Rose tinted recepticles

Ok so wine will be my first brewers blog.

It may help to know my wine credentials however before we start.  I have liked red wine for about twenty years now.  So your maybe thinking that in that time I've become a bit of a connoisseur.  Well not really although I have tried some truly gorgeous wines.  Like most people my wine shopping habits started out based on price rather than any real taste or quality.  I liked a good £3.99 vintage whilst anything above £5.99 seemed to be strictly the reserve of gifts for people who knew their wines.  The problem is that I've never really changed.

I don't know about the the rest of the world but wine is something that has effectively got cheaper as I have aged rather than dearer.  When I was trying to impress a girl in my teens and early twenties it seemed to cost about £4 or £5 pound for the cheap stuff where now it can be as little as £3.  What's more when I was a lad the cheap stuff was truly cheap and a bit nasty.  Now supermarkets here promote some pretty strong brands with a price point under £5.  When I was young Paul Massons Californian was a wine from a far fetched region and le Piat Dor was for those who couldn't stretch to french wine.  Nowadays there's wines that I can't afford coming from south America and Australia.  At one time a screw top wine bottle was just beyond the pale where now it's the norm. 

The upshot of all this is that I've actually managed to develop a taste for wine and different grape varieties without ever having had to stretch the budget.  The problem is, as readers of this blog will know, that the budget as far as wine is concerned disappeared about two years ago.

Imagine just how thrilling it would be then to make wine at about 75pence per bottle.  How rough must that taste?  Well surprisingly I've discovered at least one wine kit (maybe beginners luck) that produces a wine that I would seek out in the shops that costs precisely that.

After a show about cooking that involved an alcoholic version of ginger beer (I tried it, it tasted great and contained almost no alcohol) I told my wife that I would like to try home brewing.  Try as I might and work hard as I do we just can't seem to afford the luxury of beer or wine with any regularity and it annoys me.  I don't want lots (well actually I do) but I used to have a couple of beers in the pub on the way home of a night and then maybe two or three cans.  By the end of 2007 I was celebrating if I could have two or three cans a weekend.  I miss beer and wine.

My wife obviously also misses beer and wine as she come home one night from the supermarket quite excited to tell me about a kit she'd seen that promised 30 bottles of wine for about £70.  £70 would buy a kit with everything needed including the ingredients and, even more exciting, once you bought the kit you could make wine even cheaper in future by just buying the ingredients.  The idea seemed good.  I liked it but I had reservations.  £70 was a damn good amount of both wine and lager made by experts and drinkable today at supermarket prices.  Also I reasoned that, easy or difficult, the wine would have to sit for months before we could drink it or we'd end up ill.  Well actually this stuff claimed to be ready in seven days.  I looked at reviews and they seemed average.  Believe it or not I saw this as a plus because I would have thought that the reviews would have said it was appalling.  There's a home brew shop close to us so I suggested we look and see what they had.  I expected again to be told to avoid the seven day stuff and go for something decent that would take months to brew but no!  Apparently there's even five day stuff that tastes quite good.  Still £70 is a lot of money.

I started to research this and couldn't find much bad about it.  People kept saying it was simple but used terms like gravity, mash, krausen and fermentors.  Well maybe it is easy but I wasn't a million percent convinced.  Thirty bottles though....That's a lot of wine and, from what I read, beer wasn't that much more difficult.  Could it be true?  Could you actually make palatable stuff at home?  I had doubts but decided to give it a try.

I think the money came more out of desperation rather than us being able to afford it but I researched the kit I needed and bought it from Tesco's (a major supermarket chain in the UK) for about £30 rather than just buying a ready made kit.  I bought a Young's, seven day, thirty bottle kit of Cabernet sauvignon.  I followed the instructions to the letter and......

A passable wine.  Thirty bottles of a slightly Rose looking red from a kit that cost about £22.  What's more it wasn't evil.  It wasn't a wine I'd rush to buy again but it was actually quite tasty.  Also now that we had the kit it would be criminal not to use it.  I was off to the brew shop for some Shiraz.  With my £30 I couldn't afford the £35 Shiraz they had so I took a gamble on Solomon Grundy Medium Dry Red.  I knew the wife would be unhappy even as I handed the £22 over.  This wine kit didn't even claim to be a specific wine.  It must be awful.  But I didn't want to come home empty handed.  I boiled my water, put 4kg of sugar in the tub along with the mix and enough water to make to 22l.  Having learnt how to use I hydrometer I tested it the added yeast.  It brewed for seven days and I tested again.  To my surprise it had reached exactly the gravity that it said on the can.  I began to bottle.  I got the surprise of my life.

