It is very cheap to make and follows a traditionally English recipe. These days almost all beers are flavoured with hops, but you might be surprised to learn that it wasn’t always so. In fact, hopped beer has only been popular in the UK for the last five hundred years. Before hops took hold, beers were flavoured with herb mixes known as ‘gruit’ which could contain any number of things, including bog myrtle, mugwort, heather, ground ivy and henbane. The Celts may have used nettles for making nettle beer as far back as the Bronze Age.
Nettle beer
- 900g nettle tops (with leaves 4-6) (about 1 carrier bag full)
- 5 litres water
- 230g brown sugar
- 7.5g ground ginger
- packet of brewers or beer yeast (available from all homebrew shops)
- Once you have your nettles, give them a quick wash and place in a big pot with as much of the water as you can, bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes.
- Strain the mixture and add the sugar and ginger, stirring to dissolve.
- Pour into a sterile brewers bucket and top up to 5 litres
- Allow to cool to 18'C and sprinkle yeast onto the surface.
- Cover & add a airlock and leave to ferment for about 3 days (or until the airlock stops bubbling)
- Bottle into Strong beer bottles with 1/2 a tsp of sugar in each bottle ( 1/2 tsp per 500ml) and leave in a warm place for 3 days. Plastic PET bottles would be better as there is less likelihood of beer bottle bombs.
- If you can, leave the brew for 1-3 months, it IS ready to drink a week after bottling though! My brew came out at about 3.1%
Washing the recycled bottles.
Nettle beer in the bottle.. Well, my book says that this is drinkable after a few days in the bottle, but I'll wait till it clears quite a bit before having one because at the moment it looks a lot like MUD!! I did have a little taste while bottling up the Nettle beer and it smells and tastes not unpleasant but it's not really beer as we know it by todays standards.
Looks good! It's nice to see other people are making use of their weeds as well... I'm in the process of making up some dandelion jam (The flowers are soaking at the moment).
ReplyDeleteHope it's tasty. We'll be expecting some feedback :D
Humm Dandelion Jam.. Might have to have a go at that as well. Where did you find the recipe for it?
ReplyDeleteI'm just sort of cobbling my own recipe together based on an afternoon's google research! I first saw a recipe on River Cottage but I have tweaked a few together so we will see how it goes. The steeping petals smell a bit like sweetcorn at the moment!!
ReplyDeleteThat is amazing! I will have to give it a go if I catch time. I usually use nettles for juice and I love it!
ReplyDeleteWow, I'm very tempted to give this a go and will be watching with interest... We have quite a patch behind our back garden...
ReplyDeleteThe bottles of nettle beer have now been moved into my beer shed so they can cool condition for a few days and hopefully clear some more. Next time I'll use some sort of beer or wine clearing stuff to speed it up, well that is if this batch tastes okay and I make some more.
ReplyDelete[...] while back I made Nettle Beer so here’s a little update on how it’s getting [...]
ReplyDelete[...] the Nettle beer has been sitting in the bottles for quite a while now so I thought after a long day at the [...]
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