Spring is, apparently, three weeks late due to the UK having had a properly cold winter. There's now evidence of life out in the parks, Buds are sprouting from twigs, then bursting into leaf. It's all a promise of things to come. But for now, one of the few plants available for harvest is Nettle. It's so ubiquitous, so useful that the question is "what shall I make?". I'm up to my eyeballs in Nettle tincture so maybe I should try something more fun - Nettle Beer.
I gathered what seemed like a good, big bagful from the edge of a sports-area which is not used for exercising dogs. I used my thickest pair of rubber gloves for harvesting as I don't like being stung. Back home I had a look at some recipes from both Maud Grieve and Audrey Wynne Hatfield's book "How to enjoy your weeds".
Their recipes require 1-2lbs of nettle for a gallon of beer. How much had I picked? Only half a pound. It was washed in the bath, simmered, for around 30 minutes in 4 pints of water then strained. To this liquid I added 8oz of golden caster sugar, the peel and juice of an elderly lemon, 1/2 oz of cream of tartar and 1oz of wizened ginger chopped up small. For that quantity of beer there was no point going out specially for fresher ingredients. By this time it was late in the evening and the mixture was too hot to add the yeast.
Next morning I warmed up a jug-full of the Nettle tea, poured it back in the bucket and sprinkled on 1/2 oz of wine yeast. Fresh baking yeast would probably be more than adequate but wine yeast was all I had. This may mean that the final alcohol content is higher, and the beer drier than intended.
I started the fermentation in a bucket covered in cling film with a hole poked through and plugged with cotton wool to allow gases to escape without allowing in insects. After the cotton-wool plug fell in, I transferred everything (bar soggy cotton wool) to a demi-john to complete fermentation. It was about 5 days before the bubbles in the air lock slowed to a virtual standstill.
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