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Hi all, for the last few batches I've been using starsan rather than chlorine based sterlisation solutions. My water here is too hard for starsan to work though so I had to use deionised water for the shop and have just been reusing it. Yesterday when I racked it to my fermenter it had turned...

Has anyone ever tried making a mead with manuka honey? Is it nice? Or just not worth it at all? It usually costs about £10 a pot here so I always just ignored it, but just spotted some for about £3 a pot so I could probably manage a small 2L batch with 3 or 4 pots.

Last July I found some rather funky Tropical Mead from the Zambian rain forrests that I figured had to be worth a try. I used 4lb of the honey in a 5 litre batch and while I don't remember if I took an FG, as far as my taste buds are concerned it's dry. As it was a 5 litre batch I had a...

Hi all, 3 - 4 months ago I posted about a mead that was... unintentionally high in gravity. I had decided to throw together all the random pots of honey I had collected over the last few months, as well as finish off the bucket of honey I had been using - as there wasn't enough in it to make a...

Hi all, I currently do 5 litre batches normally, which are fairly experimental anyway, but I also have some 2 litre bottles that are just asking to have something brewed in them. I have so far got a test batch of capsicumel in one of them and am looking for inspiration for the others. I'm...

At the start of this week I bottled by raspberry mead, which is supposed to be carbonated. It's a 5 litre batch, I added 60g sugar and bottled in plastic. Should I be able to see activity? How long does it take to carb up a bottle when the wine was cleared? Or will I have to reopen and add some...

Ok so I have just boiled by second attempt at an AG (BIAB) beer, this time it's a lager and I now have it in a fridge coming down to pitching temps. It's a 1 imp gallon batch. It's been in the fridge a couple of hours and a good 2 inches of crap is sitting on the bottom. I guess my question...

The other night I decided to make a quick and dirty mead using all the small pots of honey I bought as taste tests, what was left of my big bucket of honey and fake banana stuff. You see, I went to Turkey on holiday this year, and everyone was selling this instant hot drink powder. I picked up a...

So, a friend bought me over a whole freezer draws worth of elder berries. I was going to ask if I needed to de-stem them before use, but having gone too google it seems that not only do I need to destem, but also cook them too? So, is there a quick way to do so? Or am I missing something? How...

So my first all grain batch attempt wasn't perfect, the yeast I used clearly wasn't up to much and way too much of the sugars don't seem to have been fermentable. At the point where I thought it was stuck, I decided to attempt using a starter (of sorts, I only had a few hours to get some...

I made a melon melomel a while back that used melon juice for all of the liquid. Once it had finished I crashed it, racked of the yeast and then used camden and sorbate as well as topping off with more juice. It's since Sat failing to fully clear for a good few months. Last weekend I had a taste...

I attempted a biab all grain batch a few weeks ago that surprised me by going really really slowly. Today it had negative pressure in the airlock so I moved it to a secondary taking a bit of the trub with it. It's now got possitive pressure again but not much so i will leave it another while and...

Ive just put them in the freezer, what's the best way of dealing with them next? Sweeze them through a muslin bag? Blend and boil them, stick them in whole? Thanks in advance!

This weekend just gone I decided to throw caution to the wind and attempt an AG batch using BIAB. I used too little water for the mash/sparge but I seemed to get an OG roughly where the recipe said so wasn't too worried. Rehydrated some nottingham ive had in the fridge a little while (a month or...

Has anyone used these before? I just found them at ASDA, are sort if sweet with a spicyness to them. Almost tempted but not sure if they will work.

I live in an area where our water is about a ph of 8, which I have just found out turns starsan instantly cloudy. Is a mixture like this completely useless, or will it work for one session? If not, is there anything I can do to make it work? I can buy distilled water but its not exactly cheap...

My melon mead, on Friday, was nice and clear after using kwik clear on it, with a small amount of sedimentat the bottom. I was away over the weekend and expected it to have dropped some more and be ready to bottle. However, while there is a bit more sediment, i now can't even see my hand through...

After a number of meads that haven't killed anyone yet swmbo has finally put in a request for "raspberry fizz". Ok so I'm guessing a mix of berrys and either sugar or honey will get the job done, and I will look though the forums for a recipe closer to the time. What I'm interested in knowing is...

I found a load of jars of this: http://www.tropicalforest.com/Tropical_Forest/Organic_Forest_Honey_Ethiopian_Clear.html (but the Zambian version) I got myself 4 pounds of it, looks to be untreated. Has anyone made a mead with this? I would like to do this one as well as I can so it will be...

My kegs have finally arived with bungs that have a hole in the middle. They look like the attached pic. As a test a put one in the keg... it took me a good ten minutes, sore fingers and a bent spoon to get it back out again. I have now ordered a different type of bung that i'm hoping wont be...