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.

Wow it’s been a bit busy of late for me, what with moving house and our first baby on the way.

The new house has given me the oppurtunity to acquire a new boiler, well not some much of a boiler rather a huge pan. It does work a treat though, I made a batch of pale ale for christmas, which I must say was pretty good, I’ll post the recipe shortly as it is probably the best I’ve come up with yet.

Before Christmas I was chatting with the guy in the homebrew shop, he tells me the price of a pint here in the uk is set to hit 3 quid a pint. Even the price of the better ale kits has risen by 2 pounds a kits. All as a result of the crappy british summer last year. Grain harvest has been poor, the weather has also effected the hops harvest. Muntons have responded by putting up the price of their beer kits.

The moral of the tale of course is to brew your own from scratch, whether it be from malt extract or from grain. It tastes better than the processed beer you get in the a lot of pubs.

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