"Buy one big bucket..." Dave Burrows checks out the contents of the home brew kit.

In the first of a regular new feature, David Burrows and Simon Alton turn their hand to the art of home brewing.

It started, like a lot of good ideas, over a drink or two at the pub.

Unsurprisingly, I was moaning. This time about the price of a pint.

At this point my friend and former Shropshire Star colleague Simon Alton happened to mention that he’d been given a home brew kit a while back as a present and he’d never got round to doing anything with it.

“We could give it a go,” he suggested. “Then we could even try making our own.”

The seed was sown. As we drank more, it took root. All sorts of grand plans were formed about how we could create our own recipe, and what we could do to make it different from anything else out there.

Who knew? If we were successful we might even be able to get a cottage industry going.

Home brewing is becoming more popular. In times of recession, people want to find ways of saving money and suddenly become more industrious. Hence we have demand for allotments, and vegetable patches popping up in people’s gardens again.

Dave Burrows pouring a beer from the first ever batch.

The owner of one brewing shop told me, tongue in cheek: “We love a good recession”.

A survey by home brew kit maker Muntons last year found an estimated 60,000 people across the UK were fermenting at home, with a 12 per cent rise in sales of its kits.

And so, with frugality in mind, two clearly inept people decided to set aside 10 minutes or so to knock together our first batch of home brew. It soon became clear we’d not given ourselves enough time.

After setting up Real Ale HQ in Si’s shed (which involved much clearing of cobwebs, mountain bikes and rakes) we set about the most basic of basic kits.

Our starting point was Si’s gift from Brew Genie – a boxed kit giving us, according to the instructions, everything needed to create our first 40 pints of beer!

Inside the magic box was a 30 litre brewing bin with all attachments (lid and grommet, bubbler airlock) a mixing spoon, a five gallon beer barrel, a syphon kit to get our nectar from the bin to the barrel and a tub of steriliser so we didn’t kill ourselves or destroy our product.

And, of course, a 40 pint John Bull beer kit with instructions.

And so, after cleaning everything with the steriliser, we were ready.

Task one was to empty the syrupy looking liquid from the beer tin into a saucepan and heat it to soften the mixture.

The tin contained all we needed. All we had to do was add a bit of sugar and pour it into our brewing bin before topping up with cold water. And that was it. Simple.

But such was our lack of understanding of the beer making process, that Si and I decided to try a pint after a mere week of letting the beer ferment.

This was a mistake.

It tasted awful.

This was not the start to our brewing empire we had envisaged. In the kit was something called “finings”. Si wasn’t sure, but he thought these were important. Thank the lord for Google. It turns out finings are used to clear and improve the taste of the beer.

Reassuringly ...er... cheap. Simon Alton with the debut beer.

“We best add that, then,” I announced, wisely. We did. And then waited some more. A few days later, we deemed it ready to drink. Again.

Now, I have to confess, the kit we used had passed its “Best Before Date” by the time we got round to using it, but the Government has said it wants us to start ignoring those, so maybe that’s further proof of our Good Life credentials. I don’t know how much of a factor the expiration date was, but the beer was still not of pub quality. But – and here’s the important point – it was drinkable.

In fact, it was quite drinkable. I’ve had a few. Si’s had more (the advantage of the brewery being at his house) and other people have tried it and come back for seconds. And thirds. And so, we have mastered the most basic of basics.

According to the internet, there are things we could have done to experiment with this simple kit to improve the taste or increase the strength. But we want to run, even if we are still a bit unsteady on our feet with the whole walking thing. And so, back to Brew Genie. A more advanced kit this time (but still a kit – we don’t want to be Usain Bolt, not just yet). And so we had better get a shift on drinking our first batch.

We need the room for phase two.

• Are you joining the home brew revolution? Do you have any tips for David or Simon? E-mail starfeatures@shropshirestar.co.uk