Reg's Tale

Reg gets a glazed and distant look in his eyes as he reminisces on a childhood, surrounded by bubbling demijohns!

An uncertain start

(Or how I got into, then out of, then back into brewing my own beer)

You parents give you your looks, your values and in my case a long-term relationship with home brewing that has blown hot and cold throughout my life.......

A Family Affair

I seem to have been fated to brew my own beers and wines.  Some of my earliest memories are of the hypnotic bubbling of airlocks.  My parents were fanatical home brewers, having a flair for both wines and beers, as well as making their own sloe gin and cherry brandy. Hence a huge variety of airtight jars and demijohns surrounded the radiator in our small kitchen in the Cotswolds.  What is more we were never far from a ready supply of ingredients to try out new brews.  Our family's home was above the family shop.  My mother had anticipated the trend towards health foods had set up a local business selling all kinds of whole and organic foods, so we sat happily over a ready supply of grape juices, dried fruits and so on.  Anything that past it "sell by" date simply dropped into the next brew.  In fact having a large supply of raisins, organic rice and sultanas led to our family brewing saké by the bin full and distributing bottles to our friends and neighbours.  We lived in between two local pubs, but as each landlord got his fair share of free wine for his supper table, they didn't seem to mind a little no-cost competition to their stock in trade.

Starting Young

As a result of this, I guess it was inevitable that I would turn my hand to my parents' pastime.  I started first by brewing wine, which at the ripe age of eleven, I was not allowed to drink. However, my efforts seemed to be appreciated as our friends were always keen to get their hands on my latest creation.  I started off with a safe-but-simple formula of making rosé wine from any white and red organic grape juice that had gone out of date.  Perhaps it was in my genes, but I soon proved to have a talent for making palatable wine from these leftover ingredients.  Hence, as I grew older and more confident, I naturally assumed that my skills would be transferable to beer with little effort.  What I had yet to learn was that your successes teach you little.  What you actually learn from is your mistakes.

Beer Kits

Having little or no experience with beer, I thought my safest bet would be to resort to a kit for my first effort.  So I set off to the local Boots in the next town and bought myself a 5-gallon brew bin, a one-can beer kit, (pretty much all that was available at the time), plus the further ingredients it listed on the side.  I fastidiously followed the rather meagre instructions and set the brew going in the confident expectation of having a ready supply of beer in a few days time.  Well I did have a ready supply of something, but it would be somewhat presumptuous to call it beer.  For a start it was cloudy, but being used to dealing with filtration to clear out the odd stubborn demijohn of wine, I managed to fix that failing using a sterilised funnel and some filter paper we kept amongst our wine supplies.  More problematically it was thin, exceptionally bitter and had to be poured from a ridiculous height to gain any sort of head.  In short, it was virtually undrinkable.  (Although to be fair, I did have a jolly good go, my father even grimaced his way through a couple of pints in an effort to encourage me).

Inspiration

Frankly, I was demoralised.  I had made my first mistake and rather than repeat it, I returned to the safe ground of brewing wine that I knew everybody would like rather than trying to fix the problem.  However, all the time the knowledge that I 'wasn't any good at brewing beer' was an annoyance to me.  I would sit in the kitchen trying out new variants of my successful wine ingredients and think 'if I can brew nice wine from these leftovers, why can't I brew decent beer from a proper kit'.  My father had bought me a second kit in an effort to persuade me to try again - he never was a man for people who gave up - so one day, I took the kit out and started cleaning and sterilising things in preparation to have another go.  However, I was frustrated by the lack of sugar in the house and took a moment to go downstairs to borrow some sugar from the shop.  I was halfway down the stairs when inspiration hit me…  I didn't use sugar in my wine except in smallish amounts if I had to stretch my supplies a little.  My parents occasionally used sugars and they had many more problems than I with cloudy brews.  Good wine was made from fruit juice, good beer - at least in my understanding at the time - was made from malt extract.  Malt extract was something that was readily for sale in the family shop.

The Answer!

As with my experiments with wine, I had no real idea of how much malt extract should be used to replace the vast amount of sugar that went into the kit brews of the 1970s.  I wasn't even sure that the extract would be suitable for the purpose.  Nonetheless, I resolved to give it a go and my next brew duly contained two tins of malt extract which in volume were somewhat larger than the bag of sugar that I was 'supposed' to add to the brew.  This was, alas, the only method I had of judging what might be required.  The results were a revelation.  The malt added head, sweetness and body to the beer that cleared quite naturally this time.  My father felt the need to 'test' my beer regularly and even hinted that the malt extract was a slow moving line in the shop and I might want to 'give that brew another go'.  His only negative comment was that bottling beer in wine bottles tended to encourage him to drink to excess.  I feel reasonably sure, however, that this was something he didn't really mind.  What I had learnt from this mistake was that my wine tended to be good because organic grape juice is a pretty good starting ingredient.  Cheap beer kits use hop extract and sugar to keep their price and hence their quality down.  I had probably compounded their error by using beat sugar in my brew.

The Moral of the Story!

So, if you must use a one can kit, whilst there is little you can do about the hop extract, you can substitute a good brewers malt extract for the sugar to obtain much more palatable results.  Better still, splash out on one of the better two can kits.  They are, on the whole, very good!

Reg