In July, my wife and I are attending a wedding for a couple that we’re very close to. As that date approaches, the couple is pretty heavily involved in planning things – and they’re really beginning to realize how many little things there are to take care of.

Meanwhile, there’s another couple that are close friends of ours who recently had a baby. Their wedding shower is set to happen a couple months after the birth of their child. I can tell by their Twitter feeds that both of them are running low on sleep.

In both of these cases, the people in question don’t need physical things. Instead, they’re in a situation where they’re under some significant pressure and the greatest gift you can give them is to relieve that pressure.

This is often true of many people in your life. Almost every adult has some sort of pressure bearing down on them – spiritual, emotional, physical, temporal, or something else – and relief from that pressure is the greatest gift you can give to them.

Over the last few years, my wife and I have slowly been migrating towards this direction for our gift-giving. Rather than simply passing an item to someone, particularly the people we care the most about, we ask ourselves, “What can we do to make their lives better?”

Often, such a gift doesn’t have much of a financial cost. The cost is usually in the form of time and/or energy.

More importantly, such gifts usually end up meaning a lot more to the recipient than just another tchotchke.

The best way to demonstrate what we’re talking about is to use the examples above.

For the soon-to-be-married couple, we asked them how their wedding planning was going. They were worried about several issues, but one that stood out to us was the idea of having a small “gift bag” for each attendee. They wanted to give each attendee a memento of their day, something unique that would really stand out. We offered to handle this for them by making individually wrapped homemade soaps for each gift that were in line with the theme of the wedding. All they’d have to do is give us a bit of suggestion for what they’d want in the soap – scents, oil types, and so on – and we would make the soap, wrap it up, and distribute it for them. It’s a problem directly off their shoulders.

As for the couple with the new baby, the biggest thing they need is time for rest and for intimacy with each other. We can solve that by simply giving them a few gift certificates for evenings of babysitting.

So often, gift-giving occasions are met with consternation and cost. They often mean an outpouring of money onto some object that you’re not even sure that the recipient will value – or else you’re just grabbing an item off of a wishlist, which is just a step or two away from just thoughtlessly handing them cash.

Instead, simply step back and ask yourself what the recipient actually needs in life. What, in their life, is causing pressure or is creating a vacuum? What do they have too much of – or too little of?

If you have an older relative or friend, the thing they’d most value from you is likely companionship. Why not promise to spend a few Saturday afternoons with your grandma or grandpa or mom or dad playing cards with them or watching a movie with them?

Parents? They almost always value trusted babysitting. Teenagers will usually value time you spend taking them to do something fun. Younger children love trips to the park (and their parents often value it, too). Many single people greatly value expertise in fixing things, so if you’ve got some skills to share, that’s a great opportunity. Weddings? Take care of a detail for them.

The list goes on and on.

Remember, if you want to give something that the recipient will actually value without spending money on something you’re not sure they’d value, just look at their situation and ask yourself what they most need in their life. Do they need companionship? Rest? Experiences? Something taken off of a long to-do list?

Whatever it is, if you can provide that, you’ve given them a gift that matters without spending unnecessary cash. That’s something everyone can appreciate.

Throughout the fall, I ran a series of posts on homemade gifts with enough lead time so that interested parties could make some of the gifts on their own if they so chose. I wanted to top off the series by listing all of the items in the series, showing off the small mountain of stuff we made, and providing some pictures of some of the ways in which we packaged items.

Here are the homemade gift items we covered in the series:
Vanilla extract
Homemade soap
Caramel apple jam
Homemade beer
Wine jelly
Meals in a jar
Crocheted hat and scarf
Personalized cards and stationery
Handmade ornaments
Homemade cookies and gift bundling
Photo cubes

That’s our collection of completed gifts. A few of them (some of the beer and a few of the jars) had already been given as gifts when we took this picture.

As you can see, we made quite a bit of everything. The handmade greeting cards are the one thing that’s not very visible here – they’re in the white boxes near the back of the picture, with white ribbon (which I’ll show again below).

Beer and ornaments

As you can see, we made custom labels for the beer, depicting me with a Santa hat drinking a pint. We entitled the beer “Nit Wit,” mostly as a self-deprecating joke but also because the type of beer we made is a witbier.

