Home brewing - a lowdown

Although distilling your own spirit is illegal, there’s nothing to stop you flavouring spirits with fruits - and making cider and wine, of course.

Fancy trying your hand at brewing some beer or wine? Read on to find out the basics and to work out which might be best to try first...

Sloe gin This is a rich, fruity elixir that tastes very different to the neat spirit. Sloes can be gathered in the hedgerows in late September and October. Recipes for sloe gin are legion but they are all based around the same principle. The fruit is pricked with a sturdy needle to pierce its tough skin, sugar is added and the sloes are then infused in gin, in a bottle that is shaken regularly to mix the ingredients. The proportions vary from recipe to recipe, as do shaking times but more frequent agitation is needed for the first few weeks. Once it has been strained, the berries can be nibbled; the long maceration removes their bitter taste.

Cider Making cider takes some muscle. First, fresh, whole, unblemished apples need to be crushed or pulped: any apple variety will be good, though special cider varieties such as Dabinett or Michelin are excellent if you can get hold of them. The Brew Shop (0161 480 4880, www.thebrewshop.com) sells commercial crushers and pulpmasters, which attach to electric drills to do the job. Then the pulp needs to be pressed to extract the juice. Buy, hire or borrow a small press –  you should be able to find one for around £50. The juice is then fermented with yeast in the same way that beer is made, and should be ready in a month or so.

Beer It’s possible to grow a hop bine in your garden or smallholding. They are vigorous plants and just one will grow to 6m in length. A single bine will produce enough hops (its female flowers) to make beer in the autumn. Home-grown hops vary widely in flavour, bitterness and yield, so beer made with fresh hops will always be an interesting experiment. This can only be made once a year, which is why most home-brewers use dried, prepared hops.

Wine Although homemade wine can be made year-round, the autumn has a particularly rich selection of potential ingredients. Apple, plum and damson all make good wines, as do blackberries, rosehips and bilberries. The Brew Shop offers a “hedgerow wine kit” with everything necessary to make one gallon of any country wine. It saves buying all the ingredients if you’re just making a single gallon, though you do have to supply the demi-johns and equipment (borrow if you are an experimenting novice). A book that's good for the basics is First Steps in Winemaking by CJJ Berry (Special Interest Model Books, £5.95). If you have a greenhouse and choose an early-ripening variety, you can grow your own grapes for wine-making.

Homemade crème de mûre (blackberry liqueur) This follows a basic fruit liqueur recipe, combining 450g of fruit or berries with 700ml high-proof vodka. The mixture is stirred once a week for a month, strained or filtered, then sweetened with 200g sugar and aged in a sealed container (glass, with a tight-fitting cap) for at least a month. Extra sugar may be added to taste. Use berries picked away from busy roads, where exhaust pollution may taint them, and don’t wash until you’re ready to use them, as damp fruit swiftly goes mouldy. The straining process is necessary with blackberries because of all those pips: use a muslin jelly bag or coffee filters for a smooth, bright liqueur.

Happy brewing!

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