Frugal brewing

Making things yourself saves you money - some of the time. To be honest, if you buy a pattern and good quality fabric to make a dress, it ends up being more expensive than something from a cheap shop. Better quality, and better value for money, but more expensive upfront.

When we started brewing our own beer, I thought it would be the same. A fun activity that gets us off the sofa, a new skill, and one that would over time save us money but would be more expensive for the first years.

Not so. We have just bottled our second batch of beer, and my boyfriend has kept rigorous records of everything we have bought - ingredients, equipment, bottles... Our beer currently works out at €2,25 per 33cl bottle. Which is already cheaper than craft beer in the stops. I am very pleasantly surprise to find that our homemade beer so, well, frugal.

We are finding more ways to make homebrewing more frugal. Re-using the bottles from beer we drink, rather than buying bottles. Did you know you can 'wash' yeast after a brew and re-use it for a total of up to ten batches? And now I find myself with a bowl full of hops - with the most delicious smell. I can't bear to just chuck them in the bin, they smell amazing. Reuses for hops, anyone? I'm thinking to try them out and make a sleep-inducing herb pillow or pot pourri for the bedroom.

Beer update and Sunday reading

I know we're all about the freshly made, but this post comes to you pre-prepared. While you are reading this, I will be brewing about 20 litres of ale.

After the beer had fermented for two weeks, we racked it off the dead yeast and sediment into a clean bucket and left it for a week to clarify. Then we bottled it.

26 bottles standing on the wall, 26 bottles standing on the wall, and if one brown bottle should accidentally get opened and drunk...

The last batch is now sitting in the depths of our basement and will age there for some time. The ale should be ready to drink rather sooner, but we're also more than doubling the volume that we will brew. It's essentially the same amount of work whether you make 5 litres or 25 litres.

Meanwhile, some reading for you:

What happens when you leave a city slicker family in the forest?

Seven things every first-time gardener should know

Nine lies that keep our schedule overwhelmed

A little uncluttering goes a long way

Eleven ways to live a happier life

Will mayors one day rule the world?

Cheap cuts - how to buy beef

Hops are the herbs of beer - the growth of local harvest groups

First adventures in brewing

So after drinking a lot of craft beer, attending a demonstration and generally thinking to ourselves 'this could be fun', we finally took the plunge and braved our first brew over the weekend.

There are many things that attract both of us to homebrewing. We both really enjoy good quality beer, and we like the people that we meet when seeking out craft beer bars and shops, visiting breweries and generally sharing this small pleasure. It's a very friendly, welcoming community - people want to share their love of brewing and drinking good beer, and encourage you to have a go. It very much fits in with our general philosophy of prioritising quantity over quality, and it supports our frugal living efforts because it's a fair bit cheaper to brew beer than buy it. Plus it of course appeals to me as another traditional craft to learn, a part of the traditional farmhouse's ordinary routine, and a very local activity and product.

I found a local supplier of homebrew kits and we went along to explore. To our delight we found the shopowner is a keen brewer, and spent a fair bit of time talking us through different options and advising us on where to start (which was essentially start with the simplest option and then add new steps gradually.) He also does demonstration days. It makes such a difference when starting out on a new challenge to know that we can call him up if we have any questions or if things go wrong.

We came home weighted down with some basic equipment and our first kit beer. There are three kinds of brewing - brewing from kits, brewing with malt extracts and brewing with whole grains. The most authentic and the most difficult is the last, in which you boil or 'mash' malted grains to extract the sugars and flavourings, then boil this with hops and other flavourings, then allow to ferment. Malt extract allows you to skip the mashing process - you get a powder or syrup which you dissolve in water, then you boil with hops and flavourings and ferment. We are starting with the simplest brewing method - kit brewing - in which you get a syrup containing all the sugars and flavourings which you dissolve in water and then ferment with yeast.

Sounds simple, but there's a lot of sterilising and temperature measuring involved already, so it is definitely worth starting simple to familiarise yourself with the equipment, and with things like reading the 'original gravity' (a measure of the sugar content before brewing which can be compared with a measure of sugar content after brewing to calculate alcohol content).

This has the potential to be a very frugal hobby. We have invested in some basic equipment, but we have calculated that (provided the beer comes out ok and drinkable) it would be substantially cheaper to brew our own beer than to buy it - about €0.70 per 33cl bottle for beer made with a kit, potentially much lower with grain brewing. Ideally - fingers crossed - we will soon be able to produce as much beer as we want to drink, with enough to offer guests and give as gifts. This will either get us invited to all the local parties - or none!

A day off

Today was a day off from pretty much everything. Work, laundry, sewing, bread-baking, yoghurt-making, housework... After our weekly food shop, we upped and offed to Bruges for the day.

Bruges is sometimes called the Flemish Venice and it certainly smells like it! It's a beautiful old city on a sunny day like today, albeit a little full of tourists, and ideal for our kind of sightseeing which mostly involves wandering randomly through interesting streets, exploring churches and other sights we might stumble upon, and discovering cafes, bars, craft beers and artisanal chocolatiers.

We've been drinking a fair amount of craft beer recently, and an off-hand comment from my boyfriend revealed an interest in possibly having a go at brewing beer. This is really quite exciting for me - so many of the things I do as part of this drive for a make-your-own lifestyle are things that I do alone, but now here is something we could do together. 

We've been talking about beers we like and beers we'd like to make, and I've been talking him through the results of my research into how to brew (basically outlining the differences between kit brewing, malt extract brewing and grain brewing). We'll need to find a bit of equipment and do a bit of planning, but I think home-brewed beer is definitely in our future - and an opportunity to explore this new field together.

Of course, some things need doing, day off or no day off. The plants need watering, the sourdough starter needs feeding and the dishes need washing. But I'm definitely smiling today, after my day off.