We home brew.
In 2012 Mike bought Pen a simple home brew kit for Christmas. Just a fermentor bucket, a keg and some basic tools (hydrometer, jug etc.). Between that and a beer kit it came to about £80. Pen had been complaining about the rising cost of bottled beer in Sainsbury’s. It had starting exceeding £2 per bottle and some were getting on for £2.50. Mike worked out that all we’d have to brew was three kits to make our money back. Each kit did 40 bottles and cost £20 so we’d save £40 per kit. Of course this assumed that the beer was actually drinkable.
Pen was dubious so it took us another three or four months to get around to trying it. Amazing the first kit was a good one, Woodford’s Admiral, and Pen enjoyed the result.
So, about 30 kits and five years later we’d gained a fair bit of experience, no failures and a cellar full of beer. Around this time a friend of ours, Cornelis, was retiring back to Holland and offered us his 40L kettle, some left over ingredients and some demi-johns.
We enrolled on a full grain brewing course and a few months later did a day’s training in Buxton where we asked questions and watched how the professionals do it.
Our first brew was a copy of the one done on the course, with the ingredients that Cornelis had left for us. It went ok but was really, really, weak (about 2%). The second and third were made with the rest of the ingredients (a mixture of ‘normal’ and Belgian style malts and some Saaz and Hersbruker hops. The results of these were much better than the first and Pen quite liked them.
The fourth and six were badly chlorophenol infected. We were mostly using Graham Wheeler’s Brew Your Own British Real Ale so tried milds, bitters and other basic, simple recipes for traditional beers. They’re mostly ok but nothing special.
We were struggling to figure out where were going wrong and why we couldn’t improve so have been attending the Manchester Homebrew Group. They’re a friendly bunch of guys and gals who have plenty of experience brewing, some are BJCP judges, one’s a professional brewer and several brewery owners are alumni of the group.
They’ve really helped and we’ve benefited from their experience as well as from all the contacts and events we’re been involved in as a result.
We’ve visited a number of breweries, spoken a lot of brewers and Mike’s been reading pretty much every book he can find on the subject. Mike’s written a piece of software which helps with designing brews.