My brother recently bought me a brew-your-own-beer starter kit, since he knows well enough that I'm into both beer and doing stuff like that myself. I've never made beer or any other alcoholic drink before, though my Nan did use to make her own wine from the various berries she found around the park.

So, over the last couple of weeks, I've been brewing. Here's the story.

Beer is basically made by the rather simple process of mixing malted barley with sugar and water, and then adding yeast, which over a period of time converts the sugar to alcohol in a process known as fermentation. The yeast eats the sugar and releases alcohol and carbon dioxide, which is why beer has bubbles in it. Some people add all sorts of other things to the process in order to give it an extra taste, a common example of which is the hops flower. Different types of yeast also apparently alter the flavour.

Arguably one of the most difficult things to do is to malt ones own barley. Malting is the process of taking barley (or other cereal) grains and soaking them so that they begin to sprout, and then stopping the sprouting process by drying the grain. Beer making is very similar to the early part of the whisky making process, so if you've ever visited either a brewery or whisky distillery that does its own malting, you may have seen the malting floor, a very large area above the fire, where the grain is spread out to dry. Many breweries and distilleries actually don't do this process themselves, and a specialist malting houses often provide brewers with "malted barley". If you're interested, the Highland Park distillery on Orkney does do its own malting, whereas Talisker on Skye doesn't. Both are worth a visit.

Anyway, on with the beer making. I may have a go at malting barley one day, but for now it's actually quite easy to get hold of a can of malted barley, with a small amount of sugar and water added to make it into a syrup. This was fine for my purposes now. The first task is therefore to add the malted barley syrup to a 25 litre tub.

The next step is to add hot water to the barley. I boiled this up in a pan, and then added it to the tub.

A kilo of sugar is then added to the mix. I was recommended brewing sugar, which apparently is basically just glucose. The mixture is then topped up with cold water and mixed through, making the whole thing luke warm, which the yeast will like. At this stage it started looking like a giant pint of beer already - though certainly didn't smell like one!

The instructions I was using sensibly called for me to check the temperature before adding the yeast, to make sure it wasn't so hot that the yeast would be killed. I used a small packet of yeast which came with the malted barley.

The lid then goes on the tub to prevent anything extra from getting in there and contaminating the beer, and the it's left to ferment for a week or two!

During the fermentation process, the beer can be checked on using a hydrometer, which looks a bit like a thermometer but floats on top of the beer to tell you what the gravity of the liquid is. Apparently water with sugar in it has a different gravity from the fermented beer, at which point the sugars have turned to alcohol, so this tells you how much the beer has fermented. When the hydrometer readings have dropped a few points and stabilised, the fermentation process is finished. This can also give you a guide as to how alcoholic your beer is, but I don't think it's that exact.

Once it's ready, the beer can by put into bottles or a barrel for storage. I opted for a barrel, since I really didn't fancy the hassle of messing around sterilising and sealing dozens of bottles. Instead it was easy to syphon the beer into the barrel.

Right at the bottom of the tub is a load of sediment, the remains of the barley and yeast. You have to be careful not to get this into the barrel.

And there we have it, a barrel of home made beer, and the first glass to try. It was actually very nice, it tastes most definitely of beer, though is a little watery in taste. But, it's quite drinkable and definitely alcoholic! And, I've got about 40 pints of it!