Bottling Day : Wilko Strawberry Wine + a quick taste

The Strawberry wine has now been bottled. 22 days from start to finish, so really quite good.

 It cleared to a nice bright Rosé colour, crystal clear as well. With only a thin layer of yeast in the bottom of the demijohn.

We got a full 6 bottles of wine from the kit (750ml) with a glass left over for testing.

After a small sample of the Wilko Strawberry wine by myself and the Good Lady, we have named this wine Strawberry Rosé, as that is what it is like, a very nice Rosé with strawberry aroma, following on later with flavour overtones of Strawberry. Not a huge Strawberry hit, but subtle quite acceptable Rosé wine.

	Total Cost	£8.87
Amount Bottled	6	£1.48 per Bottle
	Per Glass 175ml	£0.34

The Party Keg

Well emptied the Old Speckled Hen keg last night. Removed the the top bung nice and easy, cleaned the inside out. Then gave it a nice new paint job.

It came out really well, and looks great now in the Brewshed. Just need to fill it with Beer.

Fermenting : Yellow Plum Wine (Songold Plums)

The Yellow Plum Wine has been macerating in the 5 litre bucket for the four days as the recipe states. So today it starts it's journey into a sweet wine. I say sweet due to the fact 1.75kg (4lb) of sugar went into the demijohn.

As normal, I strained the liquor onto the sugar in the demijohn. Gave it all a good shake to dissolve the sugar, then added yeast nutrient and Yeast (1 tsp of each) and gave it another good shake up.

Nearly got a full demijohn, I'm glad of the headspace this time because the last few have blown their tops off when they first start the ferment. I'll top it up in a few days once it dies down a bit.

My Good Lady's chickens are now feasting on the barley and plums left over in the bucket. So nothing is being wasted with this wine.

Keeping them Birds off!!

Last year we planted quite a bit of fruit, red,white & black Currants, couple more Gooseberry bushes, some raspberries, a blueberry, along with the Jostaberry and Rhubarb.

We only managed to get a total of 500g of fruit from all the bushes. The birds got to almost everything, but as the bushes where in their first year we didn't expect much from them.

The fruit we did manage to save ended up in a very very nice Elderberry & Mixed Fruit Wine.

So this year I have covered the lot with netting, we want plenty of raw material for our wine making this season.

I had already moved the old arches that the Hops grew up last year, so part of the netting frame was already in place, the rest is on canes, with bottles on top to stop the netting pushing through.



Other things around the plot are doing well, Jane's Broad Beans are starting to grow, direct sown this year over a few weeks.

My hops are doing great guns, with the Fuggles now around 5 foot high, all busy winding themselves up the strings.

The Chillies and the Sweet peppers took a hit with the cold in the greenhouse (-4'C), lost a couple but the others are on the mend, with new growth showing and some with a flower or two.

Again this year the aubergines are not doing much, in fact from the 4 that went into the polytunnel only one is still alive, I'm going to have to do some research into growing these dam things.

The tomatoberries are doing good in there though, lots of new growth and it won't be long before I move the other tomatoes and the cucumber seedlings in there as well, it'll be like a forest inside the polytunnel when they all get going.

Bottled : Wilko Sweet Newkie Brown (KIT)

The FG of the Newkie Brown dropped to 1008 from a SG of 1042, So it's in at 4.5% ABV. Moved the fermenting bucket into the Brewshed to cool and help the yeast drop out of suspension a couple of days ago. So today is bottling day.

The bottles I have left that are empty are 550ml bottles, I still clean and Starsan 42 bottles just in case.
This beer was a bit of a pain to bottle. After adding the recommended 1/2 tsp of sugar to each bottle, the amount of beer foam building up in the bottles when filling meant that I had to fill 30 bottles and rest the crown caps on top, then go back and top each bottle up.

Got 39 bottles at 550ml out of this brew, so £0.35 per bottle, not bad at all.

Labeled them all up, just a basic label for Kit's, and put them up on the racking in the Brewshed.

Just one more beer kit to go, then back to BIAB all grain brews. And a completely full Brewshed.

Current stock as of today is around 137 pints of beer in the Brewshed with another 40 to make for the other pressure barrel. 23 bottles of wine ready to drink with another 25+ bottles still fermenting or clearing. Lovely!!!!

Tasting : A Very young Evil Dog IPA KIT and Coopers Stout KIT (with Treacle)

I know, I know, I'm halfway through my 40 pint pressure barrel of Treacle Stout (Coopers Stout Kit) and I only now get around to blogging it.

It was barreled Sunday, 16 March 2014 so it's been in the barrel doing it's thing for quite a while.  It's a very nice stout, and for a kit not a hint of that "Homebrew" type taste. Smooth, nice creamy coffee head to it. Very nice body and the treacle I added come through just nice without over powering the beer.

This one is on my "to do again" beer kit list.

Now onto a newer beer in the Brewshed. The EVIL DOG IPA (8%).

I know this beer is still far to young to be drinking yet, but I just couldn't resist it. It's been in the Brewshed in it's 43 bottles now since Thursday, 17 April 2014 so only 4 days!!!.. It hasn't been that warm in the Brewshed for it to get into a strong secondary ferment so I wasn't expecting any carbonation.

So right now, it's quite clear and a very light colour. No head at all, but due to it's age I wasn't expecting any. It's a lot sweeter than I expected and not dry at all, even tho' the Final SG ended at 1004. The aroma is huge, floral and I can distinctly smell both hop additions. On drinking, already there is some carbonation, and it's floral again in taste with a big hit of citrus. At 8% ABV I was expecting a fairly harsh alcohol bite,but there isn't, this is going to be a very dangerous beer as it in no way tastes as strong as it is.

I would say this is really is a "Craft" beer in a kit, I would highly recommend this to any home brewer.

Easy Keg, filled with Old Speckled Hen (5 litres)

Saw this in the Supermarket today, and my Good Lady said I could have one. She's good to me.

It sits lovely between the two pressure barrels, the good thing about this is once it is empty, I should in theory be able to fill it back up with my own beers just like the Easy Kegs you can find online, I know the empty ones are a lot cheaper, but hey this is full of one of my favorite beers which I have to drink all of before I fill it back up.

Brewday: Yellow Plum Wine (Songold Plums)

We keep an eye out in the Supermarkets for reduced fruit on sale. Today in Morrison's there was packs of Songold Yellow plums on half price. Down from £0.49 per 400g to £0.25 per 400g. We picked up 5 punnets for the princely sum of £1.25 for 2kg of fruit.

We are a little short of fruit from what most of the wine recipe books say we need,and last time I made this wine I used 10lb of fruit as it was free at the time. The plum trees that we got them from last year sadly are no longer there.

However Mr C.J.J Berry suggests adding 250g of crushed barley, of which I have loads, to add more body to the wine and only requires 1.75kg of Plums, so we will be following his recipe on Page 182 (Greengage Wine) this time.

This will be my 1st C.J.J Berry wine I have made from his book, so hopefully his excellent reputation in the wine world will produce a equally good wine.

As a quick guess, the sugar will cost around the £2.00 mark, plus the Plums and barley, and including sundries.  I reckon it'll work out around £0.70 per 750 ml bottle.

Put Barley into my 5 litre bucket.

Stoned and cut up the 2kg of Yellow Plums and added them to the bucket.

I think I should have used a bigger bucket for this, ah well. Topped up the bucket to the 5 litre mark on the side with boiling water straight from the kettle, I reckon I got around 3-3.5 litres of water in. Gave it all a good stir and just in case, chucked in 1 crushed campden tablet just to make sure that no wild yeasts and nasties where on the fruit.

Planning: Chinook APA (BIAB)

Found some Chinook 12.5% AA hops in the bottom of the freezer and I haven't made up a BIAB beer for a while so thought I would do a single hop beer with the Chinook.



From beeradvocate.com
Chinook is a bittering variety with aroma characteristics released in May, 1985. It was bred by crossing a Petham Golding with the USDA 63012 male.

