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[KegThat]

Hops have been used in brewing for 800 years, helping to balance flavours, and stop spoilage bacteria ruining the beer. The concept of a “hop heavy” beer started in the 18th Century when beers which were sent to India were highly hopped to survive the long journey from the UK. Whilst that started the style of India pale ales, or IPAs, today the style is abundant in pubs, bars and homes as the taste for hops continues to grow....

Read the rest here The Guide to Dry Hopping - Techniques for home brewers

 

[KegThat]

A BEGINNERS GUIDE TO MAKING CIDER FROM SCRATCH
Apples are a heritage fruit to Britain, and cider plays an incredibly important role in that story. It’s a drink which is closer to wine than a beer alternative, as many bars and pubs would have you believe. One of the great things about cider is that with a few basic tools almost anyone can make it, and here’s how.
Read the rest here Making Cider from Scratch - Beginners Guide



7 Home Brew Hacks!
Here is our new blog post :)
We may see brewing as a hobby we do every weekend, but sometimes it’s helpful to remember it’s older than civilisation itself, and for the majority of people who’ve lived in history, they made beer at home instead of buying from a brewery. This might seem somewhat profound for an introduction to a homebrew article, but it means every problem we face as homebrewers has probably been solved at some point. Here are some useful hints and tips to help with your brewing.....
Read the rest here... 7 Home Brew Hacks to improve your brewing!



Hops Under the Microscope
Check out our recent blog post here!

 

[KegThat]

Does wine have to be made from grapes?
When supermarket wines are described has having flavours of blackberry or cherry, or even gooseberry and banana, then why can’t we just cut to the chase and drink wines made from these fruits instead? The answer is you can. Wines made with hedgerow-picked fruits, or delivered to us from the farmer via the supermarket, are known as country wines and can be made by any winemaking enthusiast with a demijohn and a plastic fermentation bucket.

In a country that hasn’t grown grapes all that reliably for much of its history, the UK has looked to the scruffy elderberry bush to make red port-style wines with the September-ready black fruits and even used them (legislation put a stop to it) to add extra flavour and colour to the imported Portuguese real stuff. If you’re not sure whether you’ve got an elderberry bush near you then look out for their gorgeous scented flower heads in June and use these to make elderflower wine by steeping the flowers in sugar dissolved in water for a few days then sprinkling in (jargon alert: pitching) some yeast.

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Red please, but which one?
So you know you like red wine but how do you choose the red wine kit that will give the flavours you’ll enjoy. The answer lies in a cup of tea.

How do you take your tea?

Tea contains tannin and so does red wine. Tannin is the stuff that makes your mouth feel dry and, in large amounts, can make your mouth pucker. To soften this effect we often add milk and sugar to tea. But in red wines it’s not that simple.

So to choose the right red wine kit you’ll need to know whether you like your red wines light and easy drinking with lower levels of tannin, full on with higher levels of tannic astringency, or somewhere in-between with red wines that taste smooth and fruity but with a bit of cinnamon spiciness in the flavour too.

To do this we can compare our taste preferences by how we like our cup of tea.

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Dry hopping your wine kit
The homebrew wine world often reflects what’s going on in vineyard-made wines. And that’s infusing hops in finished white wines: dry-hopping them in a similar way to beer to add complementary fruity pineapple and lemon aromas.

Infusing your made wine with hops doesn’t add that well-known characteristic of hops – their bitter flavours – as these only come out with a boiling process. Boiling is part of the beer making process but not for wine.

What wines are dry-hopped?

A German winemaker dry-hopped their Riesling with Eukanot hops, while another infused Citra hops into a white wine made with the Muller-Thurgau grape variety (and also released a dry-hopped red and rosé to complete the mix). In American the Michigan Wine Company has made a slightly sweet tasting white wine made with the spicy tasting Seyval white grape variety and infused it with Citra hops for two weeks.

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Brewing a psuedo lager
If you’re a homebrewer reading this, chances are at some point on a hot day you’ve cracked open a cold, crisp, clean lager, sat back in your chair and thought “I wish I could brew this”. Maybe you’ve had the good fortune to drink a pilsner in Czechia or a helles in Munich and you’ve been inspired to make your own.

