Home brewing kits ....

I've just ordered myself a couple of 9L Brewferm Diabolo kits. I plan on doing them together, and intend on using golden syrup as a substitute for candi sugar. Apparenty it works quite well, but does anyone here have experience of using it in place of the proper stuff?
 
Tonyator said:
Just bottled up a 20 litre Alcoholic Ginger Beer kit! Needs three weeks in the bottles though :(

Hopefully it'll be good!
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It's quite good actually!

Just bought some apple juice, and I'm gonna try and make a non-kit batch of Cider in the next week or so, I have some strawberries and raspberries I might chuck in to :D

A nice fruit cider for the summer, hopefully!
 
ive got some proper cider brewing atm. just about ready to bottle for the final fermentation. hoping it will be ready for xmas. cant wait.

Thinking about doing a lager kit again as well. the last one went down quite well
 
5 litres of Turbo Cider is in the fermenter to try out :)

Using the recipe below, although I put all the apple juice in as I'm using a bucket, and used 5 litres...

Here we go courtesy of wines at home forum

Well this is as easy as it gets!
(called turbo as its so quick and easy)

Ingredients:
4.5L of pure apple juice
1tsp yeast

Method:
1. Place 3L of apple juice into a demijon (assuming everything is sterile)
2. PLace 1tsp of yeast into the demijon
3. shake
4. leave for 36-48hrs to ferment then top with with the remaining of the juice (cant fill it right up at the start as it will foam quite a bit)
5. leave to ferment out
6. Rack off and drink (or if you like cider fizzy then prime as usual)

i thought i would try this out and i was very impressed with the results.

it is sssooooo easy

i used tesco value apple juice and SG was 1.042 so no sugar was necessary (to get to 5.5%ish) but if you want cider stronger add sugar/honey or whatever.

very good for a beginer and an expert alike!

good for trying out different yeasts also since the recipe is so simple and the ingredients vary so little.

Courtesy of Des Devlin (Deadlydess)
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Tonyator said:
5 litres of Turbo Cider is in the fermenter to try out :)

Using the recipe below, although I put all the apple juice in as I'm using a bucket, and used 5 litres...
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The turbo cider was a bit rough... but drinkable with a little lemonade.


Has anyone tried using high alcohol super yeast on just sugar & water to make some ~20% alcohol? I think that might be my next try, either that or an alcoholic lemonade :)
 
Tonyator, the turbo cider does get better with age amazingly. It's rough now but gets surprisingly smooth a few months down the line.

I did that water thing once, it's got a proper name but it's escaped me for the time being. Suffice to say, it's foul.
 
Righty. I've just had a read through this thread and I'm ready :D

Last year was my first brew. We picked up the apples in my mate's garden. We got around 60kg of them which was good for 40 litres of apple juice. That went in 9 demijohns round at another mate's house and he let the lot brew to cider. We used two types of yeast. Most was with cider yeast which dropped out quite quickly to a nice dense sediment at the bottom and the cider was flat. The other lot we used champagne yeast which took an age to settle out and we were left with quite crisp sparkling cider. I would say it wasn't worth the extra wait, because racking it off knocked the fizz out of it and the yeast sediment was very light and made racking a pain. Since we were noobs we lost loads in the racking, bottled it too soon and generally cocked it up, but the end product was quite drinkable.

Around December I put a blackberry wine on. I think it was about 700g fruit which was previously foraged and frozen, a kilo of sugar and topped up to 5 litres with water. It has aged well and is quite drinkable. It could do with a bit more fruit though - note for later this year :D

The latest brew is a gallon of limoncello. I knew roughly what I wanted it to taste like so I juiced 15 lemons from the market, added 1kg of sugar for the brew and once completed I'll add more sugar to taste. It has now cleared and is sat in the demi. I need to rack it off the yeast and bottle it really.

Next up is another cider which I'm hopefully putting on tomorrow. I don't have apples this time so I'm going to do it with economy juice and sugar. I'll probably campden tablet the brew once it has stopped fermenting to kill the yeast, then I can add sugar to taste. It might be fine without it but cheap apple juice is quite sharp.

Will take some pics. I have three demijohns in total and slowly building the collection up. My plan is to make use of nature as much as possible. We have cherry trees, plum trees, elderberries, blackberries and nettles locally, so should be good for a few brews later in the year :)
 
Ahleckz said:
Tonyator, the turbo cider does get better with age amazingly. It's rough now but gets surprisingly smooth a few months down the line.
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By any chance have you done a Turbo Cider with any other flavours blueberry/strawberry etc? As that was one thing I was considering trying.

Ahleckz said:
I did that water thing once, it's got a proper name but it's escaped me for the time being. Suffice to say, it's foul.
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Is it that bad? What I mean is, could you not use with juices to make them alcoholic, as it works out a lot cheaper than vodka even using double to get the %. A few methods I read suggest filtering it... it could help with the taste, possibly purifying the water first.
 
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Tonyator said:
Has anyone tried using high alcohol super yeast on just sugar & water to make some ~20% alcohol? I think that might be my next try, either that or an alcoholic lemonade :)
Click to expand...
This is pretty much what the old Boots high alcohol brew kits were. You'd brew up a lot of sugar in a gallon of water with high alcohol yeast, a yeast nutrient and a bit of citric acid. Then activated charcoal was added to absorb the odours. Then finings were added and it would clear. Once syphoned out you'd have clear, theoretically flavourless, liquor. Into that would go a sachet of concentrated schnapps flavouring and more sugar to taste.
 
Tonyator said:
By any chance have you done a Turbo Cider with any other flavours blueberry/strawberry etc? As that was one thing I was considering trying.

Is it that bad? What I mean is, could you not use with juices to make them alcoholic, as it works out a lot cheaper than vodka even using double to get the %. A few methods I read suggest filtering it... it could help with the taste, possibly purifying the water first.
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We made a turbo cider thing with a bunch of random cartons of fruit juice if that is what you mean. It ended up having bits in it and just generally looked horrible. I had a swig, and it's very strong but you wouldn't want to drink much of it.
My pal made some fruit cider, which he bottled last night and said it "doesn't taste too bad!". I'll get the recipe off him later.
It's worth experimenting I suppose!

We didn't bother mixing it, we just drank it straight. I suppose you could but you'll still have that horrible twang to it and by diluting it too much it's not really worth it.
That being said, when I drink vodka and juice at home (before going out at least) it's usually half and half and 1/3 vodka, 2/3 juice so I need the strength that vodka provides.
If I'm just drinking casually in the evening, then I'll prefer a nicer drink so will stick with proper vodka and tonic or gin and tonic.

Activated charcoal sounds like a good idea though, to get rid of that customary home brew smell! In home brew shops, you do get sachets of concentrated flavours which you could add. That might make something quite nice, and they are quite cheap I believe.
 
Filtering, I assume. When I was at the brewery, we'd filter our brews through some big, complicated machine thing. Only two of the brewers actually knew how it worked and I couldn't get my head around it. It produced a fair bit of waste which was pretty horrible looking.
With home brew, you tend not to do that (or at least not effectively as you would when on a commerical scale). Racking is one way, but it's hardly close to 100%.
 
So we're not 100% sure then :D

I put these on this afternoon. I'm doing a cider with cloudy apple juice from Lidl and what they call pear nectar, which is pear pulp watered down with added sugar. It's quite thick and gloopy so I guess it'll make a kind of perry cider. These are the offending juices:

IMG_6910.jpg


Into the demijohns goes 200g of white sugar, a teaspoon of yeast nutrient, a teaspoon of yeast and 4 litres of juice:

IMG_6907.jpg


That will probably start to froth up so I've left a gap at the top. In a few days I'll top it up to the neck and leave it to ferment out. The 200g of sugar will add about 2% alcohol on top of that created by the natural sugars in the juice, so the apple should come out at about 6% and the pear which is a bit sweeter might be 7-7.5% :)
 
Ahleckz said:
I'll get the recipe off him later.
It's worth experimenting I suppose!
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Yeah that's be cool, thanks. Experimenting was my plan, you don't know what is gonna be nice till you try it.

Ahleckz said:
Activated charcoal sounds like a good idea though, to get rid of that customary home brew smell! In home brew shops, you do get sachets of concentrated flavours which you could add. That might make something quite nice, and they are quite cheap I believe.
Click to expand...

Yea I had a look at some of the flavours and it is reasonable, and there is a large selection, they even do cream based ones like Irish Cream if you mix it with a flavour and a base mix. I think I'm definitely gonna give it a go, perhaps on a small scale first.

I think I'll look into filtering as, I'm guessing, it would improve any brew.


I just cant decide what to try and brew next... I'm stuck between trying the sugar/water, lemonade (after seeing that thread on here) or a fruit cider...


In the case of Cider and lemonade, what is the best way to sweeten it after fermenting, am I right in thinking you can't just add granular sugar, I read somewhere you could use lactose as it isn't fermentable...


And I'm thinking about getting a couple of demijohns as the 5 gallon bucket is a bit big for small brews... is there a downside to using plastic demijohns?
 
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I've done an Irish Cream one and I didn't like it much. It was a bit grainy because of the powdered milk, but adding normal cream would have diluted it too much. The schnapps worked well though.

Yes you're right that you can't just add more sugar, not if you're going to store it anyway. You could rack it off and put a Campden tablet in the demijohn. This should kill the yeast, but if there is any residual surviving and you add more sugar there is a risk that it'll start fermenting again and you risk blowing up your bottles. Either use an artificial sweetener like Splenda (yuck) or add sugar just before you drink it.
 
Brewed an all grain hefeweizen. Ready for drinking in two weeks from the brewday. Just used the recipe from Graham Wheelers european book for schneider weisse. malty and easy to sink. wlp300 yeast fermented at 18-20 in my kitchen.






nice mild mix of clove and banana but the malts really shine through. mix of wheat, munich, vienna, pils, and a touch of caramunch. hops are hallertau hersbrucker.
 
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