Beer, it turns out, is very easy to brew, and it’s one of the most cost-effective self-sufficiency moves you can make. You can quickly and easily set up a small brewery under your kitchen counter and, a week or two later, be snapping open your first few home-brewed pints.

We’ve been brewing our first batch of beer for the last week, with a fermenting barrel tucked away in a corner of the kitchen, two crates of bottles waiting to be filled out in the outhouse, and our first capping machine bought and tried out with a couple of the 100 caps we bought for plugging the bottles’ necks.

Once you’ve got your equipment, for an initial outlay of around £20, the beer itself works out at about 13p a pint, as you’ll only be buying supplies thereafter. Compare that to the £2.50 to £3 or more you’ll pay for a pint in a pub and you can see why it makes sense.

But before you can start brewing, you need some specific kit and ingredients. Chief among these is the fermenter, which if you buy a kit-based brewing system, will consist of a large barrel with a snap-on lid. Ours holds five gallons.

This must be scrupulously cleaned, and a quick scrub with some washing up liquid isn’t going to do the job. You can get special sterilisation powders that you mix with water and use to soak all of your kit, but bottle sterilising formulas used to clean babies’ bottles would probably do the job just as well. This is important, as the slightest impurity can contaminate your brew, and make it undrinkable, or simply not brew properly.

If you’re using a kit, you’ll get a can of malt and a packet of yeast. This malt is what determines the kind of beer you are making, and there are plenty to choose from. Each one, for a 40-pint batch, costs less than £5. You warm this gently in a pan to soften it up, and at the same time boil three pints of water. Once the malt has softened - you’ll have to use your judgement here as you can’t see inside it - you mix it with the water and 1kg of sugar in your fermenter and stir it using a sterilised spoon until the sugar has dissolved.

Now top up your fermenter to the five gallon mark with cold water and wait for it to reach room temperature. This could take some time, but when it does, you stir in the sachet of yeast and then snap on the lid. Let brewing commence.

Assuming your temperatures are fairly constant, and neither too hot nor too cold, the yeast will start to react with the sugar and malt, and the beer will start to brew. Pressure will build up in the fermenter and could cause the lid to bulge if you don’t have a release valve. Keep a close eye on this, as you don’t want to risk having it burst, and drenching your house in sticky, smelly, half-made beer.

Four days later, you start testing it, either with a hydrometer, which will tell you for certain whether or not it’s ready to bottle thanks to a gauge on its side, or by looking at how clear the liquid has become. Clear liquid is generally ready for bottling.

For us, that will probably happen next weekend, when it’s had another week in the fermenter to condition. And the best thing about that? By then it will be more or less ready to drink right away.

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