Tuesday 25 October 2011

CUISINE REVIEW: Booze for Free - Andy Hamilton

Release Date: 01/09/11

SYNOPSIS:

Home brewing and wine-making is fun, easy and hugely satisfying. If you garden or forage, can follow a recipe or make jam, and you enjoy a drink, this is the book for you.

Discover the secret language of home-brewing and drinks-making

Make over 100 wholesome, delicious drinks, to your preferred taste and strength, quickly, cheaply and with minimum fuss

Turn your garden into a drinkers' paradise

Learn where and how to forage with success

Impress your friends with the weird, wonderful and just plain tasty

Cheers!


REVIEW:

As a far of real ale and keeping traditions alive, I was more than curious about this title by Andy Hamilton, where it claimed you can get booze for free. What this title does in fact is give you a good all round grounding in the various options that you have available whether you want to make some wine, a beer or even cordials or tea’s to help refresh your palette.

All of the options are explained in an easy to follow manner, takes the time to explain the terminology and also provides the reader with easy to follow recipes that will allow them to get to know what they like so that they can develop their own range at home. Obviously I haven’t brewed anything up yet due to the time delay for the stock to mature, but I have made some of the cordials of which I have to say that the Dandelion and Burdock is my favourite as it has a fresher taste than the shop bought ones and to be honest, if you want it fizzy I’d say to make it with either soda water or even sparkling mineral, really refreshing and apparently healthy for your liver.

All in I have had a lot of pleasure reading this book and I’ll have a lot more making a number of the products within. My only real disappointment is that I couldn’t’ find a recipe for mead which is one of the oldest drinks around.

1 comment:

Andy Hamilton said...

Hello there, thanks for the review. Just to say on P185 there is a recipe for lavender mead. You can use other edible flower or just leave them out.

Happy brewing!