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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.
7 Ways to Improve a Beer Kit
Make sure to check out our YouTube video where you can learn of 7 ways to improve your beer kit.
Mastering the Art of Beer Recipe Creation: Tips, Techniques, and AI
Are you an aspiring brewmaster ready to create your own unique beer recipe? Look no further! In this blog post, we'll...
Reviving a Stuck Beer Yeast: Tips and Tricks to Get Your Brew Back on Track
There's nothing quite as disheartening as discovering that your homebrew has a stuck fermentation. But fear not,...
Ancient Beer: Unknown Historical Facts about the UK’s Favourite beverage
Beer has been enjoyed all over the world for thousands of years and has a long and intriguing history. It is also one...
Top 3 Home Brewing Cider Kits in 2023
If you are looking to get into home brewing cider, there are many cider kits available on the market that can help you...
Brewing Sugar Vs Regular Sugar – Why it Matters in 2023
Whether you are brewing a beer kit, cider kit, wine kit or even making your distilling wash, you will nearly always...
First Steps in Water Chemistry in Beer Brewing 2023 Version
Water is the most important ingredient in beer, making up more than 90% of its content. While it's easy to overlook...
How to Separate Heads, Hearts & Tails? (Taking Cuts)
Distilling alcohol is a complex and nuanced process that requires careful attention to detail. One of the most...
How to Start using Botanicals when Distilling
Are you a distiller looking to expand your craft by creating a unique flavour profile using botanicals? Or perhaps...
How to Upgrade your Grainfather for Distilling
Are you a passionate home brewer looking to diversify into making your own spirits? Or maybe you are bored of brewing...
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 Make a Sugar Wash at Home
A sugar wash is a mixture of sugar, water, and yeast fermented to produce alcohol. It's a crucial step in the process...
How to use the T500 Condenser? Ultimate Guide
This guide will cover how you can set up, run and make professional quality spirits with your Still Spirits T500...
Can you Use Out of Date Home Brew Beer Kits?
Beer kits are a popular choice among home brewers, both beginner and advanced. They offer a convenient and...
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
For many brewers, their adventures start with extract brewing - whether liquid or spray malt - and eventually want to...
Does Making your Own Beer Really Save Money?
There is a lot of marketing out there which boasts of huge savings from home brewing, but how much can you really...
How to Make Your Own Rum Moonshine – Recipe Included
What is Moonshine? Moonshining refers to making spirits ‘by the light of the moon’ because of its illicit nature....
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...
7 Ideas for Christmas Home Brew Beers
It seems a bit early to be thinking about Christmas. We're only just putting away our Halloween costumes and cleaning...
Commercial Spirits to Home Brew Flavour Conversions
Have you ever wondered which home brew distillation flavouring is the perfect subtitute for your favourite store...
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
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
If you haven’t guessed by now, kveik is one of our favourite types of yeast. We love seeing the unique characteristics...
6 of the Best Home Brew Beer Kits 2023
I have compiled a list of the best home brew beer kits in 2023, I have based the research on personal preference, best...
Open Fermentation – Everything You Need To Know
https://youtu.be/sexloMKPuO8 Virtually every book, instruction manual, YouTuber, brewer will tell you to never look...
Fresh Hop Beer
As summer rolls into autumn, we see more rain and less sun, and people are packing away their BBQs whilst holidays...
What is Distillation? – The Ultimate Guide
Introduction to Distillation Distillation is a process of separating and concentrating the components of a liquid...
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
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.
Ultimate Guide to Yeast Starters for Homebrew Beer
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: fermentation is the most important part of brewing, and good yeast health and...
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?
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.
Grain to Glass in 4 days – Rosemary Ale
Sometimes it's really useful to have the ability to make a decent beer really fast. I'm talking grain to glass in a...
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
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.
Stuck Sparge – Don’t Panic
During one of my recent brew days whilst using the Grainfather, I encountered a stuck sparge. Although a rare occasion...
How to use Chemsan and Chemclean – The Workhorse of the Home Brewery
Cleaning and sanitisation are such important parts of brewing it’s almost impossible to brew without some sort of...
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
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
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?
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
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.
3 Beer Glasses to Perfect your IPA
Why does the glass matter? Whichever beer glass you choose helps to enhance aroma, flavour and visual representation....
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
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
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 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
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
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?
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.
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...
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
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?
A Beginners Guide to Making Cider from Scratch in 2023
Apples are a heritage fruit to Britain, and cider plays an incredibly important role in that story. It’s a drink which...
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?
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
Hops have been used in brewing for 800 years, helping to balance flavours, and stop spoilage bacteria ruining the...
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...
Right-on wine: 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...
Wine kits: Do I need any equipment?
Wine kits: Do I need any equipment? Wine kits contain just the juice used to make your 6 or 30 bottles of home-made...
Five Grainfather Hacks to Improve Your Brewday in 2023
The all-in-one Grainfather system took the homebrew world by storm due to its ease of use, compact size, and quality...
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...
Rise of the Pseudo Lager: Grain to Glass in Rapid time
If you’re a homebrewer reading this, chances are at some point on a hot day you’ve cracked open a cold, crisp, clean...
Beginners guide to brewing beer
Guide to brewing home brew beer from a kit So, you are a beginner and are interested in brewing your own beer... We...
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...
Homebrewing: Expectations vs Reality
It’s no secret that beer is one of the most popular beverages in the world and the UK love grabbing a cold one after a...
The Beginners Guide to All Grain Homebrewing in 4 Basic Steps
Homebrewing is a fun hobby, and you can save a lot of money on trips to the pub. The thing is, most people don’t know...