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Yes, ho ho. Has anyone got a solution for how to fully immerse and sterilise all these long items of brewing equipment like a 5 gallon auto-siphon, a Fermtech wine thief, a long plastic spoon, or a 5 gallon degassing stick? The auto-siphon for example is over 60cm long, which won't completely...

I'm with you on the Mangrove Jack's Simcoe IPA, which I'm also drinking right now. Certainly one of the best American style IPA kits I've tried (and that includes most of them). I agree about the problems of brewing this summer, when temperatures are rarely below about 22C, but then the story is...

As an experiment the last time I made this kit I swapped the kit yeast for a high attenuation saison (Mangrove Jack's French Saison) to see what sort of final gravity it would reach. As you say the kit yeast seems to give up at about 1.014-1.016, making the ABV well under the quoted 6.5%, and to...

4 days after adding the hops (10 days total from the start) fermentation had apparently completely stopped, and the airlock was "balanced", ie. pressure inside and outside had equalised. I left it a couple more days because there was no time to do the bottling rituals. Tonight was day 12 (hops...

Sounds sensible. I seem to remember that the plastic wand (if it's this one - https://www.home-brew-hopshop.co.uk/degassers-paddles-spoons/2302-degasser-the-wine-whip.html) pulls out of the crappy plastic bung. The stainless steel one has a pin through the nylon bung so it's all one piece, but...

I regularly brew both 23L beer kits and 23L wine kits (Beaverdale, Kendridge, Atmosphere) and I find the wine kits a bit easier and less time consuming than beer, mainly because I bottle the beer so there are 48x500ml bottles to sterilise and rinse vs 30x750ml wine bottles. For degassing I use...

Day 6 today and the SG is down to 1.010 so added the hop pellets. The instruction leaflet says to expect a final SG of 1.009 for the Founding Fathers, so it's already almost there.

I'm not sure that pure sugar will support much life. Sugar is used as a preservative after all (to quote the Wikipedia article on sugar "They are also used as a preservative to prevent micro-organisms from growing and perishable food from spoiling"), and it's only when it's diluted that things...

I've also made a few of the other Festival kits (Old Suffolk Strong Ale, Pilgrims Hope, Belgian Pale Ale, Golden Stag Summer Ale, and Razorback IPA) and as you say some have the extra dextrose and some have only the malt pouches. The Old Suffolk Strong Ale has 1kg of dextrose, and even then the...

I noticed a new "limited edition" Founding Fathers' Pale Ale kit when placing a recent order with Hopshop. The description says "Crisp and refreshing with fruity hops flavours, orchard and tropical fruit aroma and an overlaying biscuit base" which sounds like my kind of thing. Hopshop reassured...

That's a neat trick. Just roughly timed some of the options with a 500ml bottle: a) holding still upside down = 7s b) vigorously shaking upside down = 8s c) holding still at 45 degrees upside down = 6s d) the vortex method = 4-5s so I guess the bottle in his video was 1L.

My method is to combine sterilising the bottles with sterilising a second fermentation bin which is then used for batch priming the brew. In other words I fill a 30L plastic fermentation bucket with VWP to about the 25L mark, sterilise the bottles in it, give the bucket a good rinsing, siphon...

Hi Mike At the risk of teaching you to suck eggs there's a decent home brew show in Penryn (on the industrial estate behind B&Q and Asda) - Granite Rock Brewery - which sells a fair selection of kits and most common equipment too. They cater for both kit brewers (I am one) and all-grain brewers...

Aha, Brix scale. My hydrometers only have the specific gravity scale so I've never used Brix. Looks like (https://www.brewersfriend.com/brix-converter/) 11.02 Brix = 1.0443 SG, which is almost exactly what my Lidl juice showed. If it ferments down to 1.000 (= 0.0 Brix) then that works out at...

About 15 years go I overhead a conversation between a Brit and an American sitting behind me on a coach. The Brit was trying to be appreciative about American culture, and mentioned that his favourite beer was Budweiser, but the American was having none of it. He told the Brit that one of the...

Is that 11.02 Plato scale, or 1.102 relative density? 1.102 would mean a likely final ABV of over 13% if the yeast can take it, so I assume it's Plato scale. I just finished my first pint of rather cloudy 99p/litre Lidl apple juice based cider. I'm not really a cider drinker myself so no idea...

That's good to know. I put a first bottle into the fridge just now and it did look slightly clearer than a couple of weeks ago, so maybe it's just a matter of patience. Still, there's plenty of good cloudy scrumpies, so cloudy's not a problem really.

Is the Aldi apple juice "naturally cloudy" or fairly clear? It seems difficult to find clear apple juice that's not from concentrate. I recently made a gallon of cider using Lidl's "naturally cloudy" juice - too tempting to pass at 99p/litre - but it's resolutely not clearing. Not a yeast haze...

Yes, I've seen them for sale, and that's the solution if the swing tops allow it. Unfortunately the Range swing tops have been made so the seals are inseparable from the white plastic bit. It's hard to work out exactly how they've done that, but even with pliers I haven't been able remove the...

@chrig -the swing tops can be used umpteen times though, so that £40 will be spread over many batches. I have 8 boxes of the Range swing top bottles, so two 23L batches, and I've probably used each bottle+swing top about 20 times so far with no problems. I am careful with the swing tops though...