Making Herbal Beers

Herbal Beers! What a marvellous idea, it struck us with the force of a revelation 4-5 years ago and we have been cheerfully making beers on and off (time permitting) ever since. Our original inspiration was Stephen Harrod Buhner’s book ‘Sacred Herbal & Healing Beers’ highly recommended as inspiration for recipes and general beery herb lore.

Our motivation was the realisation that our beer habit at the time was costing far too much. Our herbal beers cost us less than 50p a bottle to make. I’m not including the price of buying the bottles as they get re-used so many times that their cost is offset. Homemade herbal beers are also much more delicious, more complex and flavoursome in taste than commercial beers (or home brew in a can) and, because they contain herbs, you can fool yourself that they’re good for you. Which they are of course. Mostly.

Included in this article is general advice as well as several tried and tested herbal beer recipes to get you going. Tried and tested does not of course mean infallible – all beers fail sometimes for no apparent reason and that is part of the organic and mysterious world of herbal beer making.