Beat the Budget - Brew Your Own!
I used to love cooking with wine, but when I found out how much of what I paid for it went straight to the Treasury, I decided to stop.
And let’s not even think about the four-pound pint, coming soon to a pub near you.
Then I discovered home brewing.
I’d always thought that when it came to making your own beer, you had to boil up all sorts of very sticky stuff and do complicated things like sparging (technically speaking, that’s draining the wort from the mash - whatever they are), doing a lot of cleaning up while bottles of home brew explode around you … and then holding your nose and downing the result in one gulp so it didn’t go near your tastebuds.
And as for making wine, jumping up and down in huge vats of grapes wasn’t really my idea of home brewing. Not in my kitchen, anyway.
It just goes to show how wrong a person can be: when it comes to home brewing these days, you simply pick up a home brew kit, chuck in some sugar and water, give it a stir and let nature take its course. No mess. No fuss.
Beat the Budget
And at the end of anything from a week or more, you’ve got a perfectly drinkable batch of wine or beer - at a fraction of the price of anything you’d find at your local off-licence.
How does 75p a bottle of nicely-oaked Chardonnay sound? Or a pint of Pilsner for 15p?
It sounded fine to me, and after a couple of months, I was cooking with wine again.
True, I had to make a small investment when it came to stocking up on home brewing equipment. But there’s usually someone at any given car boot sale flogging their not-very-used demijohns, fermenting vessels and airlocks for pennies on the pound. So I got all my home brewing supplies for a pittance early one Sunday morning.
And then, after a few home brew kits, the fun really began: that autumn being the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, it seemed like a good idea to do a little harvesting of my own.
For example: four pounds of blackberries here, four pounds of rosehips there and bingo - six bottles of rich red wine and another six of rather delicious rosé. And the cost per bottle? Negligible.
But it’s not just rosehips and blackberries any more: I’ve made wine from fruit, flowers, vegetables like pea-pod and celery (excellent for cooking purposes) … and even instant coffee!
Every now and then I have to make do with a home brew kit until the next batch of fruit wine is ready, but even with those I’m still not at all worried about the rise in alcohol duty every Budget Day.
It’s so good to be able to cook with wine once more. And thanks to the miracle of home brewing, every now and then I even put some in the food.
S. Carreck
Tags: beer, home brew, home brew kit, homebrew, homemade wine, rosé, rosehip wine
