How to make nettle beer

Bushcraft, News — By Outdoor Adventure Guide on April 18, 2012 at 12:58 pm

Having been inspired to brew my own beer from nettles we had to
show you how simple, practically free and surprisingly tasty beer made from nettles is. Admittedly, ours came out more like ale than beer, due to losing the fizz, but the point of doing this is more the buzz of the process than the end product. The exciting thing is learning how to improve the next batch, figuring out how to add different flavours, and realizing you can turn any vegetable matter into alcohol!

You will need:

6 litres of water
Carrier bag of young nettle tops
Juice of one lemon and one orange
750g of caster sugar (or brewing sugar)
30g of cream of tartar (in the baking section of supermarket)
Pack of brewing yeast (5g)

Press “play” to find out how you make it…

1. Pick some nice young nettle tops – just the top four leaf sets – using gardening gloves. Get a carrier bag’s worth for this 6-litre recipe.

2. Bring a large pan of water to the boil, then add your nettles, bring back to the boil, and then turn heat off and allow to infuse until cool.

3. Pour the nettle juice through some unbleached muslin fixed to a brewing bucket, straining the last bit of juice out of the nettles.

4. Gradually stir the sugar in until it has all dissolved. Then add the lemon and orange juice, then the cream of tartar.

5. Then add your yeast. There are many variations on this recipe (such as activating the yeast, floating it on toast...). I say experiment.

6. Pop your lid on, with an air lock half-filled with clean water, and leave for a few days until the liquid has bubbles and is fermenting.

7. Now you can check the specific gravity with a hydrometer to see whether the fermentation has finished and that it’s time to bottle or not.

8. Syphon or funnel your beer into bottles. Syphoning is best, using a u-bend style wine syphon, as it leaves any sediment on the bottom of the bucket. I used a funnel on this first batch, but the sediment is no different to a cloudy bottled cider and was not a problem for me. Now leave for as long as you can to improve the flavour. I didn’t. Except for one bottle, but even the early stuff tasted great. The next will be better…