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How to use a Keg King Pressure Fermenter

How to use a Keg King Pressure Fermenter

Pressure fermentation is a great way to create cleaner tasting beers, and can speed up lager fermentation times! This video shows you how to put your Keg King pressure fermenter together, sanitise, pressurise and ferment in it.

Air Still Pro vs Air Still

Air Still Pro vs Air Still

Are you tired of buying expensive and low-quality spirits at your local supermarket? Maybe you've tried distilling...

How to Brew High Gravity Beers

How to Brew High Gravity Beers

There’s a stage I think every homebrewer goes through, they brew a few pale ales and once they get the hang of it, a...

Partial Mash Brewing

Partial Mash Brewing

For many brewers, their adventures start with extract brewing - whether liquid or spray malt - and eventually want to...

How to Brew Low Alcohol Beer

How to Brew Low Alcohol Beer

If you go on Untappd and look at the top rated beers, you’ll see a trend: they all seem to be high ABV. In fact - as...

Top 6 All Grain Beer Kits

Top 6 All Grain Beer Kits

All grain brewing is cheaper, there’s more control over the product, and there’s something satisfying about using 100%...

Advanced Cider Tips

Advanced Cider Tips

As I sit and write, it’s early October in what’s been a fantastic year for apples. I have over 190 litres of juice...

Kveik Stout Recipe

Kveik Stout Recipe

If you haven’t guessed by now, kveik is one of our favourite types of yeast. We love seeing the unique characteristics...

Fresh Hop Beer

Fresh Hop Beer

As summer rolls into autumn, we see more rain and less sun, and people are packing away their BBQs whilst holidays...

Forager’s Favourite: Blackberry wine

Forager’s Favourite: Blackberry wine

Mid-September is the best time to pick blackberries as they will be at their ripest. And National Blackberry Day celebrates this on September 12th when our hedgerows will be full of those plump black fruits that make an excellent homemade red wine. Come home with about half a carrier bag full of black berries and you’ll be ready to turn these into a gallon of blackberry wine.

Recipes: Wine-beer hybrids

Recipes: Wine-beer hybrids

Let’s get practical with two wine-beer hybrid recipes that you can make at home. I’ll share my Orange, Ginger and Wheat wine recipe that was so tasty it won first prize in a local winemakers’ show and the second is Gladys Blacklock’s Carrot and Hops wine from her book Modern Winemaking Techniques.

How to use Home Brew Dry Yeast

How to use Home Brew Dry Yeast

  Dry yeast sachets are amazing. They’re easy to use, convenient, and they stay viable for a long time if stored...

Can wine taste like beer?

Can wine taste like beer?

When wine is made from grapes and beer from malted barley, the question of whether there is a cross-over in flavours between the two is surely a non-starter. But add in country wines made by the home winemaker using fruits that aren’t grapes and flavoured with an A-Z of herbs and spices and the question starts to sound like there might be something in it.

How to use Kveik Yeast

How to use Kveik Yeast

Kveik was brought to the wider brewing world’s attention by Lars Marius Garshol. At the time it was only available...

How to choose a wine yeast

How to choose a wine yeast

When Burgundy wine yeast doesn’t automatically turn your country-style wine recipe into Burgundy tasting French red wine, or when adding a teaspoon of all-purpose dried yeast to start your elderberry Port results in a not-quite-finished stuck fermentation then just how do you go about choosing the right wine yeast for your home winemaking recipes? The answer lies in how much time you have to think about it.

Homemade wine with homemade cheese

Homemade wine with homemade cheese

Classic cheese and wine pairing advice suggests it’s Bordeaux reds and expensive sweet Sauternes when cheese is on the menu. But home winemakers can expand the wine list to include wines made with flowers and fruits – and even go one step further and make their own cheese too.

Guide to Lager Yeasts

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...

Cask Ale Conditioning at Home

Cask Ale Conditioning at Home

Don’t try this at home! Or at least use some caution. I try to carbonate my home brew beer in a pressure barrel by transferring before fermentation has ended in an attempt for real ale conditioning. Will it work?

Rosé please – but which one?

Rosé please – but which one?

So you know you like rosé wine but how do you choose a rosé wine kit that will give the flavours you enjoy. The answer...

Session Summer Ale

Session 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.

How to Keg – The Ultimate Guide

How to Keg – The Ultimate Guide

Ever wanted to cut out the pesky bottling day? Keg your beer! Bring the pub to your house! Learn everything you need to know in this video.

Make Your Own Summer Strawberry Rosé

Make Your Own Summer Strawberry Rosé

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.

All Grain Brewing For Beginners

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...

How to Bottle Beer: A Complete Guide

How to Bottle Beer: A Complete Guide

How do you get your beer from the fermenter, nicely carbonated into a bottle you and your friends can enjoy? The brewing process isn’t over yet and we’ll be looking at a method called “bottle conditioning” to show how you can easily package your beers, then (most importantly) drink them carbonated.

Fruits of the Freezer Wine

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.

LoNo Elderflower Sparkling

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.

White please – but which one?

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.

Celebratory Platinum Jubilee wines

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.

Height advantage: Wine racking made easy

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?

Does wine have to be made from grapes?

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.

Red please – but which one?

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.

A Guide to Dry Hopping

A Guide to Dry Hopping

Hops have been used in brewing for 800 years, helping to balance flavours, and stop spoilage bacteria ruining the...

Seven Homebrew Hacks

Seven Homebrew Hacks

We may see brewing as a hobby we do every weekend, but sometimes it’s helpful to remember it’s older than civilisation...

Hops Under the Microscope

Hops Under the Microscope

Ever since the craft beer boom exploded into our bars and pubs, IPAs and its variations have taken over taps as beer...

Everything about Wort Chillers

Everything about Wort Chillers

When all grain home brewing, a wort chiller is an essential piece of equipment that can save time and improve the...