Home brew fever seems to be sweeping Britain. Beer-making has come a long way since the 1970s when your dad would inflict a high-strength concoction on long-suffering neighbours, brewed from an indifferent kit from Boots. 

Beer clubs are popping up and home brew seems to have reached some kind of social tipping point where more and more people are producing their own beer. 

Kits have come a long way and the internet also allows peer-to-peer learning, as amateur brewers can go online and get good advice on beer production. 

I have recently joined the Campaign for Real Ale. After all, what could be more socialist and green than the protection and conservation of Britain’s beer diversity. I proceeded to buy some Camra award-winning bottles and then sought to replicate the one I liked best. 

The process was surprisingly easy and, while not expecting much from my first attempt, I was pleased to produce some very enjoyable IPA. 

I am not a home-brew expert but as a rank beginner I have picked up a few tips I would like to share. First, as I suggested, find the beer style you like best and try to reproduce something similar. 

There are home-brew companies that have kits for any beer imaginable. 

Get advice online or from friends. Sanitation is 90 per cent of the work. You have to get the brewing equipment sterile. Milton tablets also used for babies’ bottles are good in this regard. 

Patience is also important. You can make something alcoholic within a week. However, I would say it’s worth taking a month. 

Two weeks for brewing, then bottle it (bottling equipment is also easy and inexpensive to buy) and then leave it to condition for a fortnight in the bottle. Then drink it — it will be good! Not only good, but cheap.

You can take beer in a variety of directions — Belgian-style, potato-based, stout, porter or a thousand other possibilities beckon. The world, with a very small investment in equipment and ingredients is, potentially, your brewery. You can move from kits to malting your own barley (or potatoes) and I have one friend who picks wild hops. (I am told there is a good crop near Hampton Court.) 

Home brew, like most aspects of life, has a political dimension. Beer is often linked to imperialism. When in Sunderland, where my wife is from, I like to drink a bottle of Double Maxim, the Mackem rival to Newcastle Brown Ale. 

Double Maxim, while highly recommended, is a product of the British empire. 

It was first brewed in 1901 to celebrate the return of the Maxim gun detachment from the Boer War commanded by Colonel Ernest Vaux. It is one of Britain’s oldest beers, and while the Vaux brewery closed, the beer was revived by the Double Maxim Brewery in 1999. 

My homebrew favourite is IPA. IPA stands for India Pale Ale, which was shipped out to India for British troops in the Victorian era. Counter examples can of course, be cited. Another north-east favourite is a pint of Jarrow Brewery’s dark ruby ale, Red Ellen, named after Labour Party MP and firebrand socialist Ellen Wilkinson. Beer has been used to promote nationalism but can be used to celebrate socialism too.

The idea that three-dimensional printing will revolutionise society is often expressed by technology utopians. A consideration of home brew suggests that such assumptions may be simplistic and technologically deterministic. 

While not an instant or exact process, home brewing is 3D printing for beer. Put the right ingredients in, take some care and you get beer. Cooking too is pretty much 3D printing for food. I regularly make my own pizza — it’s not very difficult. 

While we have many technologies that can be used to produce a variety of goods and services, most of us don’t have the access or knowledge to do so. It’s a little difficult to imagine us 3D printing complex household goods at present levels of technology, the Star Trek-style replicator being some distance in the future. It’s going to be a while before we can copy and print off mobile phones, radios, microwaves or cars.

Technology works in both a cultural dimension and within power structures. 3D printing, home-brew equipment and other technologies of grassroots reproduction could be used to liberate humanity. 

The positive possibilities of community production of goods and services have largely escaped the left, and …politicians from mainstream political parties seem to ignore this dimension of economics entirely. 

Greater “inward” investment from corporations is the neoliberal Holy Grail, but production for need, utilising human creativity, should become primary. 

However, in a capitalist society such technologies will be used to de-skill workers, reduce wages and widen the gap between the billionaires and the rest of us. 

It is essential that if more can be produced outside the formal market economy that this does not simply lead to unemployment and wage cuts. 

Essentially, we need to find ways of democratising the means of production. While I enjoy making beer, it would also be good to have the option of a community beer hall, where local people could use the best equipment to make ever more innovative brews. 

The democratic economy is enshrined in Marx’s writing, and we should strive for community ownership of the means of production. 

Yes, technologies like 3D printing could make this easier, but unless these are used for the common good rather than the benefit of a minority they will oppress rather than liberate. While not a home-brewer, Karl Marx, whose relevance is strong in so many matters, was a great beer drinker, often visiting the pubs on Tottenham Court Road when Engels was in town.

Derek Wall is the international coordinator of the Green Party