Make your own beer!

If the last few pages have left you feeling parched, but like the Brewdog boys you feel underwhelmed by your average pub pint, never fear, for there’s a way you can have any alcoholic beverage you want at the highest quality (potentially), and at a fraction of the cost of your high street brands. It’s simple. You just make it yourself!

No seriously, it sounds a little daunting and has a bit of a stuffy image, but home-brewing is a bigger deal in the UK than many realise, and it’s not nearly as problematic as you might expect, with plenty of online retailers and shops across Scotland that offer all types of equipment and advice. And with promise of top quality ale and beer for as little as 19p per pint, it’s well worth looking into.

Fusion visited Edinburgh’s newest supplier of DIY brewing accessories, Alba Homebrew, run by the knowledgeable and amenable Terry Philips, to find out what was required to become a mulling master. And the answer is, according to Terry, not much,

“Honestly a monkey could do it, after you’ve got the equipment all you need to do is follow the instructions and you can’t go wrong. Most of the time when people make a mess of it, it’s because they’ve become impatient and tried to open it up and fiddle with it before it’s ready, if you just let it do its thing, you’ll get a great tipple at the end of it”

But first off you need the equipment. In the interest of frugality many people like to hire this, however if you buy the brewing kit outright (a starter kit with 40 pints will set you back about £35) you only need to use it a couple of times to make it worth it.

Once you have the kit you simply mix in all the ingredients, following the instructions to the letter, then leave the mix in an environment of around twenty degrees for four to six days to ferment. After that the mixture needs to be siphoned off in to bottles or in to a keg, and three days later Bob’s your uncle, a beautiful home-brew. Hopefully.

And there’s no need to be discouraged if you don’t happen to be a beer drinker, for at Alba Homebrew, as well as the huge variety of ales and lagers, there are also ciders, wines (for the brave) and spirits (for the very brave), so there really is something for everyone.