Since we were reconstituting six pack boxes for this, we simply took extra Nit Wit labels and affixed them to the side of the carriers.

Also, something worth noting with the homemade ornaments: we’re using a ribbon to attach them to some of the jam, jelly, soup, and brownie mix jars that we’re giving as gifts.

Vanilla and mailing

We found some food-safe jars for the vanilla from an old friend who had extra jars from a food laboratory that were never going to get used. They hold eight ounces of liquid with screw tops.

For them, we made up labels entitled “Super Joe’s Super Homemade Vanilla Extract” (referring to our oldest son’s superhero alter ego).

A few of our gifts are traveling through the mail. For those, we’re packing up the soup in Ziploc bags so that they’ll ship easily.

Handmade cards

For the greeting cards, we wrapped each bundle (we made two bundles of 38 cards each) in tissue paper as you can see above, then sealed each bundle with a small snowflake sticker.

We then put these bundles into small garment boxes, closed the boxes, and wrapped some red ribbon around them, creating an understated look.

This was actually my favorite packaging of all of the gifts we made.

Soap

As we had a wide variety of soap sizes (including some “ball” soaps, which are something of a part of soapmaking tradition), we packaged them in different ways, as you can see above. Three soap balls make a cute little snowman!

Around each soap bundle, we wrapped a small piece of paper entitled “Princess Katie’s Handmade Castille Soap” (after our daughter).

We actually ended up with a lot of these, so there are many people who are getting two or even three bars of this soap as a gift.

Final thoughts
My wife, Sarah, deserves a lot of credit for helping all of these gifts reach completion. Some of the gifts were largely her project (like the scarves). Others were almost entirely my project (like the greeting cards). Others required both of our efforts (like the jams and jellies).

In any case, these gifts were made as a team, and without working together, we would have never been able to complete so many gifts.

This is a last-minute extra addition to the homemade gift series. Sarah and I have gone back and forth for a long while about whether to post this one in the series, but when we showed the items to several people as we were making them, the comments from them were almost universal: “You need to show this to your readers, Trent!”

Why didn’t I want to do a post about it? More than the other gifts in the series, Sarah and I both feel that these gifts will be cherished by the recipients. So, yesterday, I contacted the recipients and asked them to not read The Simple Dollar for a few days – I know the recipients, and I’m quite sure they won’t if I ask them not to.

So, what did we make?

We made photo cubes (or, in our case, not quite cubes – I’ll explain below) for home decoration use or paperweight use! The cubes are made out of cedar, though most woods would also work easily for them.

We got the idea from this post at the wonderful alphamom blog and more or less followed the procedure outlined there. I’ll reiterate it here, with some details on our own experiences.

I should note that in the below procedure, I’m often stating “we” for tasks both Sarah and I did individually. She put forth quite a lot of effort during the making of these cubes; in fact, I’d easily say she handled most of the work here, particularly in terms of putting more coats of Mod Podge on the cubes throughout the day.

What You Need
The materials you need are largely straightforward.

A cube-shaped block of wood – or two, or three
Sandpaper
Six photographs
Mod Podge
A sponge paint brush
A spray sealant for the finish (to prevent tackiness from the Mod Podge)

On acquiring the wood cubes We went to Home Depot, selected a cedar 4″ by 4″, and asked them to cut the board every four inches, making (theoretically) 4″ x 4″ x 4″ cubes. I should note here that we tried both Home Depot and Lowe’s for this purpose – the people at Lowe’s wouldn’t cut the board to our specifications and basically acted as though we were a bother, while the staff at Home Depot were very helpful.

The problem with this cut is that the cubes didn’t turn out to be perfectly 4″ x 4″ x 4″. After cutting, the cedar had dried and shrunk a small amount, so we ended up with blocks that measured about 3.5″ x 3.5″ x 4″.

We had two choices at this point: we could either shave 1/2″ off of one end of each cube or we could simply go with the slightly rectangular blocks. Our decision was made after mocking up a few of them – we decided to go with the oblong ones. We found that the slightly askew blocks made for much more interesting stacking possibilities if done in multiples.

