This Nettle Beer Recipe might sound a little odd – making beer out of those things that sting us – but the flavour is exceptional. It tastes a bit like a bubbly herby lemonade that has a hit of %ALC depending on how long you brew it for 🙂
This is enough to fill x12 330ml beer bottles You’ll need a fermenting bucket, muslin cloth, 1 5 litre demijohn with airlock, beer bottles, and a bottle capper (unless you choose swing top beer bottles). Syphon tube optional but helpful! You will need to pre sterilise everything that will touch the beer.
Ingredients
- Nettles x200g
- Water x4 Litres
- Sugar x 1kg
- Cream of Tartar x 10g
- Juice of one large lemon
- Pinch of yeast
Method
- Pick nettle tops – rinse and leave to dry
- Bring water to the boil, add nettles and hard boil for 15 minutes
- Strain water into your fermenting bucket and discard the nettles (you can use these for other nettle recipes!)
- Stir in the sugar, lemon juice, cream of tartar and cover with muslin cloth. Leave to cool to room temperature.
- Add yeast and leave covered overnight (check your packaging instructions as some yeast brands tell you to activate it in warm water before adding into recipes)
- Next day remove any scum from the top of the liquid
- Stir and pour the lot in to a demijohn, fill up the air stopper with water and pop on the top of the demijohn.
- Leave to ferment for 14 days the airlock should keep bubbling and slow down towards the end of the 14 days
- Pour the liquid in to beer bottles and Cap
- If you’d like then to be fizzy then bottle in to plastic screw-top bottles with 1tsp of sugar per 500ml leave for a further 7 days and enjoy.
words from Forager Megan who can be found @flintandfern.
Looking for More Nettle Recipes?
Nettles can be used in absolutely loads of recipes, that many we’ve dedicated a whole page to our favourite recipes.
You can see them all by clicking here