Reading about lager brewing might put some homebrewers off, especially if cold fermentation is an issue, finding a suitable vessel (and space) for long term storage, or just understanding what the differences are between ales and lagers and how to brew them.

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Wort chillers
In homebrewing, a wort chiller is an essential piece of equipment which can not only save time but improve the quality of your homebrew beer. We will explain the benefits of using a wort chiller and also the pros and cons of different wort chillers so you can decide which is best for you and how you can use the wort chiller you decide on.

Read the rest here

 

[KegThat]

Height Advantage: Wine Racking Made Easy
Racking is the process of moving your home-made wine from one vessel to another. But when this involves moving up to 25kg of liquid, how do you do this without putting your back out? The answer is to think ahead and create the necessary height needed for racking wines into your fermentation process right from the start and move your brewing bucket off the floor.
https://kegthat.com/height-advantage-wine-racking-made-easy/

 

[KegThat]

Nettle Beer - Guide for Home Brewers
Nettles are the worst of all weeds. They spring up everywhere, are incredibly difficult to get rid of and they sting like hell. Why must plants fight back!? These nasty nettles can be turned into alcohol though, so perhaps they’re not so bad.

There are many nettle beer recipes online, but they’re made by people who don’t homebrew. Whilst that’s fine, I’ve found through my own experimentation that having homebrewing equipment and ingredients to hand makes the process a lot easier and allows for a wider range of flavours.

Read the rest here

 

[KegThat]

Celebratory Platinum Jubilee Wines
With just eight weeks until The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, running between Thursday 2 and Sunday 5 June 2022, there’s just enough time to get brewing and make yourself some homemade wines and even some ginger beer to help with the seventieth anniversary Bank Holiday celebrations.

If you need help organising a street party, The Eden Project’s Big Jubilee Street Lunch has a free planning pack to help you organise the event – you can even add it to the government’s list of events going on around the country.

Read the rest here

 

[KegThat]

How to Bottle Beer
Bottling beer + video How to Bottle Beer: A Complete Guide

 

[KegThat]

How to Keg
https://kegthat.com/how-to-keg/

 

[KegThat]

All Grain Brewing for Beginners
I’ve been a home brewer for over 8 years now and in this time I’ve run many homebrew classes, and what I always tell new students wanting to make their own beer is: all grain brewing can be as easy or as complicated as you want it to be. As a beginner, let’s keep it simple! This guide will help you through your first few brews and get you beer you’ll be proud to share with your friends.

The most important part to focus on is sanitisation and cleanliness! If there’s one thing you take away from this article, it needs to be this point. It may not sound very fun, but if you get this down then everything else will fall into place, your beers will be good, and this will give you the drive to brew more and get more from this hobby. They say brewing is 50% art and 50% science. It’s actually 95% cleaning.

What is Brewing? And How is Beer Made?

Let’s start right at the beginning. Beer from all grain brewing is made by mashing grains in hot water so the sugars can be extracted. This creates a liquid called wort and it’s then boiled with hops for bitterness and flavour. The wort is cooled, transferred to a fermenter and yeast is added to ferment those sugars. As the saying goes: brewers make wort, yeast makes beer.

The yeast turns the sugars into carbon dioxide (CO2) and alcohol, and once fermentation is finished we have beer. The beer is then packaged into bottles or a keg and enjoyed.

Read the rest here

 

[KegThat]

Make your own Summer Strawberry Rose
Making strawberry wine is one way of using up the excess of berries brought back from that tempting Pick Your Own farm day out. And although the recipe is easy to follow, the resulting delicately flavoured rosé wine has to be treated with care if it isn’t to fade its colour and oxidise all the taste away.

Read the rest here

Fruits of the Freezer Wine
With the earliest of garden fruits only starting to ripen in June, late spring sees a fermentation gap in our calendars. This is where the almost forgotten contents at the bottom of our freezer comes into play – those carefully harvested blackberries, blackcurrants, raspberries, elderberries, plums, apples, rhubarb and gooseberries that were promised for winter jams and tarts can be turned into a tasty, everyday drinking red wine instead.

