Apocalypse Beer: Sheltering in place at home: what can you brew beer with?

While the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic isn’t a full-blown apocalypse, many of use are under what are effectively shelter-in-place directives and a lot of what’s happening can feel a bit apocalyptic. With the order of the day to stay isolated at home, you should only be venturing out for the essentials. If you brew beer, however, the question is—are homebrew supply stores considered “essential”?

If so, I’d recommend you stock up on the ingredients you’d need to brew in the event that you have no more access to them. For instance, I have 20-plus pounds of malt and grains, plenty of hops, and packets of yeast that I stocked up on several weeks ago.

But what if your local is closed, and you’re stuck at home with all the equipment you need to brew beer, but have none of the usual ingredients? Time to raid the pantry to find out what you can brew with!

Fermentables

Oatmeal (rolled oats, instant oats, etc.)

Corn meal or corn grits

Rice

Sugar (white, powdered, brown)

Molasses

Honey

Syrup

Granola

Breakfast cereal

Ancient grains like quinoa, amaranth

Flour

Bread, baked goods

Fruit

In the case of the grain and cereal items, you’ll need to find some way to mash or otherwise convert the starches to sugars, while the straight sugars and syrups can be used as-is. With the ancient grains, it might be possible to malt those yourself, which is essentially getting them to sprout and then drying them out to halt the process. For some guidance, check out this post with links to resources on the HomebrewTalk forums.

Or, try to keep at least a small amount of base malt on hand that you could use to mash other cereal grains and sources. Two-row, six-row, and other pale malts have enough diastatic power to convert the other starches. You’ll want to cook them first (the oatmeal, corn, rice, etc.) to gelatinize the starches to make them accessible.

You might even try tackling some of these like a kvass or similar drink, traditionally made from bread.

For additional ideas and some pointers for getting this stuff to ferment, check out How to Ferment Anything in this series.

Bittering/Spicing/Aroma

Let’s face it, if you don’t have hops available to you, you are essentially brewing a gruit. So what might you find in the pantry that could loosely substitute for hops?

Start with tea—green, herbal, black, whatever. If you have a bunch of tea bags you could even just add those directly (think of them as mini nylon mesh hop bags). I suspect any tea would work well here, though green tea might get you closest to hop-type character.

Culinary herbs and spices, including things like rosemary, sage, caraway seed, fennel, ginger, nutmeg, lavender, basil, thyme, and so on, will provide some bittering but are best used for aroma and flavoring additions. Obviously different combinations will take you in different directions—holiday spices for a wintry beer, coriander and orange peel for a Belgian-y wit influence, basil and fennel for “pizza” beer (I’m just making that up), etc.

Do you have a yard? Trees? You might have to venture outdoors for this. Spruce tips and juniper berries can be great additions and have been used in traditional brewing for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Or think outside the box a bit—do you have dandelions coming up in your yard? They are entirely edible (leaves, flowers, roots and all) and have been used in beers before.

Yeast

If you don’t have brewers yeast, or bottle conditioned beers handy, the next most logical substitute is bread yeast. You can use it just the same way; expect more of a yeasty, bready finishing character to the beer.

You have flour in the pantry, yes? Your next option would be to create something similar to a sourdough bread starter and culture your own yeast. There are a number of good online resources to read up on how to do this (and would be a good, future in-depth Apocalypse Beer article besides!).

Or you might consider fresh fruit, or raisins, which will have yeast naturally living on the skins. You could chop up the fruit and add directly to the cooled wort and wait to see if fermentation starts.

Bear in mind, yeasts are everywhere, so you could even simply leave your wort open to the air overnight and odds are, some wild yeasts will fall right in and kick off spontaneous fermentation. In fact, any of these last three options are going to be introducing wild yeasts into your beer and you may end up with unpredictable results.

Regardless, once you’ve harvested and cultured your yeast, you should look into reusing it and propagating it to keep a ready supply available.

Recipe Ideas

All of these recipes are for one gallon of homebrew, assuming limited ingredient availability. I’m also not giving any significant measurements here because, well, I’m making these up, nor am I giving details on brewing all-grain beers (there are plenty of books and online resources for that).

Breakfast Ale (all-grain)

¼ pound two-row malt

½ pound oatmeal

½ pound Corn Flakes

Splash of maple syrup

1-2 cinnamon sticks

Raisins

OG (estimate): 1.037. FG: who knows? IBUs: n/a

Pre-cook the oatmeal, then combine with two-row malt and Corn Flakes and mash for one hour (or until conversion is complete). Boil wort with maple syrup and add cinnamon stick(s) in the last few minutes (otherwise, boiling too long may give you a woody character). Once wort is cooled to pitching temperatures, throw in a hand full of raisins and hope for yeasts on the skins to start fermentation. Otherwise, add bread yeast.

If you don’t have any two-row malt handy, substitute one pound of sweetened breakfast cereal for the Corn Flakes and hope for the best.

Ancient Grain Gruit (all-grain)

For this recipe you’ll need to malt and kiln/dry your own ancient grains. For this example I’m using quinoa.

2 pounds home-malted quinoa

¼ pound honey or molasses

Rosemary

Ginger

2 teabags of green tea

Fresh juniper berries

OG (estimate): 1.051. FG (estimate): 1.012? ABV (estimate) ~5%. IBUs: n/a

Mash the malted quinoa as you would any other malt. The spice and tea additions are pretty basic; I would add the teabags either at the start of the boil or halfway through for a bit of bitterness (2 is a recommendation, you can certainly use more) and at knockout, add the rosemary and ginger. Ginger can be in any form (powder, fresh, crystallized), and these should be added to taste. Half a sprig of rosemary for 1 gallon, maybe?

The fresh juniper berries, if you have them available to you, will be your yeast source, as well as a spice. Add a handful once the wort is cooled to pitching temps. If you don’t have juniper berries, you can go with raisins, as above, or bread yeast, or even try an overnight open-air fermentation.

Sugar Bomb (extract/non-grain)

This recipe assumes you have some hops on hand, and maybe even a packet of dried ale yeast, but perhaps no malts or grains. Yes, this could go in a mead direction.

1 pound of honey, molasses, or maple syrup, or any combination yielding 1 pound

½ cane or brown sugar

¼ ounce hops, at 30 or 60 minutes

Brewer’s yeast

OG (estimate): 1.053-1.059. FG (estimate): 1.006. ABV (estimate) ~7%. IBUs: ~27-35

Yep, this is going to be dry and thin, you are essentially fermenting nearly-pure sugar. The hop variety can be whatever you have on hand; if you’re doing a one-hour boil, add them at the beginning for more bitterness, or halfway through for less bitterness and more flavor. For the numbers above I used 7% alpha acid for the basic IBU calculation.

If you don’t have brewer’s yeast on hand, well, you know the drill.

Finally, if you do happen to try you hand at brewing an “isolation beer” out of your pantry, please let me know what you did and how you did it! I might share that in a future article. Happy brewing!