My dad used to make beer. He didn’t wait for retirement; he saw a book Make Your Own Beer in the local health-food shop in 1966 and was its slave from that second. He read it with yearning, and made rosy plans for a future of cheap Draught Bass. He began to accumulate equipment, a bit at a time: plastic rubbish bins were just coming in, and he got several and filled them with weird smelly stuff. Our kitchen, never the most minimal and orderly room in the house, started to sprout tubes of various length and calibre. Then there were the used beer bottles, hoarded and collected from friends: each bottle of bought beer representing present pleasure and future hope. His friend Jim got the brewing bug too and stopped donating bottles, causing a certain coolness between the two that soon developed into Home-Brewers’ Feud, a form of rivalry surpassed in virulence only by Neighbour Fence Resentment.
‘I tried some of that silly bugger’s latest batch yesterday’, Dad would say, ‘and it kept me up all night’.
‘You could always drink tea’, said Mum, who liked to pour oil on troubled fires.
Boyfriends were measured by their ability to smile as they quaffed glasses full of liquid that made Guinness look like Tarax. ‘Look at that yeast’, Dad would say, holding up a glass of grey-brown soup. ‘Full of Vitamin B: you’d pay good money for brewers’ yeast like that in the shops.’
‘Only in the Middle Ages’, said Mum.
He tried to get her to make bread out of the lees, but she laughed and threw it down the sink or on the garden, where it killed several plants.
We girls hated Dad’s brew as much as Mum, but somehow, it was the measure of a real man to take his tipple without poncey attributes such as clarity or nice taste. Boyfriends who went green and ran out to the loo after taking a swig were regarded as wimps, and tended not to last. A household of five daughters had to have some system for grading the suitors, and for a while, Dad’s beer was the way.
But it all ended when he got cocky and thought he’d use rainwater for his brewing. He set up a rickety pipeline from the roof and gathered July’s rain harvest into one of the plastic bins. He forgot to do a couple of things like