A high alpha acid hop with a wonderful herbal, almost smoky character when used as an aromatic during the last few minutes of the boil when dry hoping. Excellent for hopping American-style Pale Ales, especially those brewed to higher gravities. (alpha acid: 12.0-14.0% / beta acid: 3.0-4.0%)

My proposed Recipe:

Chinook APA American Pale Ale

---

Recipe Specs

Original Gravity	Final Gravity	Colour (SRM / EBC)	Bitterness	Alcohol by Volume
1.050	1.013	8.5 / 16.7	43.1 IBU	4.8%

Brewhouse Specs

Recipe Type	Batch Size	Boil Time	Efficiency
All Grain	12.0 Litres / 3.2 Gal	90.0 min	70.0%

Fermentables

Name	Type	SRM	Percentage	Amount
Golden Promise Malt	Grain	3.0	95.24 %	2.60 Kg / 5.73 Lbs
Crystal 80	Grain	80.0	4.76 %	0.13 Kg / 0.29 Lbs

Hops

Name	AA%	Amount	Use	Time
Chinook	12.5%	10.00 g / 0.35 oz	First Wort	90 mins
Chinook	12.5%	5.00 g / 0.18 oz	Boil	15 mins
Chinook	12.5%	5.00 g / 0.18 oz	Boil	5 mins
Chinook	12.5%	10.00 g / 0.35 oz	Dry Hop	3 days

Misc

Name	Amount	Use	Time
Whirlfloc Tablet	1.00 g / 0.04 oz	Boil	15 mins

Yeast

Name	Attenuation
Safeale S-04	75 %

Mash Steps

Step Name	Time	Temperature	Type
Saccharification Rest	90.0 min	66.0 °C / 150.8 °F	Infusion

NotesRecipe Generated with BrewMate


Download the Brewmate Recipe File

The plan is to make up this beer and No-Chill it, so I may still need to move the hop schedules around. Alot of No-Chillers use the chart below.

So I may move the 15min and the 5min hop additions directly to the cube to allow for the No-Chill system of cooling. I'm still trying to get my head around the No-Chill side of Aroma and Flavour. In fact the chart above does tend to confuse me quite a bit sometimes.

As long as the beer is drinkable that's what it's all about.

Any advice on this brew would be appreciated before I dive in and make it.

UPDATE: Strawberry Wine (KIT)

A little late on blogging this but the Strawberry wine has now had both the Stabiliser sachet (2g) and the wine finings sachet added. The stabiliser sachet was added 24 hours before the Wine Finings.

The Strawberry wine has been put back in its home in the Brewshed to clear completely before I bottle it. It's already starting to clear but I will give this a week or more to keep any sediment out of the bottles.

Over all this kit seems good value for money with the 25% off. At £1.50 a bottle all in as long as it has a good Strawberry flavour. The wine comes in at a reasonable 12.% ABV.

Brewshed Move around

Had to get some more shelving units to hold the beer and wine bottles, and to tidy up the clutter a bit.

Moved around the complete bar area of the Brewshed, just didn't look right with the new unit. Looks a whole lot better now and have even got spare shelves ready for the Newkie Brown when it gets bottled.

Hop Growing 2014 season (Part 2)

The hops are now about a meter high and starting to work their way up the strings. Weeded around the base of each hop and then mulched with straw,wood shavings, and chicken poo from the Good Lady's chicken house.

Cut the bines back to the ground so there are only 6 left per plant, two for each string. Cut away the old retaining string from the bines as they are not needed anymore.

Watered the hops with a good gallon of water each, with Super Tomato Food added (Free from Sutton Seeds). I'll try and get down the Allotment at least twice a week to give them a good drink. I hoping for a good crop this year so I can make a few brews.

Brewday: Wilko Sweet Newkie Brown (Kit)

Shame to have the fermenting bucket empty now that I have bottled my Evil Dog IPA. Another of my Birthday Presents back in March was a Wilko Sweet Newkie Brown Beer Kit, Thank you Beth.

This kit is a single can kit, 1.5kg, so you have to add Sugar or spray malt to make up the beer. I have no spray malt around at the moment, so used the suggested 1kg of brewing sugar.

Followed all the usual instructions to make up the beer, add tin contents, hot water, sugar, stir and top up to 23 litres, check temperature 18-20'C add yeast and stir.

Checked the Specific Gravity and it's at 1042 so if it ends at 1010 that should give a nice 4.3% beer.

Kit's are really good and stocking up the Brewshed with beer, I'm trying to fill all my empty bottles at the moment before getting back to some BIAB real homemade beers. This one will be bottled in my 550ml bottles. Then one more kit to go, a good 'ol Woodfordes Wherry Bitter Kit (3kg) to go into my other pressure barrel.

The kits cost around £10 plus the sugar at £2.50 so 40 pints work out at about £0.32 per pint.

Bottled: Evil Dog American Double IPA (KIT)

Checked in on the Evil Dog American Double IPA again today and it's stopped at 1002 SG. So yep a 8% ABV.



Decided last night to bottle it mainly due to the strength of the IPA. Not sure if I could get through 40 pints at 8% in a few months if it was put in the barrel. So this morning I cleaned and primed 43 500ml pint bottles. I always prep more bottles just in case of a few bonus beers in the fermenter.

Used a 1 level tsp of castor sugar to prime each bottle as per the instructions in the kit. The beer was quite clear going into the bottles as it's crash cooled in the Brewshed for the last 2 days. I managed to bottle 43 pints in total so just as well I cleaned a few extra. Lovely creamy firm yeast cake on the bottom. I wish I could harvest this yeast for another brew, but I don't think it would have kept until I needed to make a strong ABV brew again.

After cleaning out all the fermentation bucket and other bits used to make up the beer and bottle it, I made a quick bottle label and cleaned and labeled all the bottles.

The instructions in the kit say to condition the beer for 2 weeks, but as I have had a 60 point SG drop I would normally leave the beer for 1 week per 10 drop in SG, so for this beer 6 weeks would be correct to condition the beer properly. But I'll have one of these as soon as it's clear.

Had a little taste again while doing the bottling,  Flowery, Zesty, lovely hop aroma, quite a light beer for a IPA, but I'm sure a few pints of this on a sunny day will hit the spot so to speak.

I'll be having a go at Hop Teabags when I do another AG brew (BIAB) as this beer has a nice hop flavour and aroma from the Simco and Summit hops that where added during fermentation, so I hope to reproduce this in my own beers.

So far I can definitely recommend this Home Brew kit, but it's all in the drinking, so I'll have to wait a while before giving a final verdict.

Oh price wise, the kits are around £25 so 43 bottles works out at around £0.60 per pint

UPDATE #2: Evil Dog American Double IPA (KIT)

The Evil Dog IPA, and evil it may be, has stopped fermenting at 1002 down from 1062 SG, that gives me 40 pints of 8% ABV beer.

19 days fermenting, and gives the yeast in this brew an Apparent Attenuation of 97%, that's some yeast to hit a number like that, a more normal figure would be around the 70-80% mark.

I drank the sample from the trial jar, and already the beer is good, lovely citrus notes, fairly bitter 45 EBU's but with no alcohol bite to it. This is going to be a good one me thinks. Just need to decide whether to bottle or barrel it, leaning towards the bottles at the moment due to it's extreme ABV.

Busy Day down 'lottie

Sun's out birds are singing, and I spent most of my time digging.

But before that got a few more seeds in the propagator, Pumpkin, Courgettes, and Squash all sown and nice and warm in the Brewshed.

 Then a walk in the sunshine down to the allotment. To start the harder part of the day.

Dug over the bed ready for the Pumpkin,Squash, & Courgettes, smashed up the lumps of earth and raked it over. Planted two rows of early direct sown Courgettes (All Green Bush) two seeds to a hole and watered them in.

Then onto the Hop plants, they are doing quite well, winding their way up the strings. I have now pruned the hops back to 2 bines per line, so 6 bines per plant. I hope that 2 bines for each line is not going to be too crowded.



Gave them a good watering with added Super Tomato food (Free with a Sutton's catalogue) after a good old weeding.

Weeded around all of the plot 119's paths, all around all of the fruit, felt like I was working on a hectare not a standard allotment plot. Seemed to take forever.

Greenhouse next, check on the ol' Chillies after a cold snap last night. The Telimena sweet peppers didn't like the cold and are looking a bit sorry for themselves but all the others are doing fine, even with a -2.5'c cold snap.  I have now covered the Telimena's with a layer of fleece to try and save them.



Weeded and watered the Elephant garlic and Solent Whites.

They seem to be holding up okay after all the floods and now a very dry spell. I really hope we get a good crop from these as I would like to keep hold of quite a few of the cloves for replanting next year if possible. We will save a few quid if they do, always a bonus, mind you, we ended up eating all of last years crop.

