Happier Abroad Forum Community

Where I am you can buy those cans of malt and hops with a small packet of brewer's yeast that allow you to easily make your own beer. I recently experimented with using honey instead of sugar as the alcohol source. The thinking was that this would lead to the nutritional and antimicrobial properties of the honey coming through, while also improving the flavor. Of course, you would want to use as close to raw honey as you can get for this, rather than the clear denatured stuff that comes in squeeze bottles.

I was a little troubled that people on the Internet said the honey had to be boiled and it took the yeast a long time to digest it. To combat this and the crappiness of municipal water, the water I used went through one of those alkalizer things, which also acts as a fluoride filter. I used a minimal amount of hot water to dissolve the honey and malt/hops mix so as not to denature the honey. Water through the alkalizer would have had such a high pH as to be sterile, but the mixture would be brought down in pH by the acidic honey, so the brewers yeast presumably had a clear run. For whatever reason, the yeast really got into gear, and the airlock was bubbling furiously within about 14 hours. After five days I bottled the beer, adding a little honey dissolved in warm water to the fermenter first to act as primer.

After about five days in the bottle I sampled the beer. It was delicious; arguably better than most store-bought beers, with a "summer beer" flavor. I was meaning to post a thread asking about whether there was any healthy alcoholic drink, but I seem to have stumbled across one.

Cornfed wrote:Where I am you can buy those cans of malt and hops with a small packet of brewer's yeast that allow you to easily make your own beer. I recently experimented with using honey instead of sugar as the alcohol source. The thinking was that this would lead to the nutritional and antimicrobial properties of the honey coming through, while also improving the flavor. Of course, you would want to use as close to raw honey as you can get for this, rather than the clear denatured stuff that comes in squeeze bottles.

I was a little troubled that people on the Internet said the honey had to be boiled and it took the yeast a long time to digest it. To combat this and the crappiness of municipal water, the water I used went through one of those alkalizer things, which also acts as a fluoride filter. I used a minimal amount of hot water to dissolve the honey and malt/hops mix so as not to denature the honey. Water through the alkalizer would have had such a high pH as to be sterile, but the mixture would be brought down in pH by the acidic honey, so the brewers yeast presumably had a clear run. For whatever reason, the yeast really got into gear, and the airlock was bubbling furiously within about 14 hours. After five days I bottled the beer, adding a little honey dissolved in warm water to the fermenter first to act as primer.

After about five days in the bottle I sampled the beer. It was delicious; arguably better than most store-bought beers, with a "summer beer" flavor. I was meaning to post a thread asking about whether there was any healthy alcoholic drink, but I seem to have stumbled across one.

More proof that you're not American. We are not as industrious and independent these days.

Great idea. I would love to try it.

Might be interesting as a commercial product abroad, served in one's own cafe or sold in one's own store.

In any case brewing is a great SHTF skill.

apsara wrote:We first brewed Original Honey Brown Lager nearly 20 years ago. And we like to think every batch is still fit for a king. In the years since, Honey Brown has been brewed with the same premium barley, hops and pure Manitoba White Clover Honey to produce a great-tasting, medium-bodied lager.
This isn’t your watered-down light beer from college. Nor is it a heavy craft beer. Honey Brown pours right smack dab in the middle. A delicious golden amber color, it’s a beer you can drink throughout the night while staying true to yourself and your evolving palate.

Best damn spam I ever saw.

+1

Strangely, though beer brewing is perfectly legal here and we save about 70% of the cost of buying the cheapest store-bought beer (and would save a lot more if we used sugar rather than honey as the carb source), it is hard to find the brew starter kit cans. I have to go to a supermarket some distance away. There the cans were literally gathering dust. I would see the physically same cans between purchases two weeks apart. Recently they extended their range and placed the cans in a more prominent position, but I believe this is because of all the cans that I personally was buying. So it seems that virtually no-one is brewing their own alcohol. This seems odd, as there are lots of broke pissheads who would save a fortune, but then I suppose they can't come up with the $200-$300 to buy the necessary equipment and may not have the Internet connection to tell them what to do. The poor can't afford to be poor.