Lt's deal with the downside first.  I'd say that this Medium Dry Red was actually quite a sweet jammy, plummy red.  Given my £3.99 expertise I would compare it with a ruby Cabernet.  Thing is I really love ruby Cabernet and....this was a good one.  Good enough that, were it a shop bought example, I would seek it out.  What's more at 10.5% proof it was none to shabby at getting you drunk.  Even better I had thirty bottles.  I had no kit to buy for this one and that means that it cost me less than a pound per bottle.  This could represent extreme savings and extreme quantities of alcohol.  Better still I hadn't had to do anything clever.  I needed the kit: a barrel, a bubbler and stopper, a bucket, a syphon and  a hydrometer but, once bought they pretty much last forever.  For all future wine kits I just needed £22 and I could have thirty bottles.

Of course now your thinking that, like all alternative types, I was giddy at making something that anyone else would have said was rubbish.  Not so.  I've had no bad feedback and even get requests for bottles. (Of course free booze is always popular).  So go on, give it a try.  Risk a few pounds on the equipment and try Solomon Grundy Medium Dry Red.  What's more, let me know how you get on.  I've got lots more to try but, as a starter, it's turned my head.

Now of course the wine story won't finish there, there's beer and ginger beer still to discuss but, that should do you for now.  Follow this and you may not feel as poor as you used to....You'll be too drunk to care.

Hope the new years resolutions are still going well

T

Jesus! I can turn water in to wine

It's true you can actually turn water in to wine if you buy the right kit.  I'm not just talking about a bottle either, no, we're talking 22 litres, 5 UK gallons here.  That must be good.

First let me say hello, I'm back and especially thank you to the loads of people who have viewed this blog for one reason or another since I last updated nearly a year ago.  I haven't been away anywhere or anything like that I just haven't been blogging.  Sorry.

The blog has also seen a recent upsurge but I assume that that's probably got more to do with people making their new years resolutions to stop smoking and finding me through some sort of Champix search.  If that's the case welcome, stick with it and good luck.

Anyhow, related to all the saving money stuff in my 2011 blogs I decided to have a go at home brew.  Remember homebrew?  If you were around in the seventies or the early eighties then you would probably have come accross homebrew.  If you were around at that time and did come accross homebrew you've also probably resolved to never look at the stuff again.  Watered down dubious looking lager that presented a valid excuse for a week off work with food poisoning and/or a brain disorder and flashbacks for years to come.  Either that or some new age hippy that could make quite a pallatable wine out of hedge clippings but it took eight years to mature that one special bottle.  Homebrew it seemed was not a viable alternative to the pub.  Well the homebrew I'm going to talk about isn't like that at all.

My dad did a home brew in the late seventies or early eighties and, even though he died an alcoholic, vowed never to touch the stuff again.  He suceeded in making several litres of  foul tasting vomit inducing brew and invited all his mates around to try it.  None came back for a second helping.  Most of them, even the hardened drinkers, weren't capable for at least a week.

In spite of all this I have always had the feeling that brewing could be done at home.  What put me off was patience.  Had my dad left that brew in the bottle for about eight weeks or longer it probably would have been a good brew.  The whole process is just chemistry afetr all.  The reason I've never tried it up until now is that, like my dad, I lack patience and I know that I would be trying to drink the stuff long before it was ready.  I had mentioned to my wife however (as we cut back on the amount of beer and wine that we could buy for monetary reasons) that I might look in to home brewing.  This must have planted a seed because a few weeks later she came back from the supermarket to tell me about some homebrew kits she had seen.  On a seperate trip I had seen them too, noted the details and done a quick google search on what was available.   It seems that home brew has moved along in the past few years and, whilst it is still a bit like keeping pigs or growing your own vegetables, it can produce a decent alcohol and, more importantly, in a short period of time.

Almost completely seperately I was watching one of those lifestyle chef type programs that you can't avoid these days and one of them claimed to brew a 4% proof ginger beer in just two weeks.  Who knew ginger beer could actually be potent?  Well probably everyone did but I didn't.  4% is practically the same as the lager I buy in the shops.  Also although I'm not famous for soft drinks one of my favorites is ginger beer.  Even better if it could be alcoholic.  So I'm going to return to blogging for a while and let you know about my beer projects.  I'm not going to tie myself down to a blog a week or a blog a month, but I'll update on the various things I try.

Who knows you could save money and get drunk in to the bargain.

Keep watching

T