The Home Brew Site

Just a quick post, I’ve found a neat little way to prime pint bottles. Normally I try to squeeze in a half a teaspoon of dried malt extract into the bottle with inevitable sticky mess on the side of the bottle.

So next time I shall do it like this, take the malt, about 200grm for  a 40 pint kit. Then mix this with water to 200ml, and boil it briefly for a few minutes to make sure it is sterilised. Leave to cool whilst you are sterilising your bottles.

Then using a syringe, I use one from my sons Collic medicine, which is good because it has a notch at 5ml. Take 5mls and squirt it into each bottle. No mess and much quicker.

This will also work well if you use honey or anything else to prime your beer.

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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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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