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Sorry I disappeared all, got distracted by Christmas ;) Well it's still bubbling away so didn't make it in time for Christmas anyway. Thanks for the useful tips. I like the ideas with experimenting with adding yeast or not. Maybe if it doesn't work again I will try a batch without lemon and...

Oops, that was stupid, sorry forgot to mention the 500g caster sugar! I boil up the ginger for about an hour, add the lemon juice towards the end, dissolve in the sugar, stir it up, put it in a gallon jar with an air lock, wait for it to get to the right temp, and then add rehydrated...

Thanks boydster. But I can't help wondering if it will work. You see, that would be doing exactly what I did last time: racking into bottles, added plenty of priming sugar, and leaving at same temp or slightly above. And it didn't work. Any more ideas about what might have gone wrong?

OK thanks for the honest reply! I guess I could try transferring some of the sediment this time then. Temperature shouldn't be a problem because I was storing bottles at the same temp as the fermentation jug. I must admit I am also in a slight hurry because I want it ready for Christmas...

Hi all! I am on my second batch of ginger beer (gallon water, 200g grated ginger, juice 2 lemons, nottingham yeast) EDIT FORGOT TO WRITE 500g SUGAR! I was very pleased with the first batch except for one thing. After I fermented to dry, and added 7 teaspoons sugar to each 1.5 litre bottle (I...

Great thanks, that puts my mind to rest. I've thought about filtering but when I've done it like this before I've found that in the end the solid stuff ends up just falling down with the lees and you loose it when you rack. But if I had a nice piece of nylon I might have used it! Cheers, Ben

Hi folks! I hope someone can help me with a tricky decision about what to do with a batch of cider that I accidentally double dosed with metabisulphite. I intended to kill the wild yeast prior to pitching yeast into the 30 litre (8 gallon) bucket full of apple juice I juiced myself. After two...

Alright Mike, thanks for the advice! I have just left it. Still no bubbling according to my wife but I guess it will just have to wait a week till I get back and measure the SG to see it there was any activity. Even if the yeast is dead, I guess the juice will be alright waiting another week...

Hi all! I've got a 25 litre bucket full of apple juice, into which I pictched yeast almost three days ago. No bubbling in the airlock yet. I made the juice using a kitchen juicer so it has more sediment at the bottom than one would normally have, but it worked fine like this last time. On the...

Thanks for all the extra advice folks! Nice to hear from loads of people who sound like they know what they are talking about. I reckon I'm just going to drink most of it soon, so it shouldn't be a problem even though there may not be a C02 blanket. I'll bottle some for some longer term...

Thanks a lot for the tip! I went to the brew shop and they had small cannisters of CO2 but no way to dispense it except quite expensive soda machines. I didn't feel confident about making something myself to crack open the cannister - messing about with very cold pressurised gas feels a bit...

Hi there! We (thought we) had enough fermented cider that it was going to easily fill a 25 litre demijohn when we siphoned it off the lees. However, we hadn't calculated that the lees themselves were taking up a lot of volume, nor that siphoning the last couple of litres was going to be really...

Thats exactly what I did! I like flat dry cider so I'm not planning on complicating with further additions. But, one thing I have consistently read regarding making cider like this (e.g. here http://homepage.ntlworld.com/scrumpy/cider/cider.htm) is that a long period of maturation following...

Thanks a lot for talking me down from my panic folks! I'm a first time brewer as you can probably tell! I never would have got into brewing if it hadn't sickened me to see so many apples rotting on the ground in my part of Stockholm last Autumn... but I can see it becoming a habit now...

Thanks very much for your reply Revvy! (which I only read after posting my last post). I have a kind of bucket with a really really tight lid so I'm confident that gas doesn't escape. But the explanation about how disturbing the brew can make it release gas really fits what I am observing. So...

I've been doing some more reading. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but: It can't be something producing vinegar, because what does that is acetobacter, and that using oxygen and produces no gas. So it would not be causing a pressure increase in the bucket. It _could_ be lactobacillus because...

Thanks for the answer! I am pretty confident - I used ample amounts of the right sort of disinfectant on the siphon and the gravity tester. But once you expose to the atmosphere, you can never be sure that some wild vinegar making yeast might not get in, isn't that right? Is what I am...

Hi! I have 30 litres of cider which seemes to have finished fermenting (was down from more than a bubble a minute at the start through the airlock to less than one every five minutes). I cracked open the bucket to test it a couple of days ago. Test test (very dry) and specific gravity...