PAUL Sollitt of Fixby recalls home brewing in the 1950s when he was a teenager and how, on one occasion, it disrupted an election campaign.
“My father made some elderberry syrup and stored it in a kitchen cupboard. In due course a bottle burst and thus I was introduced to fermentation. We then started making wine with varying degrees of success, but all this came to an end when we made our first beer. We never had a bad one. We boiled malt, hops and sugar in a five gallon pan and fermented 10 gallons at a time in a dustbin.
“The smell of this attracted a pair of election canvassers one day. They came in to see what we were up to, sampled our current brews and forgot about what they were supposed to be doing.”
Home brewing stopped when he got married and started again, in recent years, when he retired.
“The five gallon pan and dustbin were long gone and I had to start from scratch, this time using kits. It is very easy now. No boiling pans – just a bucket, a kettle, a kit, a bag of sugar, 20 minutes and you have four gallons.”
The result? Beer at about 35p a pint.
