The Home Brew Site

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.

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The Spitfire as a premium Ale is a superb beer. Here is my clone of the famous premium ale. It also fits nicely along side, my other beers, the Lancastor bomber, the mosquito bomber and the hurricane ale. This is simalar to the recipe found in the book Clone brews.

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I’ve finally got around to devising something for the Lancastor bomber, the last of my squadron of beer. The idea with this brew is a dark winter ale. It will be slightly stronger at around 5.2%, hopefully.

I’m based it on a recipe, in the book ‘Clone Brews’, for Old Perculiar, only I’ve tweeked a couple of things. We’ll see how it turns out. I goes something like this. I’ve made this in a 2 gallon batch, as my pan isn’t big enough for more, you can scale it up as required. (more…)