Around 1988 (aged 15) I'd been given a Boots make your own wine kit for Christmas, which I loved because I like learning things and finding things out - even though I didn't drink at the time. The wine was passable according to my limited/non existent experience.
I was keen to try beer just to learn more but didn't fancy buying all the equipment. Then, the Sun newspaper ran a competition to win a Boots Home Beer kit, 40 glass bottles and all. All you had to do was write in.
To my amazement, I "won" - what's the chances of that? Well quite high as it turned out, as I had to travel to a specific store in Mansfield to pick it up (quite a trip for a kid from a council estate) - and on arriving at the store, there were great mountains of boxes all labelled "Sun Homebrew winners kit".
Even then I was savvy enough to work out this was a warehouse clearance that had been cleverly disguised as a competition. I bet they didn't even have enough entrants to cover the stock they were shifting.
Ah well gift horses and all that. I carted the kit home, did the brew, learnt nothing, thought that it tasted of brown sludge (and with zero experience of beer, it put me off beer for many many years). Bottles (full) stayed in my mum's shed until she moved out in 2002. For a laugh, I tried one - it had certainly not matured.
Happy memories but it took a lot of years before I came back to try again.
