***Home Brew Thread***

[Jonny69]

I got back into home brewing late last year with some cider after picking up the apples in my mate's garden. We got around 60kg of them which was good for 40 litres of apple juice. That went in 9 demijohns round at another mate's house and he let the lot brew to cider. We used two types of yeast - cider and champagne. Most was with cider yeast which dropped out quite quickly to a nice dense sediment at the bottom and the resulting cider was still. The other lot we used champagne yeast which took an age to settle out and we were left with quite crisp sparkling cider. I would say it wasn't worth the extra wait, because syphoning it off knocked the fizz out of it and the yeast sediment was very light and made racking a pain. Since we were noobs we lost loads in the racking, bottled it too soon and generally cocked it up, but the end product was quite drinkable.

Around December I put a blackberry wine on. I think it was about 700g fruit which was previously foraged and frozen, a kilo of sugar and topped up to 5 litres with water. It has aged well and is quite drinkable. It could do with a bit more fruit though - note for later this year

The next brew was a gallon of limoncello. I knew roughly what I wanted it to taste like so I juiced 15 lemons from the market, added 1kg of sugar for the brew and once completed I'll add more sugar to taste. It has now cleared and is sat in the demi. I need to rack it off the yeast and bottle it really.

Which brings us up to the latest brews. I'm doing a cider with cloudy apple juice from Lidl and what they call pear nectar, which is pear pulp watered down with added sugar. It's quite thick and gloopy so I guess it'll make a kind of perry cider. These are the offending juices:



Into the demijohns goes 200g of white sugar, a teaspoon of yeast nutrient, a teaspoon of yeast and 4 litres of juice:



That will probably start to froth up so I've left a gap at the top. In a few days I'll top it up to the neck and leave it to ferment out. The 200g of sugar will add about 2% alcohol on top of that created by the natural sugars in the juice, so the apple should come out at about 6% and the pear which is a bit sweeter might be 7-7.5%

I would call myself a beginner but I'll try and answer any questions. Years ago I did two lots of beer, two lots of schnapps and I've just got back into it. I've read a book, done a few brews that have been quite drinkable, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert