Recent content by Catsnstuff

Thanks very much! From the sounds of it, I think we'll be experimenting with not racking to secondary. At this stage in learning, the less I muck around with it, the safer I feel. :P

Hi everyone, We're trying a couple of batches of Apfelwein, based loosely on Ed Wort's. I notice that his recipe says "racking to a secondary is not necessary", and indeed, we tried doing this for our first batch after several weeks and I think it was a mistake - it was still bubbling a fair...

I haven't done this, but am throwing this thought out there: lot of red fruit teas use hibiscus flowers, which you can probably find dry. They have a really tart flavour that might come out in your cider, but then you'd be fermenting them, not brewing them. Rose hips are also quite tart, so...

One of the other threads mentions that brewers' yeast is tolerant of campden tablets. If you were adding the fruit to the secondary, would you then be able to campden it without killing your useful yeast?

Haha, yes! We are growing several varieties of chillies, and they can vary considerably even on the same plant. For cooking, we blend them 50/50 with vinegar to make batches of sauce - that way we always know what we're adding. I've heard to can go 70/30 chillies/vinegar, but it needs some...

I'm a newbie to brewing, but I know that cinnamon contains a fair amount of mucilage - try chewing on a good-quality stick and you'll soon see this, or squeeze a used herbal teabag that had cinnamon in it. I wonder if this is the "sliminess" people say they find when using this spice.

It'll void your warranty, if that's relevant to you! :P

Thanks for your replies. We moved the cider yesterday. I suspect it may have already had excessive oxygen contact, having tried some from near the lees - I haven't tried cooking sherry, but I would expect it to taste a little like this. Still, we'll keep it and see what happens, since these are...

Fantastic, thank you both! :) We'll do it tonight. I'd definitely be reassured by a bubbling airlock!

Thanks very much for the help with my previous question. Our first batch had its first fermentation for a little over a week in buckets, then syphoned into its second in buckets with lids and airlocks, currently 1.5 weeks. Then, we received our demijohns by courier today! Is it OK to syphon...

Hi Yooper, Thanks so much for that! That's all very useful, and the honey sounds really very tempting. If I can get some reasonably priced stuff (a friend makes mead, so should be able to hook us up) I might even try "cyser" - I hadn't heard of it before looking at this website, but it sounds...

Hi everyone, This is my first post here, AND the first attempt by my husband and myself at brewing cider (or indeed anything). It was just about 9 litres (2.3 gallons) from our tree, which I think is granny smith or something similar. It started off quite informally, like the beer and...