Brewing Our Own Botanical Beers

This year we have taken the opportunity to get homebrewing again and so far, we've made over 200 pints... All vegan and organic, using mainly foraged herbs and flowers, along with organic sugar and malt extract, yeast and pure spring water.

We started out making our old favourite - nettle, goosegrass and ginger with a few dandelion petals thrown in for good measure. 

Next up was the very popular lemon balm and lavender and then we decided to purchase some dried hops...we visited a small organic brewery where we were treated to a little tour and were able to buy a couple of different types of hops - one quite bitter and the other more floral. This resulted in a light, hoppy lemon balm bitter.   

Our fourth brew was using the floral hops with rosemary and lavender, then using the floral hops again - we made a hops and lavender beer, which wasn't so good. We think the bitter hops would have worked better...nevertheless it's still very drinkable.

Our latest beer (in the photo above) is rather good though - bitter hops and sage!

We wrote a blog post 6 years ago with a recipe if anyone is interested: Vegan Beer Post

Here's an assortment of this summer's photos of brewing, bottling and drinking...

We love sharing our beer and have had a few volunteers helping us with the process, some of whom will no doubt go off and start their own brewing!

We are planning 2 more brews before the year ends - one with fresh hops (which are growing up the side of the barn here) and lastly, a nice spicy winter ale...watch this space!

Do any of you out there have any nice beer recipes to share?

Bye for now,

Kay and Sime
xx