We’re down to the last bottle of the Something Pink raspberry and cranberry mead so there is only one thing to do… Make more mead!

This time I have decided to try making a Braggot, which is a mead with some of the Honey replaced with malt. In addition to malt, the recipe I have followed (read looked at then largely ignored) includes some hops… Hops + malt + water + yeast = beer, the same equation + Honey (in sufficient quantities) = Braggot. The recipe I based the quantities on came from the very excellent brew book ‘Home Brew‘ by Doug Rouxel & Sara Paston-Williams.

To the local brew shop! (Which is here FYI).

So following the mead recipe from an old post of mine replace just less than half the honey with dried malt extract. (So about 300g honey to 500g malt). The process too is slightly different the malt plus about 30g of dried hops needs boiling up for 15 mins before following the recipe as before.

This will make you kitchen smell awesome! Sieve and siphon you mead into a demijohn, allow to cool, add your yeast and wait… just like I am doing!

Edit: 

Having found the following mess I suggest using a little less honey! Eep! It’s lively!

Yesterday I conducted a culinary experiment! Starting from the basic mead recipe I’ve always used I made some additions to create a Raspberry and Cranberry Mead. So without further ado here is what I used:

• 1 litre Cranberry Juice
• 500g Frozen Raspberries
• 1.5kg Honey
• 3 (and a bit) litres of Water
• Lime juice
• Yeast

First I sterilised everything, then in a pan warmed up the raspberries in 1 litre of water and smushed them up a bit. In a bigger pan I began warming the cranberry juice and strained the raspberry mush into it. (Leaving behind this delicious looking gloop).

Next into the big pan went the honey. Once the mixture was warm and well mixed, into the demijohn it went with a splash of lime juice. After it cooled to room temperature the yeast was added. So now its just a waiting game until its ready. The pre-fermented mix tasted amazing, lets hope that remains. Hope simple was that!?

Finally,  as I wrote this yesterday and as Kim and I watched Jurassic Park, on a lazy Sunday afternoon I was enjoying a pint of that beer I started a few weeks ago… Aaaand its good!

Cheers!

Winter is coming! I always seem to start making alcoholic beverages at this time of year*, as you saw the other day I have some beer brewing in my kitchen, now let me tell you of how I ended up helping bring into existence hopefully 40 pints of Perry!

After the Huddersfield food and drink festival (a truly amazing annual event and not just because it is usually the weekend nearest to my birthday!), my family and Kim’s went for a crafty beer at the Sportsman pub**. The outcome of which was that my Dad, Graham (Kim‘s Dad) and myself decided to split the cost of this cider press!

Well one of the pear trees in Graham’s garden was groaning under the strain of its fruit recently which meant it was time to press! And that is exactly what we did!

First we chopped the pears the tried to press them… bad idea this was waaaaay to tough! So Kim got her Mum’s blender out and we quickly blitzed the pears and put them back in the press. Juice in abundance!

A rough estimate of the ingredients:

• 25lb of pears (pressed to about 1 gallon of juice).
• 2kg of sugar
• 4 gallons more water
• 14g yeast

This is a bit experimental and of course I’ll let you know how it turns out. But I will say this, Cider presses are FUN! The working title for the collaboration of we three cider press owners is ‘RAG cider & perry’ (Richard, Adam, Graham) so should we succeed and the Dads decide to come out of/never go into retirement and go professional watch out for this name… hum… maybe…

* I’ll be starting some meads shortly.

** This has got me thinking I should write a pub guide to Huddersfield!

Busy weekend! After finishing my guitar and going to see Cowboys and Aliens*, I started brewing my first beer!

Once upon a time I made my zeroth beer but unfortunately due to a busted seal I ended up with 5 gallons of mould topped horribleness. But now I have new kit, and kit it is, for this attempt at making beer I have started from this kit. My idea is that if this works well I shall get a bit more adventurous and make something not from kit or a ‘kit/Adam makes it up’ hybrid! Here are the bits of the kit which aren’t the 5 gallon fermentation bucket.

And here are some pictures of how I ended up with 40pints of bitter brewing in my Kitchen.

I’ll let you know how it turns out!

Right, I have one more report of something awesome I did this weekend which will be posted in a day or two… (what will I do next weekend? … write observing proposals probably).

*not bad for something with such an insane title.