The Home Brew Site

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…)

So my little sister is a keen cider drinker. I never much care for it myself, but I thought I’d have a go and make some cider. I found a simple recipe on the old t’internet. It goes something like this.

Take 5 cartons of apple juice, now try to get the ones that are just apple juice no flavours or anything else. Empty 4 and a half of them into a sterilised demi john. Then get some yeast, I added wine yeast as I had a pot of it, I used about a teasp full. By my reckoning without adding any water it’ll be about 7%. About 5 days later it had finished bubbling.

I bottled it in 8 75cl pressure bottles, I divided the wine evenly between each bottle then topped each with water. This should bring the alcohol down to about 5%. I primed the bottles with sugar as you would beer, 2 teasps per 75cl. This is quite a lot so should make it quite fizzy. I also added two sacharin tablets per bottle to sweeten the cider, it is very dry straight out of the demi john.

Store the bottles in a warm place, a few days later the cider should be clear. I’ll give a month or so then try it.

[tags]homemade cider, homebrew recipe[/tags]

I mentioned a while ago about making some pear wine using a fruit juicer to well that was about 3 weeks ago and well the pear wine is still ferementing. Last night I filtered out some on the pear pulp that had built up. I tasted the wine and phew it was strong. Far too strong to be a wine so. I’m renaming it a pear Liquer. As a liquer it is really tastey, there is a strong pear flavour but it is pretty tastey.

Here is the recipe should you want some a gallon of pear liquer yourself.

4lb Pears.

2.2lbs sugar

2 lemons

Country wine yeast

Sterilise the fruit by washing it in sterilising fluid, then run it through a juicer empty the juice into the demi john, add a couple of pints of hot water then dissolve in the sugar. Top up to a gallon with cold water and add the yeast.

It may take about 3 weeks to ferment, you may need to rack the wine a couple of times to leave the pulp behind. You should get about 4 bottle of liquer. Should you wish to make it into a wine then add some water to reduce the alcohol level.

[tags]winemaking, home made wine, homebrew[/tags]

This is my third attempt at making a good stout, and this the first brew that I shall be laying down for Christmas. This brew starts life as a MountMerrlick Dublin stout, which is quite a good stout kit as it is, but I like to make things a little more personalised. So the recipe is as follows……

1 Stout kit.

300 grms of Crystal Malt(steeped for 30 mins at 65C in a gallon of water)

100grms of Torrified Wheat. (steep with the malt)

500grm of Dark dried malt extract.

500 glucose.

28grms of goldings hops(boiled 15mins in 1g water)

This will be my first experiment using Torrified wheat. From what I have read the wheat gives the beer better head retention which should be perfect for a nice stout. I’ve tried this kit before and I thought it lacks a little flavour hence the addition of the Golding hops.

[tags]homebrew, homemade beer, homebeer brewing, homemade stout[/tags]

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.