Homebrew

I've just finished bottling up my latest batch of home brew. I'm still in the early phases of this whole brewing caper but so far its proving pretty easy so far. At first I started out making Ginger Beer from scratch. That meant making and feeding a 'mother plant' for a week before mixing it into a sugar solution. Some batches were great. Some very dry. The worst was a recipe I found in an old cookbook. For some really strange reason it involved instant coffee...all I can say is YUCK!! Avoid that one if you can, its NASTY.
I also tried one of those Ginger beer kits-in-a-can. Not bad but it came out really sweet. Like so sweet I had to cut it with lemon juice in order to drink it without gagging. I've talked to other people and they've had the same problem so it wasn't my fault. I've now put the brew back in a tank with more yeast in an effort to brew some more of the sugar out of it.
This latest batch, the one I've just bottled is a beer. I can't drink it for at least two weeks but it smells okay.
I was shocked at how expensive brewing equipment is. The kits they sell in the shops range between $60 and $80. I made my own for about half that. Just went to Bunnings and bought a 25L openhead water tank from the camping section, along with a plastic tap; then off to the specialist brewing supply place for a airlock tube. Total cost about $30. Once I got home it took a couple off minutes to drill a hole in the lid for the airlock and I was in action.

Anyway, all this talk of home brew reminded me of my younger brother N and his adventures with brewing at home. Years ago when I was a kid my father dabbled with making his own fruit wine. Not very successful. For years there was this huge green glass bottle in a battered cane basket that my parents used as a doorstop. Apparently it was filled with one of my father's failed brews... zucchini or something equally gross.

N was poking around in the shed and found all my father's abandoned brewing equipment and hatched a plan to have a go at brewing himself, a spot of moonshine...should I mention that N was just 13 years old at the time?! Don't ask me how he managed to buy the beer product kits, given we grew up in a small town and everyone should have known his age. Still, N was always tall for his age and very confident; he'd been buying alcohol from bottle shops for several months already and kept a mental list of all the places in several towns that were scarily slack about checking customer's credentials.
So N set his new project up in his bedroom wardrobe and was soon in action. Some of his batches were killers, especially after someone told him that you could up the alcohol content just by manipulating the sugar levels. Mum was always terrified that he's blow the house up. She knew what he was doing but turned a blind eye.