By Paul Crowther

The great thing about homebrewing in our current, weird and scary times is it something you can do absolutely by yourself, and as the name suggests, in the home. Homebrewing websites have seen a surge in orders in the past few days since we’ve gone into ‘lockdown’, as homebrewers the nation over have the time at home to brew to their heart’s content.

Getting into homebrewing can seem scary, it can seem like you need a lot of equipment and knowledge, but there are some very simple homebrews you can make probably with just whatever is lying around in your kitchen. If you get can’t booze delivered for whatever reason if you’re having to self isolate, you most likely have in your kitchen the ingredients to make some!

These recipes are designed for anyone to use; they will make delicious booze, and are a fun and east way to get into homebrewing. So even if you have access to deliveries and a stocked beer fridge, these are fun to try out.

The first principle is understanding the most basic necessary ingredients needed to homebrew alcohol – it is a very simple formula:

Water + Sugar + Yeast = Booze

Yup, that’s it. People may be familiar that the four core ingredients of beer are Malt, Hops, Yeast and Water. Malt breaks down into sugar during the brewing process and hops are just for flavouring, and they weren’t even used in beer until about 500 years ago; they are not necessary at all for the creation of booze.

Now, on the yeast front, if you can get a hold of brewing yeast it’s ideal. You can buy wine yeast on Amazon, any of the Gervin wine yeasts will do. They are around £2-3 a packet. However, if you happen to have bread yeast in your kitchen, bread yeast can absolutely be used to produce booze. Bread yeast does in fact produce a small amount of ethanol in bread when you bake it, but trace amounts that are absolutely negligible, so don’t think you get drunk by eating a whole loaf of tiger bread.

For sugar, you might thing you need to use the white powdered stuff you put in your tea, but you’ve probably got a lot of other things in your kitchen that contain sugars that can be fermented – a quick rummage in my kitchen and I found: agave syrup, honey, maple syrup, apple juice, orange juice, soya milk and an Um Bongo.

All of these things can be turned into alcohol. So we have our core ingredients, but what about equipment?

For these recipes you’ll need a pan to heat water in and something to ferment the brew in…that’s it. As for a fermenter, anything metal, plastic or glass will do. A vase, a bucket, a big jug, a big plant pot. Just clean our your chosen vessel thoroughly before use (I would recommend cleaning it with warm water only, as chemical cleaners will leave a soapy aftertaste, and nobody wants soapy booze).

You’ll need a clean tea towel (or similar small piece of fabric) to cover your fermenter with, to ensure to nothing nasty gets in. At this point it’s worth me saying do not put your booze in any type of airtight container to ferment (such as a swing top bottle, a screw-top wine bottle, etc.); as well as making ethanol, yeast produces carbon dioxide. If this carbon dioxide has nowhere to go, it will build up inside your fermenter and eventually…boom! Your airtight bottle will explode. As long as you’re using an open fermenter, covered by a cloth you’ll be fine!

You can, buy demijohns and airlocks if you want to (again available on Amazon and from other online retailers). A demijohn is a five litre glass container, ideal for a batch of booze, an airlock is a rubber bung that fits into the demijohn with a bendy plastic tube on top. The plastic tube, with a little water in, allows CO₂ to escape but doesn’t let air in, this creates pleasant bubbles that pop up the show you the fermentation happening. If you want to get one of these they are ideal for brewing, but again not necessary at all, a metal, plastic or glass container with a tea towel on will do.

So you’ve got your kit? You understand the formula of booze? Let’s dive into some recipes!

N.B. With any of these recipes you can scale up or down 1:1, but for yeast you won’t need more than one packet of commercial yeast unless you’re really getting into and making more than 20 litres. With bread yeast I would use a heaped teaspoon if you’re going for five litres or more.

Quick Mead

Mead is one of the oldest forms of alcohol, it predates the first written languages by thousands of years. This is largely because it is easy to make honey into alcohol. Honey is mostly sugar and water and actually contains wild yeast, it has all three of our ingredients to make booze inherently! 

