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Well, due to the excitement of my first brew going so well, I have decided to start a new one.

This time I changed the way I used the ingredients.

First of all, I boiled the hops off in 3 different stages.  Half of it in from the start, then after 30 minutes I added half of what was left.  Then 5 mins before the end of boil I added the remainder.

I also added a small amount of strawberry essence while it was boiling and a cup of tea (minus milk and sugar) as I’ve heard this is good for it.

After this instead of adding the Malt extract to fresh hot water, I added it to the Hop Water after hops had been removed, then topped up with cold filtered water.

Im also experimenting with some Super Wine yeast, as I had no beer/lager yeast available.

Well it’s fermenting away nicely now so in about 10 days should be ready for bottling.  Hope it turns out ok.

It’s been a while since I posted last, as I’ve been very very busy.  Anyway the brew is now finished fermenting and has been filtered and bottled. I even printed lables for the bottles.

Need to wait  a couple of weeks now for it to settle, can’t wait.

My previous calculations were wrong on the alcohol content, I have re calculated it to around 3.8%

Well we’re on day 3 of the homebrew now, and I’m happy to say it is coming along nicely.

On the evening of day 1, I did notice a small problem, I went and checked the airing cupboard where I am fermenting this beer, and it had basically started to froth over teh top.  The airlock and demijohn and not to forget the shelves below and floor were covered in froth.

Action was needed.

After cleaning up the mess I decided that I needed to put the demijohn inside something, and I opted for my builders bucket.

Luckily this fitted on the shelf nicely where it was before so no major disruption.

I checked again the following morning and the cap off the airlock had dissapeared and there was some spray on the wall next to the bottle, but nothing serious.

The bubbles are raid and the airlock is working overtime, and everytime I look I have a sense that there is now more alchohol in there than last time.

It does appear to be very slightly clearing as well, and the color has lightened from a muddy brown to a golden / muddy brown.

I expect over the next few days, to see a slow down in the bubbling process and start to get close to the end of fermentation, I will take my first SG reading then to see how close we are.  I am aiming for a reading of 1.006.  The start reading was 1.035, so this should give a alchohol content of around 2.8% I think.

More updates soon.

Last week I decided to have a new fresh attempt at brewing my own beer. for those of you the already know me, you will remember I have tried this before, without much success.

The difference this time is that I will be creating from scratch, rather than using a kit.

After a bit of research, I decided on making a lager. I also decided that making my own fermented sugar, and that it would be easier (at least for a novice) to buy malt extract. Which is essentially what is used for brewing beer, and is made by extracting the sugar from barley.

So I got my ingredients:

Malt Extract (From Holland and Barrats)
Hallertau Hops
Lager Yeast
Boiled, Filtered water.
Brown Sugar

I followed a specific method I found out on the Internet and eventually (after about 3 hours) came up with a fermenting brew.

I am calling this one Scarlet Fizz.

The reason for this name, is that when I was creating it, I was recovering from Scarlet fever. Anyway, here it is on day 1 of fermentation.  I will try and add pics on a daily basis.

Scarlet Fizz - day 1