The Brewing Shed

Nettle beer, the allotment drink of champions

nettle beer, frocester

To be honest I wasn’t expecting much from our nettle beer experiment, especially after the way in which it stunk out the kitchen during the cooking process. I’d heartily recommend giving it a try though… dead easy to make and actually tastes like a pub-purchased beverage.

The flavour is pretty distinctive, quite lager-ish. And beerish (barger? leer?) with an acidic bite. Nick described it as being like an alcoholic ginger beer without the ginger kick, which I reckon is spot on.

In the end, I left it for five days to ferment instead of the prescribed three, making sure that the SG was reading a safe 1000 before bottling. (There are tales of people unwittingly creating nettle beer hand-grenades when bottling their beer before fermentation had finished)

In many ways, this is the ideal allotment drink….nice and thirst quenching and not too alcoholic (we reckon about 3-3.5%), thus lessening the chance of sticking a fork through your foot.

It also feels good drinking something weed-based…if you can’t beat ’em, drink ’em!

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