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I've got my bees so I'm throwing honey into everything. I'm generally very pleased with the results but I'm trying to find ways to counter the thinning effect of high proportions of honey without swamping the flavour. My latest batch is satisfying but not quite perfected - 10l 1.4 kg pale...

Off work with a foot in plaster but that won't stop me making beer! To keep boredom at bay I've had an online malt shopping spree. Bought myself a big pile of pale oat malt and decided to make something hoppy. I was toying with adding 500g torrefied wheat but thought better of it Maris otter...

I got the blogging bug when I got the bees - here's a couple of brewing related posts. I must post an update on the quadruple brew day ( damn that was a busy day! ) http://thenakedapiarist.com/2015/10/20/try-a-little-bitterness/ http://thenakedapiarist.com/2015/09/03/quadruple-brew-wednesday/

My first year of bee keeping coming to a close and I have buckets of honey to play with. I like fermenting my beers out very dry and like the aromatic aroma that the honey adds when the sugar's been taken away. The trouble is, honey has a pH around 3.9 and using largish proportions in a brew...

Bees have been occupying most of my spare time but I've been quietly brewing. I thought I'd try using my sourdough to brew - originally my plan was to sour part of the mash then add it to the boil and ferment normally but my yeast culture didn't make it so I pitched sourdough starter as...

Hi I've not been on for a while due to disruption of everything by builders and arrival of a bunch of bees. Can't remember my photobucket login to post online but here's the youngsters just before transplanting - The clear pot isn't XWBC, it's the other one's I can remember the lineage of...

I'm using my elderflower yeast again - It worked well in the ginger saison but I didn't particularly like the brew - which was down to recipe not yeast as also did a batch with saison yeast. I thought I'd try it with something a bit more robust - 1.8kg Pale maris otter 200g Crystal Rye...

Whilst I'm waiting for my bees to arrive :) I've bought some honey off a local beekeeper and set up another batch of honey beer. I'm aiming for a pronounced honey flavour here so it makes up quit a large proportion of the fermentables and to retain some body I've mashed high and included...

Inspired by but in no way meant to be a clone of Brewdog's 5am Saint after doing a beer school session. Aiming for something dark red with grapefruity and grassy aromas. Pale malt 1.27kg Wheat malt 0.5kg Black malt 60g Crystal rye 110g Amber malt 140g Mashed at 68C Simcoe 10g...

I want to do a brew involving a range of dark malts aiming to bring out the liquorice and fruity notes of the malts using flyer and bramling cross to accentuate that. I've done two brews recently that came out really well and I'm going to use as the base -( both are 12l ) they were - 2kg...

Feels like I've been away for ages. I had an op to take out a neck lump ( benign ) a few weeks ago. Supposed to be in overnight, ended up with 4 days on the ward with a plastic tube stuck out of neck cos it wouldn't stop bleeding. Out for all of 18 hours before I was rushed in with track marks...

So the year's nearly up and it's seen a lot of brewing. I'm going through my notes and planning for 2015. There are definitely some I'll be repeating and some lessons learnt The failures I give up on Munich malt, all those brews have been disappointing and thin, maybe try again some other...

I bought these ages ago to push an order into the free tastedelivery range, finally got round to using them. Flyer's supposed to have fruity notes so I thought it would go well with the black malt 2kg pale malt 500g pale rye malt 215g black malt Mashed at 69c 16g Flyer 90 min 16g...

Had a fridge clear out of the old strains and gave this stuff one last chance - it's cooler now and rather than using the isolated colonies I've gone back to the original ferment with its mixed selection. It's also colder so I'm hoping I won't get the ethyl acetate trouble I had over the summer...

Pale malt 1.2Kg Brown malt 1.5Kg Munich malt 0.5Kg Challenger 35g 90min Challenger 35g 30min 13l Irish Moss Safale S33 - trappist style. Bret culture from Wild beer co Bret IPA Mashed 2/3 at 69C, 1/3 at 66C OG 1070 Set this up 3 weeks ago. Over boiled :( which is why I never...

I have two surpluses in the garden - gravel and cement and since the compost heap's full for the moment I needed something to do with my spent grain. I also needed some edging for the newly dug hop beds, ahem - I mean flower and veg borders if my other half's reading this. The obvious thing...

Set up a simple brew at the weekend 2kg pale malt 500g Munich Mashed @ 69c 30g fuggles 90min 12l Og 1043 Split into 8 and 4 Gave the 8 my 20g of newly dried Mathon into the fermenter and Burton yeasy 4l got Brett from a wildbeer co ipa Waiting.......

I took a cone of my Mathon yesterday to check for ripeness, looks like it's got a couple of weeks to go. To my surprise there was a single seed in the cone - a nice fat juicy one but it wasn't ripe. This means there are probably one or two seeds in the other cones as well and I'm keen to...

I'm going through a lot of historical recipes at the mo. and many of them utilise a split mash using with separate batches being mashed at different temperatures and combined for the boil. What does this gain over a temperature stepped mash? Is it just that a commercial brewery will have...

Much earlier than I was expecting - my Bramling's about 4 weeks behind.