The Beer Machine: Brewing your own beer...

A short while ago, D-Mo the production guru gave me Brewzer - a small brewing kit to produce home-brewed beer.

It took 20 days and the final product was pretty damn good - a standard English bitter served room temperature, with no carbonation.

Unfortunately, that batch got ruined when Tina decided to do a bit of furniture moving and poured the contents of the brewery (which my brother said looked like a bong) into bottles. Sediment and all. Like real ale, the slightest disturbance makes the beer cloudy and basically ruins it. We ended with four litres of cloudy gunk.

But the brewing bug had bit me - and recently Natalie, my sister in law, gave us the most amazing gift: The Beer Machine.

The Beer Machine takes home brewing to an entirely new level. A sealed unit, it allows you to brew top-notch quality beer, carbonated and malty just like the top quality American micro brews. And make no mistake - Germany had better be on the lookout for the outstanding micro brews coming out of the USA. Their national brew might be Budweiser (or, as the European Union has demanded it be called, Bud) but they make some fantastic beers.

The Beer Machine looks like a Rotostack, to be honest, so it was a fitting tribute to Hamster than her little house was replaced with a similar looking bit of kit. Included in the Beer Machine kit Natalie had sent us was a back of Red Canadian Lager beer mix and yeast, which we decided would be called Hamsterbrau when it was ready.

It's very simple to do.

First off, you have to assemble the machine. It's tougher than it looks, because you have to make sure all the rubber seals and gaskets are airtight, by filling it up with water and then carbonating it.

Afterwards, the machine is bleached and rinsed and the beer mix is sloshed in. Finally, the yeast is added and the whole thing is sealed up.

For the next five to seven days, the beer machine lived in our living room. Inside the plastic casing, the yeast got to work fermenting my malty hops and creating our beer.

This is where it starts to get a bit difficult.

Because once the beer has fermented, it needs to be chilled. This caused a few mistakes on my part - not least of which was not having a fridge big enough for the Beer Machine!

After five days, I moved the machine out to the back yard, which was cold enough to be a fridge (in theory.) I left the Hamsterbrau for the end of the official cycle and five days later, sampled it.

Bleugh. The beer was horrible. Worse than that, it was cloudy and smelt rank.

I was heartbroken, because I figured I'd done something wrong and ruined the entire batch. But after doing lots of research, I discovered that my mistake had been chilling the beer before the fermentation cycle was entirely finished. That's why the beer tasted sickly sweet.

I popped Hamsterbrau back inside for another 48 hours and something miraculous happened. The sickly sweet beer turned into a robust, hoppy nectar.

It was still totally cloudy, but it tasted great. So I popped it outside again to chill and hopefully clear. But it didn't.

Nope, the beer wasn't cold enough, so despite it being delicious, Hamsterbrau needed to chill to hopefully develop that crystal clarity that makes less rodenty beers so appealing.

The problem was, we didn't have a fridge big enough.

Sarcastically, I said to Tina: "Listen, we have to take EVERYTHING out of our fridge so I can put the beer in it to chill."

And without batting an eyelid, she said: "Sure."

So that confirmed two things. Firstly, that Tina is the coolest and most understanding wife a Brewmiester like me could have. And, secondly, that half of the shit in your fridge you don't really need. We discovered Mozzarella that looked more like Gorgonzola.

And this is what the fridge looks like now: