Homebrew Lager Kit

As mentioned in a very recent post, I got a lager making kit for Christmas. Yesterday I went to see my sister and brother-in-law and he has recently made the same kit so I had a chance to taste it before actually making it. I must say I was impressed with the flavour and decided to waste as little time as possible starting my own brew. I couldn't start it the same day so as soon as I'd let the chickens out this morning I got started.

The process was really easy as it was from an all in one kit. All I had to do was sterilize the brewing bucket and provide 1kg of sugar then make up with water to 23l.

1kg of sugar

The contents of the tin of lager mix.

Pour the contents into the bucket

Once sugar and mix are added put some water in to dissolve sugar.

When all is dissolved add water to make to 23l then sprinkle the sachet of yeast into the brew.  I then took a gravity reading of 1.034 at this point so will know the strength of the lager.

The whole process was really easy and I would encourage people to have a go themselves. The next thing to do is wait 4-8 days until fermentation has finished and then bottle it, then leave a further week or 2 for flavour to develop. I'll let you know how it goes. At some point in the future I will aim to make beer or lager without the aid of a kit but this will suffice for now.

Plum Wine

On the 19/08/11 I started a batch of plum wine. In the background of the first photo there is a few jars of plum jam we also made. By the fact we made over 20 jars of jam and still had enough left to make wine you can get an idea of the amount of plums we collected. We have been back since and it doesn't even look like we've taken any. If this wine is nice then next year I will make a much bigger batch.

The recipe I used for the wine can be found here in full but I will go through what I did. I started off by removing the stones from the plums to make up 6lb of fruit. I then poured over 2 pints of boiling water and crushed the fruit a bit to start releasing the plum juice. Next I added a teaspoon of pectolase when the juice was cool; this helps break the fruit down. I then covered the mixture and left it overnight. The next day I dissolved 3lbs of sugar in 2 pints of boiling water and added that to the fruit mix, which was then left 48 hours. The next step was to add the yeast and put it all into a demijohn. Before putting the juice into the demijohn I strained the mix through a sieve. If I do this recipe again I will use something much finer to strain the liquid from the fruit; this is because a lot of the pulp must have also gone into the demijohn as when I woke up the following morning there was a lot of pulp that had been pushed up by the fermentation over night, the airlock was full and some of the mush was over the kitchen table. I managed to clear this up and there wasn't too much of the mix lost. I did take a gravity reading using my hydrometer so will be able to work out the alcohol level at the end. The reading was 1.08 which will give a final alcohol level between 10 and 15 %, I will now leave the wine a few weeks then rack into another demijohn.

The wine in the demijohn, the pulp at the top is the same as what overflowed after the first night