If you want cubes, ask for a tape measure to measure the 4″ x 4″ before they cut it for you. Make sure that it actually measures 4″ by 4″.

On acquiring the Mod Podge, sponge brush, and spray sealant I went to a local Hobby Lobby intending to just pick up the Mod Podge and the brush, but the person there seemed fascinated with the project. She warned me that the Mod Podge might wind up being slightly tacky when we were finished, and she suggested a clear spray-on finishing spray that would eliminate the tackiness.

Both Hobby Lobby and Michael’s were very helpful during our various homemade gift projects. I never went away from either store with disappointment with their prices, product selection, or customer service.

Choosing Photographs
Choosing the photographs made for an interesting experience, too.

We decided to make photo cubes themed around our children. In the example above, for instance, we’ve chosen pictures for a cube full of pictures of our daughter.

Now, it’s easy to choose 4″ x 6″ snapshots of your target that are wonderful pictures on their own, but you quickly begin to realize that when you’re cropping them down to fit on the face of a cube, you’re shaving off a lot of the context of the picture. This can quickly make wonderful shots unusable or greatly reduce the likeability of the shot.

In other words, when you’re choosing snapshots for such a cube, choose ones that have a lot of potential space to crop away. If a photo is filled with your target, it’s not going to work for a cube face unless you shrink it down to the cube’s size.

If you do as we did, which involved selecting photographs out of a big box of prints, this is a really important factor to think about, and considering it up front will save you some effort in finding great pictures that work on cube faces.

Making the Cubes

As is often the case with projects like this, we put the cubes together during a family arts and crafts session, in which the children were making their own projects at the same time (hence the colorful doodles next to the cubes above).

We used scissors to trim the photos down to an appropriate size for each cube face. This was more of a process of repeated trimming and comparing to the various faces of the cube until it looked appropriate.

At the same time, the cube faces were a bit rough, so we sanded them down a bit. The faces themselves do not need to be perfectly smooth as they will be covered with photos, but the edges should be smoothed down to a nice rounded edge, depending on how exactly you want your cube to look.

The photographs were attached to the cubes using Mod Podge that was allowed to dry. This worked very well for directly attaching the photos.

Typically, we attached three photos, allowed them to dry, then attached the other three photos. This enabled us to not have to sit a drying photo on the bottom side of the cube, which might have caused uneven drying or warping (better safe than sorry).

After the photos were attached, we gave three faces of the cube a coating of Mod Podge. When you first put the Mod Podge on, it’ll look like you just coated the face with something white and it’ll look frighteningly bad.

Just wait. It will dry clear and look glossy.

We applied three coats to each face of the cube. We would coat three faces, let it dry, rotate the block, then coat three more faces and allow those faces to dry. Repeat that procedure three times and you have a finished cube.

Usually, we had several cubes going at the same time, so we would put another coat on several cubes all at once and let them dry all at once. Honestly, if you’re going through the effort of making one cube, the additional effort to make more is much less – the leap from one to two cubes is much less than the effort for just one cube.

After we had three coats on it, we sprayed the cubes with a clear finishing spray so that they wouldn’t be sticky over long periods. If the cubes are stacked, for example, we don’t want them to become stuck together in a tower.

If you’re thinking of doing this yourself, remember you can make cubes of any theme you’d like. Friends have suggested cubes made up of your favorite sports team (perhaps using cropped baseball cards), cubes of the home where you and the person you’re giving the cube to grew up or spent time together when you were younger, cubes depicting a trip taken together, or so on.

If you know of a person’s passion or something they care about deeply and that can be represented visually, you probably have what you need to make a photo cube for them that will touch their heart.

In a few days, I’ll have a final “homemade gift” post that shows what we did to package many of the gifts.

In the coming week, we’re going to be giving a few early small seasonal gifts to people, so with that in mind, we put the final finishing touches on our first gift basket, utilizing some of the items we already made.

One component of many of our baskets this year is going to be cookies. Sarah is a spectacular cookie maker and she delightfully packages them up for people as well. This year, she decided to use a peanut butter-based cookie recipe for her cookie bundles.

In the picture above, Sarah is making cookies using tofu as an egg substitute – these actually turn out really well and were well liked by someone who thinks tofu is disgusting, so it works. Here’s what you need.

