It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide
Booze for Free

Booze for Free

Summary

Home brewing and wine-making is fun, easy and hugely satisfying. If you garden or forage,
can follow a recipe or make jam, and you enjoy a drink, this is the book for you.
Andy's no-nonsense, easy-to-follow guide will enable the beginner and inspire the expert
with over 100 recipes including beer made from hops and but also yarrow, mugwort, elder
and other foraged plants, great tasting wines from fruit, vegetables and the hedgerows,
cider and perry from apples and pears, cordials from the leaves of a range of trees, and teas and
fizzy drinks from herbs and wayside flowers.

- Discover the secret language of home brewing and drinks making.
- Make cheap, wholesome drinks, to your preferred taste and strength
in little time, with minimum fuss and no need for expensive equipment.
- Turn your garden into a drinkers' paradise.
- Find where and how to forage for success.
- Impress your friends with the weird, wonderful and just plain tasty.

Try Carrot Whisky, Sloe and Damson Rum, Parsnip Sherry, Elderberry and Blackberry Wine,
Pumpkin Beer, Broom Tonic, Meadowsweet tea as well as classics such as Elderflower
champagne, sloe gin, prison brew... Cheers!

Reviews

  • Some guys have all the luck. Andy Hamilton has 'road tested' over 100 DIY drinks - many of them pleasantly alcoholic- to be made from the plants of the garden, hedge, field and wood, and has brought the results to the pages of his Booze for Free. The result is a home imbiber's delight, full of lore, sense, entertainment, humour, botany, history and tongue-tantalizing recipes. Hamilton has that wholly underrated, but absolutely essential skill in a practical matters, of writing with pure clarity and absolute readability. His recipes won't let you down. You may fall down after sampling some of the stronger brews, but that's another matter
    John Lewis-Stempel, author of THE WILD LIFE: A YEAR LIVING ON WILD FOOD

About the author

Andy Hamilton

Andy Hamilton lives with his family in Bristol. He runs brewing workshops and tasting sessions locally, grows ingredients for beer in his vertical hilltop garden and forages for ingredients for various alcoholic drinks in and around the parks and waste grounds of Bristol. He is also a member of the British Guild of Beer Writers and CAMRA and makes regular appearances on TV and radio talking about foraging and home-brewing.

He is the author of the award-winning and bestselling foraging/home-brewing book Booze for Free,
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more