Back to the digging!! Where the digger compacted the area on plot 120 the whole section is now like concrete.

Started digging a new veg bed, very hard going indeed and it is also a bit stinky from all the rotting material that was plowed in. Should be good for Jane's runners when they get planted.

It's all looking a lot better now on 120, I still need to rake and smash quite a few more clumps of solid earth, but it's almost ready for the climbing beans that Jane is going to direct sow.

Finished my 5 hour allotment session with a bit of hoeing and weeding around the onions, got a good chunk of it all done, I've got about a third of the onion patch do finish, but I had to call it a day due to running out of fluids and getting a little sunburnt.

The allotment is looking loads better, and I feel better being down there again after all the troubles, my enthusiasm has returned.

RACKED : Rhubarb Wine (part 3)

All the brewing stuff is now in the Brewshed, all the fermenting demijohns and the 23lt Fermenting bucket with the Evil Dog IPA that won't stop fermenting.

Took the opportunity to Rack the #1 Rhubarb Wine into a clean demijohn.

Still quite muddy looking, but as it's the LAW I had a sample during transfer, and surprise surprise it's really very nice, still has a very pronounced taste of Rhubarb, no banana flavour. Apart from the colour I think we have another very Rhubarby wine.

With all the fermenting going on now in the Brewshed, the cooler evenings should help to start to clear the wines (and the IPA) down quite a bit but let them continue to slowly ferment until finished, well that's the plan and the Good Lady will be pleased not having demijohns all over the house.

Seedlings : Tigerella, Gardeners Delight, Cucumber Crystal Lemon, Cucumber Swing, Melon Outdoor Wonder

More lovely seedlings are poking their heads up.



So sitting the the brewshed under lights are:

Tigerella (Tomato)

Gardeners Delight (Tomato)

Cucumber Crystal Lemon

Cucumber Swing F1

Melon Outdoor Wonder

Looking forward to getting these in the polytunnel, I already have planted the Black Beauty Aubergines (4) and the Tomatoberry's (4) directly into the ground through sheeting instead of using growbags.

I am hoping that the tomatoes will do better than last year, now that I know what to do with them. We kinda just let them do their own thing last year as we didn't really understand about how to keep a cordon. I found a helpful website that explained it all in words & pictures that I could understand on how to prune them properly. It's all well and good books telling you to pinch out side shoots, suckers etc, but if you don't know what they look like it's not a lot of help.

2 Rhubarb Wines (side by side)

These are the two Rhubarb wines side by side, the one on the Right is the wine made with raisins and bananas, and still looks like mud. The nice pink one is the Basic Rhubarb wine which we have made before, but this year there is a far better colour to the wine.

They are still both fermenting away. It'll be interesting to compare the two at bottling time, but I have a feeling that the Pink wine is going to be the better of the two, going by colour alone.

UPDATE: Strawberry Wine (KIT)

The Strawberry wine kit has now had another seven days fermenting, there are still a few burbs from the airlock but it's slowed down quite a bit now.

According to the instruction booklet, today is the day to add the flavour sachet.  Snipped the sachet open and added it to the wine. Put the airlock back in place and I'll leave it now till there are is no bubbles coming from the airlock before going on to the next stage.

UPDATE: Evil Dog American Double IPA (KIT)

Three weeks and this beer is still fermenting, it just hasn't stopped, nor any signs of slowing down yet. The Specific Gravity started out at 1.062 and was supposed to finish at 1.008. Checked in on this beer last night and it was down to 1.004 and still going. That means it's already at 7.7% ABV.



I was hoping to bottle this beer this week, but it looks as tho' I'm going to have to wait a while longer. Had a check around the WWW and found that this kit does reach stilly ABV values and can take a long time to finish fermenting, so I'll have to just wait it out.

Tasted the beer from the sample that I took to read the SG, and no signs of any problems or infections, high alcohol kick to it with some nice citrus notes.

I like alot of Hops in my beers to I have added both the Hop teabag to the Fermenter today. As per the instructions I put the bags in a cup each of hot water and let them steep for ten minutes.

Then added the teabags and liquor to the fermenting bin, so now I have the added hoppyness  of Summit and Simco hops floating around in the fermenter.

The smell is lovely bubbling out the top of the Airlock. Just have to wait until it stops fermenting.