6 eggs (or 1 1/2 cups whipped tofu)
2 sticks margarine or butter
3 cups brown sugar
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups peanut butter
2 teaspoons baking soda
12 oz. chocolate chips (milk or semi-sweet, as per your preference)
3/4 cup chopped nuts (a little more or a little less, as per your preference)
1 1/2 cups M&Ms (a little more or a little less, as per your preference)
9 cups rolled oats

Making cookies is easy.

Mix together the butter/margarine and the sugar. Then, add the eggs/tofu, vanilla, and peanut butter and mix until smooth. Add all remaining ingredients, then mix well. Shape into small balls (about the size of a golf ball) and place them on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 F (175 C) for 8 to 10 minutes. They’re done when they hold together but are still really chewy.

Naturally, we wanted to package these fairly nicely. Sarah’s simple solution was to take a large square of clear Saran Wrap, place three cookies in a stack in the middle, draw the Saran Wrap up around the cookies, twist the top, and tie it with a ribbon.

Quite nice! Of course, you might want to just make big batches of these cookies for any family events and dinners you have coming up, either at Thanksgiving or at Christmas.

We wanted to give some of these cookie bundles away as part of larger gift baskets that incorporate other homemade gifts. Over the last few months, we’ve been searching a wide variety of supply stores looking for small gift baskets, eventually finding a large box of them for about $0.40 a basket.

Here’s the basket we prepared.

This basket contains a cookie bundle, a jar of the wine jelly, and an ornament hand-painted by our daughter (who likes blue and purple). It’s nestled on a piece of blank newspaper from our end roll.

This is a small example of the gift baskets we’ll be giving out this year. Some will be larger and contain other items that we’ve made, and I’ll show you some of these later.

This may be the last entry in the series. We may be making one more item – if we do, we’ll show it to you in two weeks. There will also be a final post showing some of the packaging that we’re using for these gifts.

This year, we decided to make a big batch of handmade Christmas tree ornaments for our home, just to make some “homey” Christmas items to decorate with. We decided to make them in the style of Christmas sugar cookies, with dough that would harden and look roughly like such cookies.

As we were making them, though, Sarah had the brilliant idea of making extras and giving them away as “add-ons” on some of the gifts we’d already made. “We could just put a ribbon through them and tie that ribbon around a jelly jar,” she suggested, referring to the jellies and jams we had already made for gifts.

Sounds like a good idea to me!

The ingredients for the dough are simple enough. One cup salt, two cups flour, five teaspoons of cinnamon, and 3/4 cup water (with maybe a bit more).

Mix the dry ingredients together, then add the water slowly. Mix it together until it forms a ball, like so.

If you find the ball to be crumbly, add a bit more water, a teaspoon at a time, and knead it between teaspoons. If you find it to be sticky, add a bit more flour, a teaspoon at a time, and knead it between teaspoons. Eventually, you’ll find a happy medium – not too sticky, not too crumbly. That’s just what you want.

A note on the cinnamon: it’s added mostly to give the “cookie” ornaments a cinnamon smell. I felt that the five teaspoons didn’t give a very strong smell and if we were to make another batch of cookies, I would use at least ten teaspoons of cinnamon.

Once the dough is ready, wrap it up and put it in the refrigerator for thirty minutes to stiffen the dough. Then, roll the dough out to roughly 1/2″ thick (about 1.25 cm) – you can be approximate on this – on a lightly floured surface.

Use cookie cutters to cut the dough into shapes, then use a straw (or another device) to make a small hole on the top of the ornament shape. Then, bake until dry at 325 F – this usually takes about an hour. I recommend using parchment paper on top of a baking sheet to bake the ornaments.

We turned the leftover dough – the pieces between shapes that didn’t quite amount to enough to roll out again – into candy cane shapes for our own use.

Most of our ornaments were snowflakes, which we chose (for the time being) not to paint. We could have painted them white, of course.

The kids painted several of the ornaments, which turned this into a bit of a family art project. They went pretty over the top with the colors, though, which means these will make good additions to our tree and perhaps the trees of their grandparents, but maybe not the trees of others…

After the ornaments were painted, we sprayed them with a matte finish sprayable varnish so they would keep for a long time. We then slipped ribbons through some of the holes to look at our finished ornaments.

