Nettle beerIt is very cheap to make and follows a traditionally English recipe. These days almost all beers are flavoured with hops, but you might be surprised to learn that it wasn’t always so. In fact, hopped beer has only been popular in the UK for the last five hundred years. Before hops took hold, beers were flavoured with herb mixes known as ‘gruit’ which could contain any number of things, including bog myrtle, mugwort, heather, ground ivy and henbane. The Celts may have used nettles for making nettle beer as far back as the Bronze Age.
900g nettle tops (with leaves 4-6) (about 1 carrier bag full)
5 litres water
230g brown sugar
7.5g ground ginger
packet of brewers or beer yeast (available from all homebrew shops)
Once you have your nettles, give them a quick wash and place in a big pot with as much of the water as you can, bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes.
Strain the mixture and add the sugar and ginger, stirring to dissolve.
Pour into a sterile brewers bucket and top up to 5 litres
Allow to cool to 18′C and sprinkle yeast onto the surface.
Cover & add a airlock and leave to ferment for about 3 days (or until the airlock stops bubbling)
Bottle into Strong beer bottles with 1/2 a tsp of sugar in each bottle ( 1/2 tsp per 500ml) and leave in a warm place for 3 days. Plastic PET bottles would be better as there is less likelihood of beer bottle bombs.
If you can, leave the brew for 1-3 months, it IS ready to drink a week after bottling though! My brew came out at about 3.1%
Link to my Allotment post on making this beer/ale.
Link to the post for the 1st taste test.
And a link to the taste test when it had cleared down some more and matured.
