The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Food & crafts => Home brewing => Topic started by: GribinIsaf on August 31, 2016, 09:17:23 pm
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We are doing our accounts and deciding there is no way we can carry on spending what we do on alcohol. We are going to make a new resolution to only drink what we make ourselves so we need to get equipped and skilled very quickly.
Would love to hear any thoughts on the easiest, cheapest, best way to do this. We have fruit including plums and sloes. We can grow anythi ng needed and we are not averse to buying in beer making ingredients - it has got to be a lot cheaper than bottles of red wine.
How shall we start?
thanks
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I have been home brewing for many years and have never been able to reliably produce a good red wine from "country" ingredients. Nowadays I just buy in a middle of the road 30 pint red wine kit (for example Rioja) the cost works out at about £1.50 a bottle.
Having said that however I do produce a very good sparkling wine of the champagne type. I make this from rhubarb in the Spring and Summer and also from apples in the Autumn. The cost of this is about 0.40p per bottle.
This gives a very warm feeling when considering the cost of commercial fizzy wines!
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Thankyou for that. We are not fixated on red wine. Will check out the kit you mention. Also, we do have rhubarb in season...
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I can second the kit version - a good quality kit makes wine making very easy. It's even cheaper if you can persuade family to give them to you for birthdays and Christmas ;)
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We make beer from kits with very acceptable results.
Have found the best bitter-type to come from Woodforde's: https://www.woodfordes.co.uk/ (https://www.woodfordes.co.uk/)
Have enjoyed the Wherry and Nelson's Revenge.
Best stout by far has been Munton's Gold Imperial Stout - fantastic results with this kit.
Works out at about 60p per pint not including equipment. We use swing top bottles, if you can find Grolsch on sale in bottles it's sometimes more economical to buy a load of that and re-use the bottles than buying new.
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We made this Merlot kit from Wilko (http://www.wilko.com/wine-homebrew-kits/wilko-30-bottle-merlot-wine-kit/invt/0318384) and were pleasantly surprised by the results. It gets significantly better after a few weeks sitting in the bottle though.
Has anybody made wine from supermarket grape juice? I'm sure I read somewhere that it's possible, but I've never tried it.
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Thank you. These very specific recommendations are really helpful and give us somewhere to start.
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We made this Merlot kit from Wilko (http://www.wilko.com/wine-homebrew-kits/wilko-30-bottle-merlot-wine-kit/invt/0318384) and were pleasantly surprised by the results. It gets significantly better after a few weeks sitting in the bottle though.
Has anybody made wine from supermarket grape juice? I'm sure I read somewhere that it's possible, but I've never tried it.
Womble, I once had a home wine making book which had a chapter on what the author called "cheat wines" , made by supermarket juices (pure juices with no chemicals) They fermented out and were ready for drinking far more quickly than other "country wines" and were very good. This author, I wish I could remember his name or even the name of the book, only ever used sulphite for sterilising and used cold strong tea for tannin, a quarter teaspoon of marmite as a starter etc. no chemicals at all. I will try to remember, Heaven knows I used the book enough. OH! Winemaking the natural way!
So, the answer to your question is, yes you can use grape juice.
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Grab it for a penny: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wine-Making-Natural-Way-Ball/dp/0716020998 (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wine-Making-Natural-Way-Ball/dp/0716020998)
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Dan- I did grab one for a penny, plus £2.80 postage when it was mentioned here yesterday.
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Excellent! I just got a copy too, we can compare results. :)
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Just ordered a copy :thumbsup:
Also started some banana wine a week ago. The smells were great fermenting Like banana bread.
Takes a LONG time to mature though!
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Takes a long time to clear too but the end result is worth the waiting.
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I've noticed it's very very cloudy and assumed it's because I squeezed every last drop from the pulp. Only making a gallon but probably will wish I'd made more as everyone says it's a great wine
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Depends if you are after a grape wine or wine from different fruits. Country home brew (as I call it) tastes nothing like red, white or rose wine to me but that suits me as I'm not keen on grape wines.
The country home brew has a different taste, more like alcoholic fruit juice, but I love it. Our basic recipe is 3lbs of fruit, 3lbs of sugar to make 1 gallon wine. We add water to make it make it up to a gallon and yeast but that's it.
Dans
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Living in Saudi we were dependant on our home brew - we made it with Ceres Grape juice (red or white depending on choice), sugar, water and yeast. It was ready to drink in about 4=6 weeks - not hugely alcoholic but pretty yummy. We used large Oasis water bottles instead of demijohns (the large kind that go on water coolers), and sandwich bags with elastic bands as airlocks (although for others the airlock of choice was a condom). All very Heath Robinson but it worked and was cheap as chips.
I have also made 'gin' using grapefruit and lemons which was pretty good with 7Up. Others converted water purifiers into homemade stills - not advisable for many reasons!
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Many thanks for all the specific recommendations that have been given above, I am sure once we get into it we will branch off in many interesting directions but in such a wide subject we just need somewhere to start when I guess there is a lot of useless stuff out there.