One important thing to note – these ornaments are actually surprisingly sturdy. One was dropped from a height of six feet onto a hardwood floor and as it fell, we fully expected it to break into bits. It seemed almost completely unharmed by the drop, perhaps losing a tiny crumb.

We look forward to tying these onto some of the handmade gifts we give out this year – and we also look forward to putting some of the ornaments on our own Christmas tree.

A few years ago, Rachel gave my wife Sarah a wonderful Christmas gift: some beautifully-constructed stationery with photos of her own choosing placed on the front of note cards, along with envelopes to mail them in. Here are three examples that Sarah has kept:

As you can see, there’s some variety in the cards – the border colors changed, some of the photos are in color and some are grayscale, some depict nature and others depict family. The full set, numbering about 25 or so, included a wide variety of pictures and colors.

Simply put, this was one of Sarah’s favorite gifts she’s ever received. Some of the cards are nice enough that they could easily be framed for home decorations. Others are so aesthetically pleasing to Sarah that she simply can’t bear to part with them.

When we first started thinking about doing homemade gifts for people this year, these cards were the first thing that Sarah mentioned. We should make a batch of them for a great gift for someone.

Our first step was finding the elements that we needed to pull this off. The things we needed most were the material for the cards themselves, some additional craft paper for the borders, and the photos we wanted to use.

For the card material and the craft paper, we simply checked flyers and waited patiently for a sale. We watched craft stores like Michael’s and Hobby Lobby, as well as art supply stores and paper stores. Eventually, we found some huge discounts on just the items we wanted, picking up big piles of both craft paper and cards for a pittance. However, even if you do buy them at face value, the cost for 20-30 cards’ worth of material is $10-15 if you shop around.

What about the pictures? This is something I’ve been dealing with lately and deserves a full post on its own. However, my rules of thumb are this:

If you need just a picture or two, home printing is probably worth it.
If you’re printing ten or fifteen, the local department store is probably the best place.
If you’re ordering a lot of pictures (enough to get free shipping – say, 100+), there are online sources that take the cake.

Now, what about assembling a card?

Here, I just chose a black and white snapshot of my youngest son (actually taken by my niece). The simplest thing to do, of course, would be to simply paste it to the front of a card without any border at all. It’s quite simple and works, but I want to add a bit more panache to it.

My next attempt was to add a brown frame to the picture, using craft paper and scissors. Since the card is 5″ by 7″ and the picture is 4″ by 6″, I cut the paper at 4 2/3″ by 6 2/3″, making a thick brown border and a thin white border around it.

Do you like that one? I did, but I wanted to keep going.

I then cut out a tan craft paper rectangle measuring 4 1/3″ by 6 1/3″, then placed that between the dark brown rectangle and the photo, creating a “multi”-border effect that I quite liked.

As you can see, there are infinite options here and you can make whatever you like – different colored cards, different colored borders made out of craft paper, different photographs. They all result in different effects.

What pictures should you choose? I would suggest using prints that would have some personal meaning for the recipient: family members they care about, locations that have meaning to them, and things like that. You can also choose some of your best natural shots as well to give the card recipients some variety in the pictures.

Another note: I think the cards look better if the edges on your own work aren’t absolutely perfect, so don’t obsess on straight perfection. A little tiny bit of skewing adds a wonderful handmade flavor to the cards that can’t be duplicated.

One final thought: if you send out holiday cards to your family and friends, consider making some of these instead. They will really stand out from the pack.

“Not everyone will like the caramel apple jam,” Sarah commented to me after we made it. As much as I liked it, I knew she was right: it was very sweet and lacked the tartness that I often crave in my jellies and jams.

So we decided to make another jelly/jam, this time doing something decidedly different: wine jelly.

What’s “wine jelly”? It’s much like grape jelly, but instead of using grape juice, you use a bottle of wine of your choosing for the primary liquid in the jelly.

In this case, we chose to use a bottle of Celebrate, a 2007 wine from a local winery, White Oak Vineyards. It’s a ruby red semi-sweet wine made from a blend of grapes that has a tartness to it that’s almost like cranberries. We quite like it.

