Originally Posted by divingbboy:
“You can do exactly the same thing (and I have done it myself) with a few 2 litre plastic bottles, some ordinary apple juice and a sachet of yeast. Less than a week and you have perfectly drinkable poor-mans' cider.”
I used to do the same thing with cartons of grape juice to make cheap wine in old sterilised water containers but even with champagne yeast and decent quality brewing chemicals it still turned out to be nowhere near the standard of the cheapest quality wine that you can buy in the supermarkets. It would cost approximately £5 to make 6 bottles of wine. It may have been cheap but what's the point if you end up throwing half of it away because it's vile. When you can buy a cheap bottle of wine for about £2.50 from Aldi then it really is more hassle than it's worth with all the faffing around you have to do just to end up with a poor quality wine or beer that's barely good enough to cook with.
I got really good at home brewing but could never get results that tasted anywhere near as good as the mass produced stuff you can buy in the shops so in the end I gave up and decided that even a really cheap £2 bottle of no frills wine from Aldi tasted better than the stuff you can do yourself. I guess home brewing is OK if you don't mind drinking shite and just just wanna get pissed cheaply but if you want a half decent tasting wine then there are far better alternatives. I tried the more expensive wine kits which I got quite good results with but to get one that tastes as good as the wine you can buy in the shops then you have to pay about £15 a kit. With all the faffing around you have to do it's not really worth the bother.
Like Peter Jones said, it's a fun novelty thing to do that appeals to students who don't mind getting hammered on cheap nasty rubbish but you can buy a 3l bottle of cheap no frills cider in Asda for about £2 that I guarantee will still look and taste ten times better than home brew.