The Home Brew Site

Now should you ever get stuck unable to get into that beer bottle then give this a whirl.

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[tags]beer bottles, beer stuff[/tags]

Making country wines using fresh fruit is the real way to make wine, I always feel as though I’m cheating using wine kits. Kits do make good wines but you can’t beat making wine from fresh fruit. There is a but, making wine from fresh fruit can be time consuming, waiting days to extract the juice from the fruit, mashing and straining in this age of technology there must be a quicker way.

Step in the latest craze, have you seen those late night informercials that go on forever, the ones I’m interested in are the ones for the latest fruit juice makers. Now there claims for giving you shiny hair and making you 4 pant sizes smaller is all well and good, but they do a great job of extracting the juice from that fresh fruit. Chop up the fruit, chuck it in the top, a roar and a splat later and out comes the juice, strain any lumps that have got through, pour the juice in the demijohn add your required sugar and water, sprinkle on your yeast and the job is done, country wine in half the time.

I tried my first experiment like this last night. I made some rhubarb wine and some pear wine. The juicer did an excellent job of reducing 4lb of pears into pear juice just right for winemaking. The only thing I found is you have to sterilse the juicer, but they come apart easily enough just drop them in a bowl of steriliser for a few minutes rinse them off and you are done, juice away.

I’ve made quite a few wines now from various kits. So far none gone bad, but from the same type of kit sometime they turn out really good sometimes they turn out just ok. Now you can make some really nice wines from even the most basic kit. I’ve had some nice results from a ‘Basic Red’ wine kit, I think they are made by brewmakers. There are a couple of things I’ve found though that make it that bit better.

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Here is it my first attempt at a extract brew. I reckon it’s working pretty well. I started it yesterday. I’ve kept it fairly simple and used the ingredients that I have to hand. It’s a dry run as it were before I have a go at making one of the clone ales.

It starts with steeping 200grms of crystal malt in 3 l of water (I’m only making 2 gallons of beer in total as I don’t have a bigger pan yet) I heated the water to 65C then using a muslin bag to contain the grains dropped them in and let them sit for 20 mins.

I removed the grains and brought the water to the boil, once boiling I pulled the pan off the heat and added the 1.5kg of Pale liquid malt extract. It’s important to remove the pan from the heat whilst the extract dissolves other wise is burns the extract which is not a good thing. Return the pan to the heat and add 1.5 oz of goldings hops, again in a muslin bag to save straining later, the wort is then kept at a rolling boil for 45mins. The final stage is to add 0.5 oz of Fuggles hops for the last 15mins.

The pan is removed from the heat, and left to cool for 15mins before adding to the brew bin and topping up with cold water to 10l or 2gallons(UK). I used Gervin English Ale yeast.

So far so good the beer has started fermenting and exploded all over, my fault I over filled the ferementer. It does smell nice even though it’s not beer yet. It’s got a sort of coppery colour, so hopefully it won’t be poisonous when done.