Growing Your Own Brewing Ingredients
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From the earliest days, Americans and their presidents have been brewing. Ever brewed your own beer, cider, or ale?
Simple wine, beer, mead, ale, flavored liqueurs, cordials, shrubs, and brandies can be made using the fruits—and also the vegetables, herbs, and flowers—of your labors!
Home brewing has a long history; some anthropologists believe that beer is as old as civilization itself. They think that the change from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural one was due to the growing of grain used for brewing and not for the making of bread. Brewing was often a sacred ceremony and every culture has stories concerning the divine gift of fermentation and its ability to heal and nourish as well as to inebriate.In Elizabethan times, water was not fit to drink so beer, ale, cider, and wine were the drinks of the day.
For those who also enjoy gardening, it is fun to experiment with growing crops for brewing at home. And if you’re a home brewer but not a gardner, growing your own ingredients is a flavorful step-up. While hops (Humulus lupulus) are a very popular ingredient for the home-brewer, many other brewing crops can be grown at home, including grains, fruit, and flavorful herbs.
You don’t need a garden to succeed as a home brewer, but growing your own ingredients is a flavorful step up
Apples and Hard Cider
Our colonial ancestors turned most of the apples they grew into cider which was fermented by the barrelful to preserve it. Hard cider was the beverage of choice for men, women, and children, with most households consuming an average of 35 gallons per person per year.
If you have a source of unpasteurized cider you can make your own hard cider. With an alcohol content of 5 to 7%, properly fermented cider will keep for 2 to 3 years.
Read more about starting an apple cider orchard.
Hops and Brewing Beer
A brew made with hops is technically a beer and not an ale.
Hops (Humulus lupulus) is a perennial climbing vine with fragrant, cone-like flowers called strobiles. In the same family as marijuana, hops have a soporific effect and, in addition to their use in beer-making, the flowers have long been used in dream pillows to induce sleep.
Whether you wish to make beer or use hops’ medicinal benefits, you can grow them in a home garden! When growing hops, start small.
There are many varieties of hops. ‘Cascade’ and ‘Centennial” are the two most popular.
As with most crops, select a site with 6 to 8 hours of direct sun. Soil needs to be loose (well-aerated by turning over several times) and nutrient-rich (with compost or fertilizer). Hop vines can grow to over 25 feet and weigh over 20 pounds, so trellising is important, even if it’s wrapping the vines on heavy rope between long poles. Plant in the spring, well after frost.
Hop grow from rhizomes which are planted in a foot-high mound. Place the root side of the rhizome down. Cover the mound with some straw or light mulch to inhibit the weeds.
Learn how to grow your own hops in your garden.
Herbal Ale
For something unique, try brewing an herbal ale. Basil, caraway, borage, hyssop, coriander, winter savory, and yarrow are traditional home brewing herbs used long before hops became popular. Fermented with sugar, yeast, and water they made popular tonics and aids to digestion in olden days. They only need to age 10 days to 2 weeks before drinking.
Wine Making
Once you get the hang of home brewing, you may want to try your hand at wine making.
Grape wines are relatively easy to make but you can make wine from just about any fruit, vegetable, flower, or herb. Root vegetables including beets, parsnips, carrots, and potatoes make excellent wine.
We are all familiar with dandelion wine but other flowers such as pansies, goldenrod, calendula, bee balm, and rose petals can be used to flavor homemade wine. There are 4 basic stages in winemaking: primary fermentation, secondary fermentation. clearing, and aging. The neophyte vintner should read up on the process and, if possible, make a batch or two with an experienced wine maker before striking out on your own.
Learn how to grow grapes.
Making Mead
A brew made with honey instead of sugar is called a mead. Honey slows fermentation so meads take longer to age but the rest of the process is similar to wine making.
Shrubs mix fruit or vegetables with vinegar and sugar. Popular in the 18th and 19th centuries when water was often unsafe to drink, the vinegar acts as a preservative. They can be made from anything from rhubarb to pumpkin and need to be aged for only 1 month before imbibing.
Brandies and Liqueurs
Flavored brandies and cordials are easy to whip up. Start with an alcohol base such as an unflavored brandy or vodka. Any fruit, herb, spice, edible flower, or root can be used for flavor. Crush or chop the fruit or other flavoring and soak it in the alcohol for up to 3 months. Strain out the solids. Make a sugar syrup from 2 parts sugar and 1 part hot water, boiled together until the sugar dissolves. Cool and add to the flavored alcohol. The liqueur can be aged longer for the flavors to meld.
See our favorite edible flowers to grow.
Fruit flavored liqueurs and brandies are very popular in Nordic countries with long cold winters.
Get into the spirit and turn your kitchen into a microbrewery. We hope this whets your interest!
Robin Sweetser
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I found out that my slugs can somehow survive beer but they can't stand a chance if I put them in salt water. The more salt the faster they die
I enjoy reading your posts; the ideas for using herbs is great! I did want to clarify that ale is beer. Ale is more specific and refers to beer made with top fermenting yeast, generally at room temp, versus lager, which is brewed with bottom fermenting yeast at cooler temps. I have been homebrewing for almost 20 years (beer, mead, and cider). I have also grown some hops, but it was not very successful in my climate (a bit too warm, I think). There are some good quick mead recipes on forums, but I have only made stronger meads that took years of aging to come into their own. I highly recommend Stephen Buhner's book ¨Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers¨ to anyone whose interest was perked by you mentioning herbal brews. Buhner has many fantastic books about a herbal medicine, plant consciousness, and Lyme Disease. Best wishes to all!
Wine is a much easier beverage to make than beer, so I'd recommend starting with wine-making. Most any fruit juice will make good wine (except citrus) simply by adding juice to a glass carboy, adding yeast, then sealing with a fermentation lock. Siphon into another carboy after the initial turbulent fermentation is over, seal with a lock, and let it work slowly for several months. Beer requires mashing grain, or if using malt extract, just boiling in a kettle for exact times, then proceeding as with wine. It's a more involved process; wine is easier for novices to learn the basics of fermentation. Get a good brewing book and go from there!
I like Mark’s advice; I always brew in glass... Don’t trust plastic. ¨The Complete Joy of Homebrewing,¨ by Charlie Papazian, is a classic, and imbued with humor, wit, and wisdom. ¨Relax, Don't Worry, Have A Homebrew¨ (or RDWHAHB to the insiders). For a free source, to get your feet wet, try howtobrew.com. Of course there are a lot of other options and the homebrewtalk forum more info than one could ever absorb. Dry yeast is so good these days I find I cannot tell the difference in results between re-hydrating versus just letting the wort cool a few degrees below 80F and just pitching it right in... I could go on about brewing for a long time, but it is bed time!
You forgot to say how you go about making HARD CIDER. Just that if you have good Apple Juice, you can. HOW DO YOU PROCEED, to make it Hard Cider?
If you make a batch that is not so great... well, that is what mulling spices are for, haha!
Her post is just an intro to the possibilities! Google ¨hvhomebrewers cidermaking.pdf¨ for some info on yeast nutrients, specific gravity, process etc... and google ¨making apple cider pdf¨ for more info than you can shake a stick at... homebrewtalk forum too. Good luck!