Thus, one fun way to make this jelly is to choose a bottle of wine from a local winery that you particularly like and use it as the backbone for your jelly. This enables the wine to have a bit of additional local flavor to it. You can, of course, use any wine of your choosing – for example, a bottle of Charles Shaw from Trader Joe’s will work quite well and only set you back $3 for the wine.

What ingredients will you need? Our recipe simply follows a very standard grape jelly recipe:

3 1/2 cups wine
1/2 cup lemon juice
1 package dry pectin (1.75 oz. or 2 oz. depending on the brand)
4 1/2 cups sugar

You’ll also, of course, need the usual stuff for canning: six jars with lids and rings, a pot to boil the stuff in, and some sort of mechanism for pulling the jars in and out of boiling water. In the pictures below, we’re using a plastic “bucket” we found for fifty cents at a sale recently.

A note on the wine: you’ll often need a bit more liquid than what a bottle of wine contains, as a bottle will often only give you three cups or a bit more. Feel free to add the remnants of a second wine or even a bit of grape juice to get yourself up to the total amount.

The first step, of course, is to boil the jars, lids, and rings and make sure they’re as clean as possible. This way, you minimize the chance of unwanted bacteria inside of the jars, which would render the jelly unusable.

After that, just mix the wine, lemon juice, and pectin in a large sauce pot (one that can easily hold 12 cups of liquid. Bring it to a boil while stirring it rapidly.

Once it’s boiling, add the sugar, then keep stirring rapidly to dissolve all of the sugar in the liquid. Bring it back to a rolling boil while stirring, then boil it for at least one minute while stirring (you can boil it a bit longer – if you do, the jelly will be just a bit thicker).

Once the hot jelly is finished, ladle the jelly into the jars, leaving 1/2″ inch (1.3 cm) at the tops of the jars for breathing room. Put the lids on them, then put the jars into a boiling water bath for five minutes (you can do this in shifts, of course).

You’ll find that you have enough jelly for six jars, with a bit left over. We used that “bit left over” on our morning toast for a few days – delicious!

When you’re done, put the jars out on a towel and leave them untouched for 24 hours. Leave at least an inch of space between each of the jars.

After the 24 hours are up, check the lids and make sure none of them have popped up. If you’re unsure, press down a bit on the middle of a lid – if it “clicks” or “pops,” that’s a bad jar. Most likely, they’ll all be fine, but don’t keep a bad jar of anything that you can.

As you can see, our jelly turned out with a reddish-purple color. It’s a bit tart and, in my opinion, is almost perfect on toast in the morning.

Later, we’re going to make a second batch of this jelly, using one of our favorite white wines. This will result in a yellowish or nearly clear jelly.

I often brew homemade beer. It’s an enjoyable hobby that allows me to sometimes use items from my garden and gets me deeply in touch with the natural process of making a homecrafted beer. I have complete control over the ingredients and can make whatever variation seems good to me with whatever ingredients seem flavorful to me.

Plus, it makes a really cool gift for someone who appreciates a good homecrafted beer.

What follows is my procedure for making a simple homemade beer. I chose to base this batch on a kit, because kit brewing is without a doubt the easiest way for a newcomer to try out homebrewing.

A homebrew beer kit, like the one pictured above, can be purchased at your local homebrewer’s shop. Most cities with a population of 50,000 or more have one – the larger the city, the more likely it is that there will be multiple shops. Search around for them, visit a few shops, identify a beer kit you’d like to try, and don’t be afraid to shop around.

For this year’s Christmas beer, I chose to make a lighter beer with hints of coriander and orange. The kit came with a small amount of each – I chose to add a few coriander seeds on my own.

A homebrew beer kit contains all of the liquid and solid ingredients you need for beermaking besides the water, the glass bottles, a pot to boil the beer in as you’re making it, and another container for the beer to ferment in. You’ll also need a small handheld device for putting the caps on the bottles.

How do you get those things? You can purchase the bottles or accumulate them on your own. You can use any large pot in your kitchen for the boiling. As for the rest…

… I recommend picking up a simple homebrewing equipment kit at that shop as well, especially if you’re thinking about brewing your own beer regularly. A kit usually includes a large bucket with a spigot near the bottom (with a tight-sealing lid that has a breathe hole), a small bubbler that allows gas to escape the bucket without exposing the beer to air as it is fermenting, a capping tool, and usually a piece of rubber hose to make the bottling easier.

