The Home Brew Site

If you go to your local supermarket you may find a lot of beer kits available, Wilkos is our closest. Incidently they have woodefordes Wherry at 15 quid. Bargain!!! They have Geordie bitter kits at £4.99 which is great.

The only problem with the geordie kits is that they have a homebrew taste. For the different brews I’ve tried this is caused not because of the water but the sugar. Cane sugar, imparts that homebrew taste. A kilo of sugar is way too much for a beer. Now you can use things like candy sugar in beer recipes because you want to add a tangy flavour, but you only use say 100grams of the stuff.

Now if you really want to improve the flavour, personally I think you have to add fresh ingredients. Save that bag of sugar for your morning tea. Use some glucose, instead of sugar 400grms, they use spray dried extract. Dark is good, for the darker ales. I used a kilo of light sprayed dried malt in a geordie kit, it was lovely nice full body.

The best results I’ve found is using crystal malt hops. Heat a pan of water as big a pan as you have. You need the water to be about 60-70C add crystal malt, for about 20 mins. Using a muslin bag helps, as it makes it easy to remove all the grain in on go. Then add an 1oz, of hops and boil for 15 mins, no longer. This will bring the hop flavour from the hops and shouldn’t add any more bitterness. For a ale you can’t be fuggles, or golding hops. If you have a light ale use cascade hops, they add a slight citrus flavour excellent for a summer ale. Remove the hops from the water and add this water into the barrel and make up the kit then with you mix of malt and sugar.

Doing this shouldn’t add to much cost but will make the beer tastier and give it a personal touch. Give a whirl on your next beer kit.

Arh the eternal question, too keg or not too keg?

It is actually a tricky descision, unfortunately there is no right answer. The decision whether you bottle the beer or keg it is largely dependent on a number of factors.

You’ve made your beer you are please that it has turned out well, now what, do  you keg it bottle it in big bottles or little bottles.

Bottling beer.

The old faithful is bottling beer, I’ve tried bottling beer in smaller pint bottles and in the larger PET (fizzy drink bottles). Both methods have been successful.

Bottling in smaller pint bottles is great because the beer lasts the longest, there is little oxidation in smaller glass bottles so the beer will last a couple of years. Personally this is perfect when you have made a batch of beer that you really like you can build a stock of beer that you can sneak a pint every now and then. Plus they will fit nicely in the fridge. The down side of course is that 40 bottles is a lot to wash and sterilise, and of course to store, they do tend to take a lot of shelf space.

The next size up is the 2L coke type bottle. Just like its smaller brother the beer does last in the larger bottle. The downside is there is 4 pints to a bottle, so once open you have to drink the 4 pints, it’ll go flat pretty quickly once open. Serving beer from a 2L bottle gets tricky, once you start pouring you can’t stop so you do need a 4 pint jug to decant into.

Kegs and Barrels

The cornelius keg is regarded as the rolls royce of kegs for homebrew, I have 2. Serving a pint from a corny keg produces a lovely smooth pint, with just the right head. As close to the pub as you can get. They do have there downsides, the beer needs to be crystal clear before it goes into the keg. So you need an extra fermenter to settle the beer. The kegs themselves are expensive I think they are nearly £70 ($140).  They do provide a tidy way to store 4 gallons of beer though. They also have a limited shelf life, about 4 months, after that the beer starts tasting funny.

Barrels are cheaper than kegs, they don’t need the beer to be super clear when you fill them, again the beer only lasts 3-4months. With a barrel though you can’t move the barrel so whereever you put it if you move it you’ll stir up the sediment.

So what to do, well I use a corny keg for beer that I really like and will drink 4 gallons in a couple of months. If I make a special recipes, ie Christmas ales, I’ll bottle them in pint bottles. Beers like stouts that I like but won’t drink a lot of i’ll bottle in 2L bottles.

Here is a trick  though, I have a 2 gallon barrel. If you have people coming around for the evening and you fancy a few beers, siphon 4 2L bottles into the barrel. The beer will be clear so you can wave the barrel around, and because you can gas the barrel the beer won’t go flat. Doing this the beer will last a good month in the mini barrel.

The conclusion to all this is there is no right answer, a combination works for me, look at how much space you have and how much beer you drink.

I was in Tescos a little while ago I walked past the reduced item shelves and there was a whole trolley full of reduced plums. They were reduced to something like 30p a punnet. Excellent I thought, so I filled my basket. I took me a little while to wash and sterilise the fruit and remove the stones. I ran them through the blender to reduce them to a pulp, and put them in the 2 gallon bucket I have. I added about 2 gallons of water and a bag of sugar, as you can see I didn’t carefully measure anything. I think in total there was 7 punnets of plums. I used some basic wine yeast that is widely available in supermarkets.

I actually didn’t rush, once it was sealed in the fermenter I left it for probably a month or 6 weeks. I transferred it to a couple of demi john the other day. Leaving behind all the pulp. The resulting wine is a lovely rose wine. I’ll leaving it for a while in the demi johns to clear, before I transfer it into the final bottles.

All in all for about £1.50 I have 2 gallons of superb rose wine, by Christmas the wine should have matured nicely. This is the real advantage with fruit wines, they get better with time. Definately worth keeping an eye on the supermarket shelves for some bargain fruit.

Wow it’s been a bit busy of late for me, what with moving house and our first baby on the way.

The new house has given me the oppurtunity to acquire a new boiler, well not some much of a boiler rather a huge pan. It does work a treat though, I made a batch of pale ale for christmas, which I must say was pretty good, I’ll post the recipe shortly as it is probably the best I’ve come up with yet.

Before Christmas I was chatting with the guy in the homebrew shop, he tells me the price of a pint here in the uk is set to hit 3 quid a pint. Even the price of the better ale kits has risen by 2 pounds a kits. All as a result of the crappy british summer last year. Grain harvest has been poor, the weather has also effected the hops harvest. Muntons have responded by putting up the price of their beer kits.

The moral of the tale of course is to brew your own from scratch, whether it be from malt extract or from grain. It tastes better than the processed beer you get in the a lot of pubs.

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