Hedgerow Home Brewing; Whats the deal with Nettle Beer?

Mother nature is out there, providing you with raw ingredients for free! No jostling at the fresh food counter, no queuing at the check out, no money need change hands. If you have never gathered food from the hedgerow, its about time you started. It burns off calories, its fun and can provide an immense sense of achievement. All you need is a little know how, which can be obtained on web sites like this or if you are a little old fashioned, from books. (If you are thinking of gathering fungi, you will need a mentor, fungi are notoriously difficult to identify and mistakes can result in the instant death of anyone who ingests your wild mushroom omelette. ) Jams, chutneys, puddings, salads and wines can all be yours for free, well almost, you will need a few purchased ingredients. One of the most simple and yet rewarding foraging projects is Nettle Beer. Its quick, its cheap, its good for you and even I can make it without much of a drama. Its the perfect economy hobby. So go on, impress your friends!

Stinging nettles are extremely high in vitamin C and also provide you with the trace elements phosphorus and iron. They also have a relatively high protein content for a plant. They can be preserved by drying and in this state can be extremely beneficial to live stock. They grow nearly all year round as any of you keen gardeners can testify and so are readily available, unlike the majority of hedgerow produce. They can be served as a vegetable, make excellent soup, savoury puddings and stuffing's. Nettles are claimed to be an aphrodisiac when eaten, although King Henry VIII's physician recommended popping them raw down your cod piece to correct erectile dysfunction, (not recommended in the 21st Century, the stings do cause localised swelling but also considerable pain.) So, despite their sting, nettles when ingested are very good for you and they cost nothing. Just imagine that broccoli and cabbage are growing in the hedgerow. Nettles are just another vegetable and once you've got your head round this fact, you can start eating or drinking weed products with enthusiasm.

Your after the common stinging nettle or Urtica dioica as keen botanists would call it. If you don't know what it looks like, you probably come from a really interesting country to which the nettle is not a native. Sods law dictates that if you fall face down in the great outdoors, you will land in either a pile of agricultural / domestic pet excrement or a large clump of stinging nettles. So, if your face is instantly covered in white, painful swellings; you've found your source for nettle beer. On a more serious note, your clump of nettles should look healthy, don't gather near crop spraying or pet latrines. However, nettles grow prolifically and you should easily locate a crop for your healthy beverage.

Some of you might associate brewing with specialist equipment and expensive utensils but this brew is as old as Father Time and requires only the most basic of tools ; the largest saucepans you have, a bucket, a fine piece of cloth for straining the nettles, (just make sure its clean,) a length of clean plastic hose and some beer bottles with the old fashioned stoppers held on by a clasp. These can be recycled so the pleasure just keeps coming. Don't buy beer bottles unless they've got beer in them! You will need a steriliser solution but you can opt for the kind used for baby paraphernalia, you don't need to locate a specialist brewing shop. Unless you want to. Now for the ingredients. Obviously, you will need fresh nettles, approximately a small carrier bag full, (the kind you used to be given in the supermarket before we all went green and provided our own shopping bags.) Don't let yours end up in a land fill site, use it as your nettle measure. Don't squash the nettles down in the bag, just keep picking until they the bag is full. Pick only the tops of the nettles, these are the newest growth and therefore, are the most nutritious. Use gloves when handling raw stinging nettles, the clues' in the name. Bring 6 litres of water to the boil, if you don't have a saucepan big enough, use two and divide the water. Take the pan off the heat and pop your washed nettles into the boiled water. Steep the nettles; leave them in the hot water until cool enough to handle. Once placed in hot water, they don't sting. Strain the nettles through a muslin cloth or any other recycled fine cloth that will act as a strainer. Add to the liquid 750 g of caster sugar and stir, until all the sugar is dissolved. Add the juice of one lemon and one orange and 30 g of cream of tartar. This can be found in the baking section of your local store. Finally, when the solution is tepid, add 5g of yeast. This doesn't have to be brewing yeast. Yeast should also be available on the baking shelf, close by the cream of tartar. Pour your liquid into a bucket, cover and leave in a warm place for several days, until it starts to ferment. Signs of fermentation is a beer like smell and froth on the top of the liquid. Skim off the froth and using a piece of clean plastic hose, transfer your brew to clean bottles. (You do this by placing one end of the hose in the bucket which you have placed on the table, sucking the other end until beer starts coming out and then fill up your bottles, which you have placed on the floor. This can be messy, so have the bottles in a washing up bowl so that spillage is easy to clean. Stop filling bottles as you come to the sludge at the bottom of the bucket. Stopper your bottles and store them in a cool place. The beer will be ready to drink in as little as three days but I have found that its best drunk after a week and it can be kept up to three months. What it would be like at this age, I have no idea, our brew has always been consumed long before this time.

Nettle Beer is a sparkling beverage, hence the use of stoppered bottles. The fermentation process continues in the bottle. If you store your new brew somewhere warm, there is a risk that any bottles that have a weakness in their glass will explode. I have had two bottles explode and the glass went an awful long way at considerable velocity. You must store it some where safe so the risk of glass embedding in your girlfriend's scalp is kept to a minimum. A cool cupboard or garden shed is perfect to retard the fermentation or absorb the explosion of a faulty bottle. Also, an over lively batch is likely to come out of the bottle in the same fashion as a magnum of champagne at the end of a Grand Prix so unless you want a column of beer hitting your ceiling, chill it first and open with caution. The furthest our beer has travelled is four metres which was entertaining but a horrible waste of the precious brew.

Our beer varies in taste, depending on the time of year. It tastes like a cross between a cider and a lager, although some of our friends think it tastes more like sparkling wine. It does smell a little like nettles but if you sniff your over the counter real ales, you will find that they have a similar veggie smell. As to the alcohol content, I don't possess a hydrometer so I can only go on our experience of drinking it. It should be enjoyed responsibly as with all alcoholic beverages. On a hot summers day, nettle beer is a refreshing, nutritional drink to serve to friends. And it made one of them laugh like a hyena after just one glass. You have been warned.

So there you are, home brewing; simple, cheap and a small element of danger. The perfect hobby for the adult. Its healthy, it gets you out in the fresh air, and you are producing something to share with others. Well go on then, what are you waiting for?