BACKYARD brewer Sean Ayling has created a beer-lovers' fantasy. He has not only turned his shed into his very own pub but he brews beer at 25p a pint.

Gone are the days when Sean trudged to his local to pay as much as £3.40 for a beer. And he has even given up going to the supermarket to stock up with supplies.

Now he has come up with his own solution to rising prices – he has turned the shed at the bottom of his garden into a brewery.

Sean, from South Street, Whitstable, said: "Even with all the supermarkets' Christmas offers the lowest-priced beers were still 80p a pint which is three times the price of mine. And mine tastes better."

The only downside to "Shed man" Sean's ingenious solution is that he is giving too much of it away.

He said: "If I sell it, the tax man would be on me in a flash."

A national survey found the average pub was paying £1.14 in tax on every pint pulled.

Sean said: "I am staying well clear of that one. It is obscene what the government has done to the pub trade. I would advise everyone who loves beer to head off into their shed and brew it themselves."

Luckily for Sean, one of his mates is Eddie Gadd, who owns Ramsgate's professional real ale operation Gadds Brewery.

Sean admitted: "Eddie helped me design the equipment and lent me a few bits, like my wert chillers, to get me up and running. But most items are included in home-brew kits.

"The only problem with off-the-shelf kits is they are quite small and the beer ends up costing at least 50p a pint. With waste and spillage it is easy to end up spending more than you would popping to the supermarket.

"But to be honest, the price is just a bonus. Making beer has become my passion."

The only problem with his South Street Shed brewery is that plunging winter temperatures are causing havoc with his fermentations. So he has temporarily shipped some of his apparatus into the centrally-heated kitchen.

He said: "Brewing takes a minimum of six hours so I have to time it for a day when my wife is away so she doesn't get upset by all the mess and clutter."

We watched the home-brew master at work and took notes. He started with 40 litres of water, or 72 pints, and poured it into a barrel containing an electric heating element from a domestic kettle.

In went the grains, a 6kg mix of malt and barley, and a kilo of oats. He confessed: "I went to Tesco and bought some porridge oats but they are exactly the same, so it is not really cheating."

He heated the "mash" for a full hour at 80 degrees in his home made "tun."

He added: "Brewers have an awful lot of silly names for things, hang on while I sparge my wert."

(The wert is the boiled mixture once the grain has been sieved out and sparging is getting the right amount of natural sugar out of the grain)!

Just a few hops were then tossed in and the mixture boiled for another 15 minutes. Without them, the beer remains a cloudy and dark super-sweet gravy.

The chillers borrowed from Eddie Gadd were then plunged into the brew to reduce its temperature. The mix, which was now down to 20 litres, was poured into a fermenter.

Sean said: "I now pitch the yeast, which means sprinkling a bit on the top. It only needs 11.5 grams. That is enough to turn the natural sugar from the grain into alcohol.

"This brew comes in at 7.3 per cent proof but not all are as strong as that."

Sean explained that by increasing the amount of water and altering the mix he could regulate the amount of alcohol.

After placing the fermenter into a huge chest freezer, where it will stay for a week, he pulled a pint from his conservatory hand pumps.

He said with a smile: "Here's one I made earlier, a pint of Snob. It is short for School Night Ordinary Bitter. Because it has a lower 3.8 per cent alcohol content it can be drunk mid-week with no side effects. Cheers!"

The bitter was remarkably good and at 25p a pint tempting to down four for £1 – even on a school night.