The only reason honey doesn’t just turn itself into booze over time naturally is that it’s too thick and too sugary for the yeast to do this. So it just needs watering down. We are adding additional yeast, however, as the amount of wild yeast in honey is quite small it would take a long time to ferment out sugars in the honey by itself.

Generally meads can take a long time to ferment and produce high alcohol levels around 10-14% (similar to grape wine). Meads are also generally aged and drunk after six month to a year of resting. This mead is much weaker (around 4-5%) and designed to ferment quicker for consumption within a couple of weeks. 

Ingredients

330g jar of honey 
2 litres of water
1 x packet of wine yeast / teaspoon of bread yeast

Process

• Heat water to lukewarm in a pan, around 25°C if you have a thermometer. The Vikings, when making mead, referred to temperature as  ‘blood warm’. Turn off heat.
• Slowly stir in honey until fully mixed in. You now have a honey syrup.
• Transfer honey syrup to your fermenter.
• Add yeast to the honey syrup in your fermenter.
• Cover fermenter with cloth, or if using demijohn put in rubber bung and airlock.
• You may see some white foam forming at the top of the the mead, this is yeast. So don’t be worried, that means it’s working, you may also hear some quiet fizzing, again this is just the yeast doing it’s job. 
• When to drink a choice here. After 1 week you’ll have some alcohol but probably some left over sugars, it will be a sweet, slightly boozy drink. After 2 weeks it’ll be mostly fermented, it’ll be stronger a lot less sweet. After three weeks it will be fully fermented, reached its full alcoholic potential and lost all sweetness.

Notes: You can pour this into a glass straight from the fermenter, I’d pour gently to make sure you don’t get yeast in your glass. It won’t hurt you if you do, infact it can add some distinctive flavour but some people don’t like it floating around in their drink.

If you want to bottle this up to enjoy later, I would leave it for four weeks to ensure it’s fully fermented out and then you can pour it into a cleaned out swingtop bottle or resealable wine bottle.

Simple Cider

Cider is apple juice fermented. That’s it. In America they even call apple juice cider, whereas referring to fermented apple juice as ‘hard cider’. 

Apple juice is mostly water and sugar. That’s right – two of the core ingredients of booze!  So do we just need to add yeast? Yup!

Ingredients

2 Litres Fresh Apple Juice (avoid anything with additives, look on the label for 100% apple juice)
Wine Yeast / Bread Yeast

Process

• Add apple juice to fermenter
• Add yeast
• Yup, that’s it! Similar to mead it’ll take a bit of time to ferment out and as it ferments it’s going to get less and less sweet and more and more alcoholic. I would expect quicker fermentation with Cider, with fermentation being complete within a couple of weeks. Drink it after 5 days if you want it a bit sweeter and bit fizzy, leave it a couple of weeks if you want it dry and still.

Hard Lemonade

Lemonade is mostly water and sugar (are you beginning to see a pattern with these recipes?) with a bit of lemon juice of course. So we’ve got our two core ingredients of booze included, do we just need to add yeast? Yup!

Ingredients

2 Litres Water
2 Lemons
200g White Table Sugar 
Wine Yeast / Bread Yeast

Process

• Heat water to lukewarm. Take off heat. Slowly stir in sugar until fully dissolved. You’ll now have a sugar syrup.
• Add sugar syrup to fermenter, squeeze the juice of the two lemons into the sugar syrup. As an optional step you can slice some lemon segments and put them in the fermenter to steep in the lemonade as it ferments.
• Add yeast.
• As with the other brews, this will lose sweetness and become drier and more alcoholic with time. Enjoy after 4-5 days and it will be sweet, slightly carbonated, slightly boozy drink. Leave longer, it will become dry, sharp and around 5% alcohol.

If you enjoy making these drinks and want to go further into making more complex beverages you can find me on Twitter (info below), and I may write some more guides. If you have any questions or need any advice on the recipes or homebrewing in general just drop me a tweet! 

Guest blog post by Paul Crowther. You can check out more from Paul on Twitter at @themadbrewery and donate to his West End Foodbank fundraiser here.