Search results

People talk in hushed tones of the so-called "ginger beer plant" which used to get passed down from generation to generation, and around the neighbourhood, and was basically a continually regenerating starter that could be used to make natural soda-type ginger beer. Although you can buy...

I got some raw, dry cider from my local friendly cider microbrewer - he makes much more commercial stuff, but let me have some of the raw stuff to bottle myself. He's already fermented it completely dry and although he says it hasn't been pasteurised, I tried to revitalise a small quantity by...

I really suck at this maths stuff (I normally just get ballpark figures using online calculators), so can someone help here? Making this year's batch of ginger wine (about 20L). I used about half actual white grape must this time, bought from the local vineyards for a bargain price, rather...

I am making some ginger wine using half mulched grapes/juice and the rest sugar, and the usual ginger wine ingredients (lemon juice/rind, bananas etc.) I was thinking, ginger wine might make a nice little flavoured vinegar to spice up salads - strange though, haven't found anyone mentioning...

Damn', my 5L batch, painstakingly juiced with an electric juicer, pitched with S04 ale yeast is now officially vinegar. In fact, thinking back, it has had a somewhat sour smell (detected by sniffing at the airlock) from fairly early on, guess it was doomed from the start. Problem is, I only...

I got a mixture of apples from a local orchard and pressed them, pitched a Bayanus cider yeast into most of the batch, but left literally just a litre bottle of the same juice as-is and put an airlock on it just to see what happens as I have never tried brewing with wild yeast. Once it got...

Getting malt in my part of the world is a tad difficult, however, getting big sacks of barley leavings from the combine is not, especially if you promise the driver a liquid commission ;). Thing is, this barley, though it appears to be two-row (no stalks to be found in the sack, so I can't...

OK, so I wanted to juice my own apples up and brew up some of the real stuff, but I don't have a press so I had to use a juicer (extracts about 50% juice by weight of apples, pretty bad, but then I do some manual squeezing to get as high as 65-70%). Thing is, it's so laborious that I have done...

Thoughts? Now that apples are the cheapest they'll get all year, I want to get a ton (well, not a literal ton, a few crates) in and use SOME for brewing cider now. Can the unneeded juice be frozen and used for brewing cider later, or even just for drinking in unfermented form? Does anything...

OK, where I live (a country in the depths of Eastern Europe) there are no: - beer kits - speciality malts/grains of any kind All we have readily available (apart from as much unmalted barley as you could ever wish for) is a kind of basic liquid pale malt extract sold in jars as a health...

Homebrewing supplies are a bit thin on the ground in my part of the world. So I came across sachets of "Wine yeast", indicated simply as: Saccharomyces cerevisae and as being produced by Enartis, Italy. And apart from instructions for rehydration at 35-38C using yeast nutrient (comes in a...

* DELURK * Awesome forum here, time to actually wade in. I have just been trying my hand at really simple cider using store apple juice. Got a brew foaming and bubbling merrily away. But disaster has struck, I just realised my vessel (more like a big glass jar than a carboy - using what I...