Brewing summer beer.

How to make your own for 19p a pint.  Helps to buy ingredients in bulk: Tucker's Maltings is good, as is Warminster Maltings. 25kgs will last 6 months.  Hops are very expensive because of the madness of lager drinking that has infected England, poor harvests due to all the diseases monocultures get and a dearth of Cockneys on stilts at picking time.  Grow your own, pick the wild ones or order in bulk and keep in the freezer.  £100 of hops will last a year at least.  Give up on buying organic hops - there's one farm in Kent that I could find that grows them and they supply all of it to large brewers.

I use a ratio of 1lb malt : 1oz hops : 1gal water to keep it simple and weak enough to drink a lot of, plus it's easy to remember.  It turns out a nice golden, lightly hopped bitter about 3.5%.  I've been using East Kent Goldings hops which are a lot more bitter than I'm used to, so I only add 2/3 of what would normally be added to the beer.  I want something a little stronger this time so I am adding more malt.

So...

Warm up 2 gallons of water to 66C in your brewing thing.

Crack your organic pale malt in the mill.  

All beers are mostly pale malt because pale has all the sugar in it and thus alcohol.  Darker malts are used to add colour and flavour.  Add to the water, stir in.  Should be like sloppy porridge.

Cover the brewing thing with a sleeping bag and wait two hours for the enzymes in the malt to convert the starch to sugar. 

I usually do this overnight to make sure all the starch has been turned to sugar, but couldn't be bothered last night.  2 hours is ok.

Drain out into 5 gal fermenting bin.

Sprinkle boiling water into brewing thing to flush the sugars out, until you have 5 gallons of "sweet wort" in the bin.

Taste a bit of the delicious malty liquid.  Yum.

Clean out the spent malt from the boiler and give the chickens a treat, mixed with chopped nettles and carrot - not all of it mind or they will explode and you'll have sans oeufs (not that you've got any anyway from the fat lazy Frenchies).

Put the "sweet wort" back into the boiler, add all but a handful of the hops and boil for 55 minutes.  

You can boil for longer and get darker beer, but any less and it'll stay cloudy.  Add rest of hops along with copper "worm" (beer cooler).

Turn off after one hour, run cold water through worm until beer gets to room temperature.

Put water from cooling into water butt for polytunnel watering tomorrow.

Drain into sterilised (or beer goes bad) fermenting bin, top up to 5 gallons with boiled and now cool water.  Want it stronger than 3%?  Add 8oz sugar per gallon of liquid -any more will give you a really bad hangover.  

Taste again, noting how the hops have made it even more delicious.  

Add yeast skimmed from previous ferment (or bread yeast if you ain't got anything else, which works fine).

Cover and pray to Bacchus.

Skim foam off after a day or so and use that for next brew (keep in fridge).

Only took all bloody day, but in between stages I hope you were doing productive things like clearing ragwort from the field and not lying on the lawn with a book on composting toilets or something!

See? I was being productive!
Bottle it the following Sunday - anything sterile and able to take a bit of pressure.  I use those Grolsh-type bottles but did start out with placcy pop bottles from the recycling skip!