Home Brew

[ColinW]

A couple of mates and I used to brew beer many years ago. In our experience the "success" rate (ie producing clear drinkable beer) went through the roof when we stopped using bottles. We all had different plastic "kegs", mine was the white spherical one with the balloon. It worked very well but was a bit of a faff compared to the one my mate had with the small CO2 cylinder. For those who don't know, these devices are intended to stop air getting to the beer, not to pressurize it.

The reason bottles don't really work is the secondary fermentation, this produces more yeast which it is all but impossible not to disturb when you take the cap off. As the pressure is released, the beer outgasses and the bubbles form on the sediment. Some people quite like cloudy beer, unfortunately I'm not one of them!

I was lucky because my dad's house has a cellar, so my keg was at the right temperature 24 hours a day and never disturbed. It was perfectly drinkable for about two weeks. It might well have kept longer than that, I never found out!

Some of the results using really basic kits were outstanding. The other advantage of the keg over bottles was that the results were repeatable. With a load of different sized bottles that was always very difficult.

As there were three of us we always had one ready to drink.

The only reason I don't still do it is that I don't really like drinking at home.

[Ken L]

My dad does cider on ocasion and my apple trees will be going in over this winter once the hard landscaping is done outside.

 

Colin. Bottles beat kegs any day of the week - and brown ale bottles are the best bottles because you can see when the sediment lifts as you pour it.

I suspect that if your sediment was lifting when you opened the bottle, you were either a little over keen to drink it (I leave mine at least three weeks - but three months is better) or you were over charging the bottles with sugar.

Quite apart from anything else, bottles fit in the fridge !

 

Ziggy. What on earth is "liquorice ginger"? The basic recipie of ginger and citrus for acid balance and grape juice/saltanas for body is easy enough to play with but even the mighty Google turns up zero hits for your secret ingredient.

 

BTW. The strong winter ale that I put on last night is going strong.

[Zigs]

My dad does cider on ocasion and my apple trees will be going in over this winter once the hard landscaping is done outside.

 

Colin. Bottles beat kegs any day of the week - and brown ale bottles are the best bottles because you can see when the sediment lifts as you pour it.

I suspect that if your sediment was lifting when you opened the bottle, you were either a little over keen to drink it (I leave mine at least three weeks - but three months is better) or you were over charging the bottles with sugar.

Quite apart from anything else, bottles fit in the fridge !

 

Ziggy. What on earth is "liquorice ginger"? The basic recipie of ginger and citrus for acid balance and grape juice/saltanas for body is easy enough to play with but even the mighty Google turns up zero hits for your secret ingredient.

 

BTW. The strong winter ale that I put on last night is going strong.

 

Good to hear the winter ale is coming on.

 

You're right Ken, they are keeping it quiet. Used to buy it in 2oz boxes from the Chinese supermarkets on gerrard st in soho. Every shop had some, could only find this by going thru google China http://www.darrelllea.com/ginger.php

 

But thats not the right colour, it had far more red food dye on it.

[Ken L]

Ah right. It's a product rather than a plant. I know there are half a dozen members of the ginger family regularly used in food (Ginger, tumeric, galangal, cardamon etc) and you had me thinking there was one that i hadn't heared of.

Edited July 13, 2010 by Ken L

[Zigs]

Ah right. It's a product rather than a plant. I know there are half a dozen members of the ginger family regularly used in food (Ginger, tumeric, galangal, cardamon etc) and you had me thinking there was one that i hadn't heared of.

 

Yeah, sorry Ken, didn't mean to mislead you. Its basically a chinese sweet, we used to munch it as an expectorant, cleared all the crap out of your lungs after a good photochemical smog. Really suprised that its not on the online chinese supermarkets lists, we used to buy it regular, along with dried jellyfish.

[Ken L]

Dried jellyfish is just weired. Dried and rolled squid or cuttle with lemon and chilli on the other hand is great.

And strangely, having had to pay £4.50 a bottle for Sherry for my chinese cooking I was thinking that I need to buy some Shaohsing rice wine next time I visit the Chinese supermarket - unless of course I just make something equivelent.

[Zigs]

Dried jellyfish is just weired. Dried and rolled squid or cuttle with lemon and chilli on the other hand is great.

And strangely, having had to pay £4.50 a bottle for Sherry for my chinese cooking I was thinking that I need to buy some Shaohsing rice wine next time I visit the Chinese supermarket - unless of course I just make something equivelent.

 

Dried jellyfish were great for putting in peoples swimming pools. Once they'd re hydrated, the owners hadn't a clue how they'd got there.

 

Don't know about the rice wine, but I used to bulk shop for soy sauce. If you buy 10 two litre bottles of plain soy, by the time you've got onto the 3rd bottle, its matured into something like tamari.

 

Want to try the dried squid & cuttle now, but i'm skint in the middle of nowhere

[chesters1]

Any of you guys do a home made errrr whiskey or whisky we, eeeerrrrr i can errrrrr test out for you.

i used to it was called EL Slurpo ,took wax straight off the floor, burned longer than polmos

i used to have some great recipes for ginger beer in an old chemists formulary but i lost it ,reel ginger beer thats brewed not the fizzy stuff they call it nowadays ,there was also a cola recipe with coca leaves as well ,impossible to get coca leaves and half the ingredients for the scores of other stuff

Edited July 14, 2010 by chesters1

[Ken L]

Ginger beer. Now there's a idea. I have some little cider bottles that will be just the job and there's bound to be a decent recipir on the net.

Love the dried jellyfish prank. Ohhh I'm so tempted. How long do they take to rehydrate ?

[chesters1]

just stumbled over the book used as reference in the victorian farm series (good series worth a look as was the others) several recipes for beer ,wine etc (ginger beer 167)

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=70ICAAA...p;q&f=false

 

you will need to fractionate the quantities plus convert to metric for the small ingredients needed

Edited July 16, 2010 by chesters1