A wonderful hassle

Brewing at home and brewing in a brewery are sort of the same. It mostly just comes down to scale. At its most basic you heat grains and malt, add hops, wap in some oxygen and yeast, and then you wait. There’s no reason you can’t make a great tasting beer at home. 

I’m a kinaesthetic learner, so the homebrewing kit my husband bought me was a very thoughtful gift. Learning by doing: we would brew the kit to understand the process, then make up our own recipes. I had big things in mind, like a peachy pale ale and a mocha milk stout. That all came to a screeching halt after our first go. 

Brewing in a heatwave in a lockdown was our first mistake. Having a hungry teen on a snack-hunt as we tried to keep the kitchen clear and a toddler helpfully sticking her fingers into the Milton was our second. It’s doubtful that many breweries are battling the same forces of distraction. 

Keeping equipment clean in a home environment is another challenge. The sterilisation tablets made up a bucket of solution into which we were required to dunk all the bits and bobs (technical terms). Between the constant dipping and the transferring of wort from pot to demijohn, the kitchen was soaking. Clear-up took twice as long as the mashing process. 

And the waiting. The first ferment usually takes two weeks, but six in my house because I forgot about it. Bottling was a nightmare, trying to aim the rubber tubing into old bottles as nearly-beer came spurting out, carefully (aye right) brewed liquid ending up on the kitchen tiles. Then back into the cupboard for another fortnight. 

When we eventually dared to pop the cap off a couple of brewskis, the beer inside was so volatile it overflowed the bottle lip, straight onto my treasured Persian rug. We learnt to open them in a bowl in the sink, trying to avoid the gunky sediment at the bottom. Honestly? It didn’t even taste good.

I spoke to a couple of enthusiastic beer makers to see what was different about their experience. Paul Crowther, of Farage milkshake fame, is passionate about homebrewing, writing about it for Ferment and Pellicle. Like me, his hobby started with his spouse giving him a present. 

Paul began with a different kind of kit. With his, wort came ready for the fermenter and he simply added yeast and water. “It was a gradual process,” he said. “It took me a while to build the confidence to do this from scratch.” Perhaps I should have tried that, instead of jumping straight into full-grain brewing. It took Paul around two years to graduate to making the beers from scratch. “I started getting bored of the kits and started adding things in. Adding honey, or adding cocoa powder into the stout kit to make chocolate stout. Once I’d done everything I could with the kits I moved on to extract so I could experiment and do more interesting things.”

The cooking analogy came up again: “Kit brewing is buying a ready meal. Extract brewing is cooking the chicken, boiling the rice but buying a jar of sauce. Full-grain brewing is making curry sauce from scratch. It’s worth going through the first stages and learning the basics before you jump in.”

Julie O’Grady, co-owner and brewer at Neptune Brewery, had a different route to brewing. She and husband Les made their first homebrew in 2013. “It started with Les being in a pub and drinking a beer and saying, 'This is appalling. We could do better than this',” said Julie. “He came home and said to me, how do you fancy trying this?”

“We started brewing in a plastic bucket kit.” Julie and Les had immediate success with their homebrews. “We gave those bottles out to beer drinkers and we had friends in the brewing industry. They said, 'This is really great stuff'.” It seemed natural to move on to brewing as a business, scaling up the operation from 20-litre brews to their current set-up gradually, organically. Neptune Brewing has been making unfiltered, unfined and unpasteurised beers professionally since 2015.

Speaking to Julie, it’s easy to feel energised about homebrewing, and beer in general. She has such a vibrant, keen outlook, and she’s eager for other people to get that same level of satisfaction from brewing. Her top tip is to join a homebrewing club. “Do it!” she said. “You may surprise yourself.”

After speaking to Julie and Paul I have to admit, my homebrewing kit is looking a little less off-putting. I’m glad I didn’t give it away after all. But until home life is a little less manic, I’ll stick to doing what I know works: buying professionally brewed beer from people who know what they’re doing, and continue not cleaning my kitchen.