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LoNo Elderflower Sparkling
The LoNo wine category, containing less than 0.5% alcohol, has been growing at a pace on the commercial side of the wine aisle. But home wine makers have been making this style of wine for generations using wild flowers and herbs. And now is a great time to join in as late May and early June sees the huge white heads of the elderflower adorning the hedgerows. This aromatic flower can be turned into what used to be known as Elderflower Champagne, but stricter naming laws have put paid to that and we now call it Elderflower Sparkling.

Using just the freshly gathered heads of the elderflower, along with some sugar, water and a bit of winemaking know-how, can produce a refreshing drink that our grandparents, and their grandparents, would know the taste of.

Read the rest here

White Please - But Which One?

So you know you like white wine but how do you choose the white wine kit that will give the flavours you’ll enjoy. The answer lies in that breakfast favourite – buttered toast topped with marmalade.

Butter or marmalade?

Are you a lashings of butter and a smear of marmalade person or would just eating marmalade for breakfast suffice?

How you proportion your toast toppings can give an insight into your taste preferences and how you like your wine.

Read the rest here

 

[KegThat]

3 Glasses to perfect your IPA
Whichever beer glass you choose helps to enhance aroma, flavour and visual representation. Much of the aroma is contained in the head, if served in the wrong glass this can deteriorate and the beer can lose the hop flavours and malty characteristics.

As the hop aroma you smell directly impacts the taste, choosing the right beer to capture this is essential.

Read the rest here

 

[KegThat]

Brewing a Summer Ale
With winter behind us, the days getting longer and bouts of warm weather are blessing us, more of us are wheeling out the BBQs and parasols, and nothing beats a warm summer’s day more than a refreshing beer.

Very few things in life beat sitting in a garden sessioning on lawnmower beers with some friends, especially if you can say “I made this beer”. Whether you keg or bottle, you can have an ample supply saving you from running to the shops mid session.

This is a recipe I like to make and enjoy in the summer months. It’s light, refreshing, easy to drink yet has that complexity to make it moreish without being demanding. The great thing about this recipe is certain ingredients can be switched out in a pinch and it still has great results. Stylistically it’s somewhere between a Belgian wit and American wheat.

Read the rest and watch the video here

 

[KegThat]

Guide to Lager Yeasts
I love lager. It’s probably my favourite type of beer. No, I don’t mean generic mass produced beer, 6 for £5 from Tesco lager, I’m talking about Staropramen in Prague lager. A perfectly poured Pilsner Urquell from Plzen type lager, Munich beer hall quality helles and a kolsch from Cologne level of lager.

I’ve been trying for years to recreate them in my home brewery. This has led me to experiment with different techniques and a range of different yeasts. Making a good lager is a bit more difficult than the average beer, but I won’t get into this here. I will talk about the different yeasts I’ve used and my opinion of them. Yeast and fermentation temperature is, of course, such a huge aspect to making a good lager.

I’ve included details of how I’ve used the yeast and in what beers. This is based on my experience with the yeasts and I’d be really interested to hear how your beers came out with these strains in the comments. As I try new yeasts I’ll be updating this article as well.

I’m including some ale yeasts for making koslches and pseudo lagers. When speaking to other brewers who want to make lagers, I find they focus too much on the process and not really on what they want to achieve. A clean malty beer can be achieved without making a lager in the traditional sense, and it’s really constructive to think of beer production in this way.

Read the rest and view a fantastic to table to keep on your bookmarks here!

 

[KegThat]

Stuck Sparge - Dont Panic
During one of my recent brew days whilst using the Grainfather, I encountered a stuck sparge. Although a rare occasion if everything is done correctly, it happens – here are some tips on overcoming the problem and preventing it from happening in the future!

A stuck sparge is where the sparge water cannot flow through the grain bed normally, a stuck sparge can also occur when you are recirculating the wort during the mash and the wort builds up at the top of the grain bed.

It is much more common when using malts with high protein such as wheat malt, however, it can happen during any brew day with any recipe!
Read the rest here