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I will be making a honey beer this week and the plan is to use the pressure barrel for the first time. I expect to take a couple of months at least to drink it, so I wondered about using preservatives and a co2 bulb. Is this sensible or not?

Nice one, thanks! I will make some of that up this evening. I have 12kg of sucrose for non beer brewing :)

Thanks, is candi sugar just normal granulated sucrose?

Simple question here, I have a Brewferm Kriek cherry beer kit. I assumed at £25 for a 12 litre kit it would not need anything else, but it turns out it needs 500g of sugar. What with not knowing about fruit beers, which sugar is best? Brewers sugar, improver or spray malt? Cheers :)

Not sure on the recipe you are using, but cherries are fairly high in pectin so may be worth using a little enzyme.

I am going to try a honey ale using a coopers real ale kit, should I simply use honey in place of sugar at a 1.25:1 ratio, or would I need some spray malt to give it some body, too? Cheers :)

Every bottle of mine gets soaked in hot bleach in the sink for a couple of hours and they come out crystal clean before being stored. They are then washed again at bottling time before sterilising.

I have only used the bucket type FV's for ale, but I feel uncomfortable not seeing an airlock bubbling away, hence wondering about using the barrel with an airlock. Right now I have something else in my friends 5 gallon FV with an airlock and I feel secure watching it bubble away. I guess it's a...

I would imagine it was because of too much headspace leaving too little pressure to carbonate the brew properly. Having said that, I don't have too much experience but from a physics point if view it makes sense.

They did sell it on Sir Frank Whittle Way about 6 years back, no idea when they stopped stocking it though as I took a break from brewing until recently.

This one has one of the bigger lids, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered :)

I looked in Morrison's Derby just before Christmas and there was none to be found. He did say larger stores, though.

My current air locked fermenter is on loan from my friend and I was given an old pressure barrel the other day. It needs a new tap, but once that is done can I airlock it and ferment in that, using the tap as a convenient way to rack off the lees? I would use it for the smaller kits, such as the...

Beet and cane are both sucrose and refined. I guess it would make a difference if you were making rum, but that's a whole different ball game. Ideally you would use dextrose or maltose if you needed to add sugar, as far as I know.

I will definitely try this again, it seems I used around half the plums and licorice that is recommended here, and the flavours are not as strong as I would like. I got my quantities from a google search before I found these forums, so I suspect it was for one can, or half the kit.

Cheers, I will struggle with cold conditioning so I will try the finings :)

Oh, I just mentioned on another thread that I had tried this. I used 800g plums and 6 pontefract cakes in a wherry kit and while it tastes ok, it is VERY cloudy and the flavours in the badgers are a lot stronger.

I made a Wherry kit but modified it to try and achieve something akin to poachers choice and it has been four weeks in the bottle and it is very cloudy. It tastes fine and the bottles have a hefty deposit on the bottom, so I am not convinced the cloudiness in this particular instance is yeast...

I am still new to the whole real ale thing, but I definitely prefer heavier brews and tend towards rubies or porters. The wife is the one who likes the Wychcraft, so if you say this kit is not as hoppy perhaps I should brew it a bit short? I understand the hoppiness is measured in some kind of...

Why would you suggest using a cheaper kit for a fruit beer? Being a true noob at this, I like to know why things are suggested so I can learn :) Good idea about the cherry flavouring, is that the stuff used for flavouring neutral spirits?