Wine No. 7 - Barley

Another winter warmer recipe from Ian Ball. The flavour comes from pearl barley, potatoes and raisins. It's clearing to a nice golden colour in the the demijohn.

Wine No. 6 - Ginger

An Ian Ball recipe. Here it is going into secondary fermentation. It tasted great, even at this stage. Lots of bubbling in the airlock, which is unusal for my attempts so far.

Cider No. 1: Bottled

1 gallon still in wine bottles. 1 gallon primed with sugar in PET bottles, which hopefully will come out sparkling. The initial taste was a little poor - not very strong or flavoursome. Oh well, it was a cheat method, partly using apple juice. Maybe I'll build a cider press this summer and do it properly.

Cider No. 2

Ingredients for Cider No. 2: some excellent Cotswold Way pears, sugar, and some slightly dodgy Polish apple juice bought at 50p a litre...

Wine No. 5: Secondary Fermentation

Wine No. 5 (elderberry) has gone into secondary fermentation. Again I'm using a plastic 5L bottle, which costs a fraction of the price of a demijohn. These wines seem to produce so little CO2 during secondary fermentation that sealing them in doesn't seem to be a problem - and no need for airlocks.

The wine itself is a lovely colour, significantly darker than the double damson.

And that marks the end of the fruit wine brewing season. It will be nice to have no more brewing bins in the kitchen. At least until the next beer experiment...


Elderberry wine

Update: three wines and a cider

There's been a lot going on:

Wine No. 3

A damson wine using this year's fresh crop, and based on the Ian Ball plum wine recipe. This includes minced raisins for extra body, and I doubled the amount of fruit, to try and make a really rich red. Stoning 10 lbs of damsons isn't a fun job. They had been in the freezer for a couple of weeks and so were tenderised, so I just put them all in the bucket and mashed the stones out by hand, leaving behind a rich slurry. However, I guess about 25% of the stones probably stayed in the mixture.

Cider No. 1

With the fruit season in full swing, I decided to try Ian Ball's "Golden Cider" recipe. Using a mix of pears from our garden and our neighbour's windfall apples, there was easily enough fruit for a 2 gallon brew. It's a semi-cheat recipe in that it uses shop-bought apple juice as the liquid base, but with 10 lbs of fruit pulped in the food processor on top it should have plenty of natural flavour as well.

Wine No. 4

For the second year running we have a great pear crop, so I'm always on the lookout for ways to use them - and what better way? Another Ian Ball recipe, this adapting his apple wine for pear. I put plenty of water in the brewing bin to stop the fruit browning and inadvertently ended up with 2 gallons for a supposedly 1 gallon brew. When I strained this after primary fermentation I ended up with a bit over a litre of extra liquid, which was captured in two wine bottles. But the resulting wine will probably be around the 9-10% alcohol mark rather than 11-12%.

Wine No. 5

I wanted to try this one even though I don't have great hopes of it tasting nice. I collected elderberries over a period of about a month from a range of locations whenever I saw them. I probably started too early; by mid September they were looking much better than when I first started in August. But 5 lbs of elderberries is a lot of little round fruits, and I wasn't going to get picky. They're also not much fun to prepare, in that you have to comb them off the stems with a fork, they roll around like little marbles, and they stain everything. However, once that's done, they just go into the brewing bin and need a quick mash - no stoning, chopping or mincing for once.



Apple and pear pulp for primary fermentation into cider


Two gallons of cider on a summer's day, ready for secondary fermentation


Wine No. 3 (double damson): fruit ready for stoning


Wine No. 3: stoned fruit slurry with a topping of minced raisins


Wine No. 3 ready for secondary fermentation


Wine No. 4 (pear) ready for secondary fermentation


Wine No. 5: elderberries in the brewing bin

Beer No . 1 - tasting!

With it being Emma's third birthday, and there being a quorum of beer drinkers present, it seemed appropriate to crack open the first 2L bottle of the bitter - two months after bottling. My thoughts were as follows:

Head - surprisingly good, foamy. Head retention not bad.
Flavour - a little bitter but not too bad. Better than expected.
Strength - weak, as expected from the OG measurement.
Texture - poor. I think this is partly due to the low alcohol content. I also noticed that the bottles didn't feel over-pressurised (they still had some give when squeezed) so maybe next time I'll increase the priming sugar to increase the natural carbonation.
Colour - a bit pale for a bitter. To be expected, because I used pale malt instead of crystal. Also I didn't make any effort to avoid the sediment, so the pint was cloudy. Next time I'll use 500 ml bottles, which should be easier to pour without dislodging the solids.
Overall - 6/10. It would be a rather disappointing pint to be served in a pub, but still a not unpleasant bevvie.

Onwards and upwards!

There are some lessons here, plus I have proved I can make something drinkable from the the basic bitter recipe. So I can now use that as the starting point for experimenting. And I can confidently brew several different 1-gallon batches at the same time without waiting for the results of the previous effort.

But first up will be a couple of different efforts:

- Emma's birthday marks 4 months to Christmas. Time to get a seasonal ale started.
- Our pear tree is groaning with fruit, and our neighbour has more windfall apples than he can do anything with. Cider time! Fortunately, the Ian Ball book has cider recipes.