We brew beer fairly often (a few batches a year), so we usually use a five gallon glass bottle for most of our fermenting needs. For beginners, it doesn’t make a big difference, but a glass bottle allows less gas to escape through the sides of the container.

The first thing to do is to sterilize everything you’re going to use to the best of your ability. We use an iodine-based solution for this cleaning – you can use bleach or whatever you choose.

The next thing you’ll do with your kit is fill a large pot with about two gallons of water and heat it to boiling. You’ll then make what I sarcastically call a “tea bag.”

The “tea bag” is simply a cheesecloth bag (usually included in the kit) that is wrapped around the dry grains used in beer making – wheat, oats, and various other things depending on the type of beer you’re making.

All you do is put those grains in the cheesecloth bag, tie the top, and put it in the boiling water for an hour or so (depending, again, on the specific grains – don’t worry, kits include an instruction sheet). You’ll usually end up with cloudy water.

Once the “tea bag” is finished, you start adding other ingredients – liquid malt (shown above), dried malt powder, hops, coriander, and orange peel all go into the pot. This is stirred regularly and boiled for about fifty minutes.

Looks yummy, doesn’t it?

Once the boiling is finished, you need to cool the hot beer rapidly. I do this by preparing an ice bath in my kitchen sink. I simply fill one of the basins with cold water, add a bunch of ice to it, and stick the whole boiling pot straight in there. The ice water on the outside of the container helps to cool down the beer rapidly (and rapid stirring helps, too).

Once the beer is down to about 80 F or so (35 C), just pour the contents of the pot straight into your fermenting bucket (make sure the spigot at the bottom is closed!). Add room temperature water until the bucket is full to the five gallon mark, then sprinkle some yeast on the surface and stir the yeast into the beer.

Once that’s done, put the lid on the bucket, put the bubbler on the lid, make sure there’s a bit of water in the bubbler, and wait.

After about 12 hours, you’ll start to see rapid bubbling in the bubbler. This will go on for a couple days, then slow down gradually until it appears not to be bubbling. You want the fermentation to stop before you add it to the bottles.

The way I do it is that I wait until it appears not to be bubbling any more. I then watch the bubbler for three minutes. If I see a bubble, I wait one more day and watch again. If I don’t see a bubble, I mark the calendar and bottle the beer three days later.

Bottling is also easy. Make sure the bottles are as clean as you possibly can (you’ll need roughly 50 bottles). As mentioned above, use bleach or an iodine solution and rinse the bottles thoroughly.

Next, mix the priming sugar with two cups of boiling water and boil the mix for a few minutes. This provides food for the remaining yeast to add carbonation to the beer – that wonderful bubbliness. Cool the priming sugar mix, then add it to the bucket and stir for a couple of minutes.

Then, simply fill up each bottle with the spigot. Go slowly and carefully – use the plastic tubing and pinch the tube to control the flow. You’ll want to leave an inch or so of air in the neck of the bottle. Put a cap on the top with the capper (in your kit) and you’ve got yourself a bottle of beer!

Our coriander-orange beer is currently still fermenting, so the completed bottle pictures are of our previous batch, a hefeweizen.

For our own homebrew, we just reuse six pack boxes of other kinds of beer (in this case, Shiner Bock). We label the caps with a number to identify which beer is which.

For our finished gift bottles, we’re planning on making custom labels of our own design.

What’s the cost of this? The initial equipment can cost $20 to $30, depending on availability in your area. Each kit costs about $25 and makes roughly eight six packs of bottled beer. Thus, if you’re just making one batch, it can be pricy, but if you’re going to make several, the initial equipment is prorated across all of your batches and the price becomes very reasonable, especially given the high quality of the beer you’re making.

I’m very serious about the quality of homebrewed beer. The three best beers I’ve ever had in my life were brewed in my own home. The freshness of the ingredients and the control you have over those ingredients allows you to make some incredibly good beer at a great price.

Even better, it makes a great gift.