Andy Hamilton - Booze for Free: The Definitive Guide to Making Beer, Wines, Cocktail Bases, Ciders, and Other Drinks at Home

A PLUME BOOK

BOOZE FOR FREE

ANDY HAMILTON lives in Bristol, where he is founder of the Bristol Brewing Circle and runs brewing workshops and an allotment. He forages and regularly takes groups on wild food walks, sharing his extensive knowledge of edible wild foods, plant folklore, and herbal medicine. Andy is a cocreator of the hugely successful website selfsufficientish.com (winner, Nigels Eco Awards 2009) and writes a wild drinks blog for guardian.co.uk. He also writes a brewing column for Home Farmer magazine, brewing and foraging features for the BBCs Countryfile magazine, and features for the Guardian (London), the Ecologist, Tow Path Talk, Kitchen Garden magazine, selfsufficientish.com, and the New Yorkbased website Civil Eats. He has also written a survivalist column for wired.co.uk. He has been a consultant survival/wild-food expert for various TV shows and makes regular TV and radio appearances both in the UK and abroad, on shows that include the BBCs Countryfile and Autumnwatch. Andy is coauthor of The Self-Sufficientish Bible.

For more information on Andy Hamilton and his books, see his website at www.selfsufficientish.com

The Definitive Guide to Making Beer,
Wines, Cocktail Bases, Ciders,
and Other Drinks at Home

Andy Hamilton

A PLUME BOOK

PLUME

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in the United Kingdom by Eden Project Books, an imprint of Transworld Publishers.

First American Printing, March 2013

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright Andy Hamilton, 2013

All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARKMARCA REGISTRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Hamilton, Andy, 1974

Booze for free : the definitive guide to making beer, wines, sherries, cordials, ciders, and other drinks at home / Andy Hamilton.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-1-101-60286-7

1. BrewingAmateurs manuals. 2. Wine and wine makingAmateurs manuals. I. Title.

TP570.H2275 2013

641.22dc23

2012028865

Printed in the United States of America

PUBLISHERS NOTE

The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

This book is dedicated to all those people I have
enjoyed a drink with,
and to those I have yet to enjoy a
drink with. Cheers!

W HEN IT COMES to making your own alcohol, everybodys first experiences are similar. You might make a few bottles of root beer, sarsaparilla, lemonade, beer from a kit, or even a country wine. Your lemonade might be divine, but its the only drink you make; your root beer is only drunk by you and the neighbors dog; and your sarsaparilla doesnt, as you thought it would, so much capture the taste of the forest in a glass as the syrupy taste of a long-forgotten something at the back of a medicine cabinet.

Despite these setbacks something still pulls you in to watch the bubbles rise into the airlock and gurgle out into the air, to see the mist inside your demijohns dissipate to reveal a crystal-clear translucent hue of outstanding beauty. Every step of the process seems magical, a moment of alchemy, and you experience a thirst to find out more. You want to make something that rivals your favorite brand of ale or wine; you gaze longingly at apple trees in the autumn and dream of turning those rotting orbs at your feet into cider. You even begrudge buying your kids packed-lunch drinks as youre sure you could do better at a fraction of the cost and with much more wholesome ingredients.

Making your own alcohol places you in a sensuous world full of new aromas and tastes, many of which are often ancient aromas and tastes reborn. Whats more, these aromas and tastes can be tailored entirely to your liking. For example, by using bay and rosemary in your beer a warming, fragrant, almost gingery beer can be created; by altering slightly the way you ferment a wine in terms of letting air in, you can change the flavor of a parsnip wine into a sherry; less sugar could be used in the brewing to produce a clear, crisp, dry wine.

A hands-on approach to our drink can go beyond smells and flavors. Over the last decade an awareness of provenance has been growing. We are now more than ever questioning how our food is produced and what goes into it, but sadly, all too often a blind eye is turned when it comes to what we drink. This is fairly understandable: eating five carrots one after another does not make me care less about where those carrots came from, but by the fifth consecutive beer sometimes its easy not to care whether youve even got your trousers on. But thats not to say we shouldnt question what goes into our booze.