Homemade Beer & Wine

[Pete_59]

I've been making my own beer and wine on and off for years, at the moment I'm just doing beer from kits but I have made a lot of hedge row wine in the past and this year hope to go back to that as well as trying to making beer from foragable ingredients and try my hand at Mead.

Not only is this a good hobby which provides you with cheap drink, it may also be a good skill to have in a post TEOTWAWKI society.

[Deeps]

There are a few on here who do and I made cider last year. I've got a tin of wine to do too, I just need to get my finger out. I think you're right that its another handy skill to have, our society is fond of a glass or two of the falling over juice, I doubt that would change even in the worst of times, in the unlikely event. Cheap bevvy is good at any time.

[jansman]

Ha ha! Just having a cup of tea before I make 5 gallons of bitter and five gallons red wine.Bottled five gallons yesterday.Monday afternoon is my 'brew time' usually.

I mostly use kits,Coopers for the bitter and Magnum for the red wine.Both make very acceptable drinks.In fact, I find pub beer to be rather insipid after my own.I do make country wines though.The first is rhubarb,and the second is blackberry and elderberry.They take a little longer than a month though!

[shocker]

I have been a home brewer, on and off, for many years. I have more recently moved onto full boil grain brews, the difference is quite noticable. My mrs isnt too keen on the sticky walls so the next brew is with spray dried malt and grain adjuncts and of a beer from her home town ! Theres an old orchard at my folks farm so windfalls go into cider, and if any brews are not perfect, they become cooking ingredients.

Later on I will post up some good books and a link to a good UK forum

[Jamesey1981]

I like the youngs American range of beer kits, the American pale ale is fantastic, beer kits have come on a long way from the tins of brown sludge that my dad used to use!
Never tried to make beer properly from scratch, unless you count nettle beer, but that's more of a weak wine.

For wine I start from scratch, I've just bottled a batch of parsnip wine, and I'm waiting for the elder flowers so I can make a batch of that.
Going to try raspberry wine if I get enough off my new plants.

[Pete_59]

I've had some great results from some unusual sources, I made marrow wine which ended up looking rather muddy, I left it for a number of years but it didn't clear so in the end I decided to try it and ditch it if it was no good, as it turned out it was great something like a heavy sweet desert wine, all the bottles got drunk fairly soon after that.