or damage howsoever caused. While we use all reasonable endeavours to ensure the accuracy of each recipe, you may not always achieve the desired results due to individual variables such as ingredients or equipment used.

The traditional reason given, whenever home brewers and winemakers were asked why they started up, was almost always price. A pint of my home-brewed ale, they would proudly say, costs thruppence, when it costs one-and-thruppence in a public house.

T hat mindset is about as dated as the currency. It belongs to the days of rationing and shortages, when wages were tight and simple commodities were hard to come by; when people collected jam jars and string and re-used wrapping paper and envelopes. The recent recession, and increases in alcohol duty, have gone some way towards bringing thrift back into fashion, but, economic ups and downs notwithstanding, these are more expansive times. True, beer in pubs is expensive; but beer in supermarkets is still cheap. As for wine, it is no longer the middle-class luxury it once was; the selection on supermarket shelves is simply baffling. And these days, if you dont have the money to get what you want right away, there is always plastic.

And yet making your own beer and wine still has a strong appeal. It ties into some very strong trends in modern life: a defiant urge to make and do for yourself; a demand for the authentic rather than the synthetic; a fascination with traditional methods and ingredients; a suspicion that most of the things you can buy are sullied in some way.

Of all the home-based crafts that have arisen from these concerns, brewing and winemaking are among the most accessible in terms of space, equipment and ingredients. Your production can become as sophisticated as you wish, but at entry level the requirements are mostly close at hand. Exclusive use of the kitchen, some fairly basic equipment, much of which can be improvised, and a limited amount of specialised kit are all you need.

Oh, and then there are the raw ingredients. Beer, wine, and cider share the same three basic components a liquid medium, fermentable sugars and aromatics (flavour) all mixed up together and fermented with yeast. And thats it. Of course, though, its not really that simple. Grapes, apples and pears are almost the only fruits that come with all three components in one neat package. With other fruits, as well as with root vegetables, blossoms, nettles and so forth, you have to supply the water and sugar, and in the right balance.

To complicate matters further, the variation of components is almost infinite; and sugary liquids are attractive homes not only for friendly yeast cells but also for a host of other, far less friendly micro-organisms. You will need to master the former and defeat the latter to end up with a beer or wine that is actually pleasant to drink; and to accomplish it you will need two key qualities: first, patience, and second, attention to detail. Sugar content and acidity need to be checked and controlled; correct temperatures have to be achieved and maintained; and, in particular, hygiene must be scrupulous.

But these requirements need not be a deterrent. On the contrary, they are the very qualities that attract people to craft activities of all kinds. To be a good cook, or a good cabinet-maker, or a good model aeroplane builder, you need the capacity to enjoy being utterly absorbed in and take pride in what youre doing. The reward for your painstaking care is a world of choice that commercial concerns dont cater for. Wine-lovers can browse among supermarket shelves and come home with grape wines of all countries, colours, and qualities, but they can never experience a strawberry or a cherry wine. Cider-lovers outside very confined regions of England will be hard pushed to find a place where they can buy a traditional strong, still cider. And beer-lovers will need to live near one of a handful of specialist shops to satisfy a fondness for a near-defunct style such as light mild or barley wine.

And this, perhaps, defines the way in which home brewing and winemaking have changed. In times when choice was more limited, most home winemakers used kits purporting to re-create a claret or a hock, while home brewers favoured similar kits marked mild, or bitter, or brown ale. Todays home brewers and winemakers are more experimental. If they want a decent claret, they can get it from Tesco or Sainsburys. They would rather explore the huge range of possibilities afforded by the orchards and hedgerows about their homes. Beer-drinkers, likewise, are better served in terms of variety now that supermarkets commonly sell wheat beers, Belgian abbey beers, strong pale ales, even porters. For them, perhaps, authenticity is a greater motive than variety, although there is a whole family of dark beers strong milds, stock ales, imperial stouts and the like that are almost impossible to buy.

In summary, then, home crafts of all species, including home brewing and winemaking, are not only enjoyable as hobbies; they also give you a measure of control over your world and the quality of your life. In fact this is more than just a pastime its a philosophy in action!

A chef-turned-microbrewer once confessed to me that running a brewery was much easier than running a restaurant kitchen, since the range of ingredients and equipment was so much more limited.

N evertheless, brewing and winemaking are subsets of food science, so the best place to make your headquarters until you get that shed converted is the kitchen.

Even the most basic kitchen already has nearly everything you need: electric sockets, running water, wipe-down work surfaces, plus many of the accessories: weighing scales, sharp knives, chopping board, pots, pans, even a potato masher and a rolling pin. But youre going to be busily at work in there for quite long stretches, so you need to plan your timing around anyone who needs to use the kitchen to cook.

The kitchen, however, wont provide the space you need for storage. However humbly you start, if you stick with it you are going to accrue quite a collection of kit, some of it pretty bulky. And, once youve made your wine or beer, its going to need a dedicated place where it can ferment and mature unmolested, in some cases for several weeks or, in the case of some wines, months. Temperature an even one is critical. Wine yeasts prefer to work slowly at room temperature or marginally above: 1517C. The optimum for ale yeasts, which ferment briskly and quickly, is a little higher: 1822C. Lagers on the other hand are best if they are cold-conditioned for a long time anything up to three months at 912C. So for your ale and wine you might think of staking a claim to a corner of the airing cupboard; but there are drawbacks. Most airing cupboards are upstairs, and, while its fine to carry a 5-litre (1-gallon) glass jar of fermenting wine upstairs, trying it with five times that amount of warm, fermenting beer is probably unwise. A dedicated corner of the kitchen is perhaps the best place to stand your ale fermenter, or perhaps the fabled cupboard under the stairs; it doesnt take up that much space. For lager, the garage will probably do. The key thing, though, is to insulate those fermenters really effectively, because fluctuations of temperature will seriously affect the quality of the end result.