Sunday reading

What are you up to today? Our plan is brewing another batch of beer, and I'm keeping a close eye on my first ever ginger beer plant which smells spicy and looks bubbly.

Cool things I found this week for you to enjoy over a cuppa:

Grow your own tea

Maintaining a minimalistic wardrobe

3 reasons to use a compost tumbler

Blogging and the internet

Easy chocolate cookies recipe

An afternoon snooze might benefit your health

Portrait of a craft historian

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!

Book of Fermentations

It's amazing how quickly something becomes habit, becomes normal. I've been making my own yoghurt for what, two months? And already it's something I have going on in the background while I do the washing up. I've had one or two less successful batches - not kept at warm enough temperatures to incubate, I end with sour-smelling milk. Not sexy. But when it sets perfectly and you can turn a jar on its side like this? I get a thrill that somehow I just don't get from sending emails.

 

But by and large, I'm finding that making yoghurt is a very easy addition to my routine. I'm making yoghurt once or twice a month - it lasts two to three months in the fridge, particularly as I can usually get an airtight seal in the jars by filling them right to the top and ensuring both milk and jar are hot. Yummy and super simple. I'm still making one litre at a time - I did try two litres once, but the jars took up too much space in the fridge.

I'm now moving on to my next fermenting challenge - growing a sourdough starter. I have recently started looking at some things on my want-to list and thinking: well that's straightforward, why don't I give it a go? I have flour, I have plastic tubs, I have water. Let's go.

So far so good - beginning signs of fermentation, and oh my god the smell. Somewhere between rotting fruit, dangerously cheap alcohol and feet. I am assured by my trusty book about bread that the smell will mature, but at this stage I'm opening all the doors and windows every time I take the lid off.

The starter is not yet ready for my first bake, but I've been working up to it by trying out the sponge method of baking bread. Basically, you mix the water, yeast and some flour into a batter the night before you bake, and leave it to ferment. I'm afraid my unsophisticated palate could not detect any great change in flavours and the yeast was not noticeably more active after its overnight feast, but the dough was much easier to knead and work.

The final bread was yummy - I'm gradually expanding the selection of flours in my cupboard and now have white, rye and multigrain. I really, really need to find a better solution to storing the flour than just folding over the tops of the bags but so far, nothing. We use glass jars for the 1kg bags of plain flour, but I generally buy larger quantities of bread flour.

Now wondering what my next adventures in fermenting will be... Any suggestions? I'm thinking of moving on to cultured cheeses, or turning my hand to brewing beer.