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.

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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.

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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.