So we have already received a copy of John Wright's River Cottage Booze book which, as mentioned, looks an entertaining read even before we make anything.
A copy of Wine Making the Natural Way, the Wilko 30 Merlot Wine Kit and associated bits and pieces are on the way.
Just one more question - recommend me a good beer making kit to start off with...
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You can make a fantastic light hock from just using grape vine leaves as you thin the vine leaves in early June , Yes you add sugar but the vinified taste is still there.
I used a five gallon bucket rammed packed full with freshly stripped off vine leaves . Poured on 12 or more pints of boiling water to fill the bucket to wwithin half an inch of the brim ,slipped the lid on & left it to brew , stirred it on day two & day three . Drained the elixer off on day four and then used a standard country wine recipe to bring th must up to a light wine density for a 40 pint bucket .
I used a light white yeast with a suggested tollerance of 12.5 % ABV, decanted it into a five gallon brewing container set in a simple cup inside a cup air lock in th screw top 7 left it to gurgle away in the shed .
It was made in the June & stopped with Campden tablets when the s.g. was reached , racked off at the end of July & again at the end of August then bottled in early October .
On the 10 th of Dec we had a big family & friends party , most of them thought we'd purchased in quite a nice agreeable light not too sweet grape wine .
They also loved the ten gallons of 14.6 abv , strong red elderberry we'd made the year previously and smoothed with a bottle of decent brandy plus , 1/4 a bottle of glycerin after the second racking on mid august .
It then sat in the two five gallon containers with water in the air traps ( checked then on the first of each month & topped up as needed ) in the roof void for I was wanting to use the heat of the summer in the roof void the next year to turn the wine into a fortified port style wine ....it worked well .
I also had to make a pulley system with a ratchet & handle device to haul the containers up through the trap door whilst I was in the roof void as they only just went through the opening .
Other sources of fruit are jars of home made jams , frozen fruits .
brewing beer , once you have read the basics & made a small kit up & got everything perfect try going to th bigger home brew packs ..some are on line some are in Wilkinsons stores .
An 80 pinter has a more rounded flavour than a 20 or 40 pint one .
I'd say it is essential that you get the correct hydrometers and a decent digital thermometer with a long water proof probe to start with & perhaps super long plastic spoons , a 2 litre plastic jug , a set of reliable digital scales with a plastic bowl .
You'll also need at least one five gallon food grade bucket with a close fitting lid & two or more five gallon food grade screw top containers that you can fit a wine makers air lock into , Finally a clear plastic tube that you can fit a small stop cock into so you can syphon from one container to another & stop the flow of liquid either when you are decanting between vessels or you are bottling up .
You use the syphon tube to decant & bottle fill because the less air you get in your drinks the less" bruised " they taste
Milton baby bottle sterilizer is usually good enough to sterilize all you equipment but never store used or unused sterilization fluid for more than a week or less as it soon goes off.
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I'd second a lot of the advice here...
Beer: start with a kit which contains the cans of malt extract - then you'll get an idea of the process. Once you've got that nailed, invest in a mash-tun and a boiler, and you can mash your own malts (to produce for yourself what is in the cans in a kit). This is often called all-grain brewing (AG). you need to soak the malted grains in hot water (temperature determines how much sugar comes out, amongst other things), and then after a 2-3 hours, you can run off the resulting sugary liquer, and rinse the malted grains through (Sparging).
It's all very possible, but it does need an investment of kit (less than £100).
Wine: I'm now an advocate of starting with something like apple wine - it's not too tricky to make a really drinkable white-wine, and it's easy then to balance the dry/sweet to your taste. If you try and make several versions of 1 wine, then you'll get an idea of the variables. We used the following this year as a bit of an experiment:
1 Gallon Dry white apple wine: 90% brambley apples (juiced), 10% eating aples (juiced), 2lb of sugar.
1 Gallon Sweet white apple wine: Same apple ratios as above, but 2.5lb of sugar.
I was very impressed with the dry this year... I don't know if it was down to increasing the amount of cooking apples, or just a fluke, but it was grand! We could happily drink that instead of shop-bough white.
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And I have just bought my 1p wine making book too. :excited:
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I've tried brewing all sorts of things and decided:
to stick with All-Grain beer brewing, in 5-gallon batches. I can actually brew better beer than I can buy in the chops for about 50p a pint (can be even cheaper but I don't skimp on quality hops or malt). Look out for books by Graham Wheeler in charity shops or just get googling.
I've done cider and I'd do it again as its free and very little can go wrong.
CBA doing country wines any more. I tried parsnip, rhubarb and blackberry/elderberry and the results were not good enough to make it worthwhile. That said, I really like grape wine, so I'm probably too conditioned
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Grab it for a penny: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wine-Making-Natural-Way-Ball/dp/0716020998 (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wine-Making-Natural-Way-Ball/dp/0716020998)
None left for a penny, but i just got a copy for 2.53 (plus 2.80 postage)