I brew all sorts of things, among my most successful has been red wine, beer, cider and ginger beer.

One of the key free resources you’ll find is http://www.howtobrew.com.  It covers everything in such wonderful detail, you’ll be stumped for questions if you read it all the way through.

Ginger beer that is commercially available (such as Crabbies, canada dry etc) does not use a traditional ginger beer plant.  There’s plenty of places that tell you how to make a plant.  You can’t.  You can make yeast, but you’ll not make a plant because it’s a composite organism.  If you want to obtain your own or learn more, goto http://gingerbeerplant.net/index.html.  It’s where I got mine from.  I can’t unfortunately keep up with producing it for the number of requests I get.  Why is it different?  You’ll have to try some to work that out, but all I can say is it has a much smoother flavour without the acrid artifical flavour you get from the cheaper yeast produced varieties.

Simple Cider:

If you fancy having a go at brewing, get a pint of value apple juice from tescos.  Carefully fully open the carton and add half a packet of dried tesco yeast to it.  Cover with a wet tea towel and leave in a warm place.  After a week, fermentation is likely to be finished and you have a carton of cider.  You’ll need to carefully decant this into a bottle – preferably one that won’t mind being pressurised, like an empty soft drink bottle.  If you add more sugar and leave it, it’ll get more alcoholic.  Alternatively if you want to drink it now, you can (it won’t kill you) – add some more apple juice to it or alternatively more sugar so it’s not so dry.

Economics show this isn’t the best way of making cider – it’s more expensive really than buying a bottle of value cider, but it’s just a way of showing how simple it is to brew.

Simple Beer:

Making your first batch of beer is a little more difficult than making cider.  If you’re going to the expense of obtaining a brewing bucket and sterlising solution, you might as well fork out for a decent beer making kit.  I’d recommend the woodfordes variety as they’re dead simple and hard to go wrong.  You’ll also be brewing for about 50p a pint, which again, more expensive than the cheapest value/on offer beer, but you’ll be thanking your taste buds.  Cheap kits (especially out of date ones) are one of the reasons why homebrewing has such a crappy reputation!