Jim's Beer Kit

You could try a hydraulic lift cart. Oooh, now, that makes me wonder... I've been pondering the same problem for a while, because lifting 45 litres of beer onto a worktop to bottle it is also a bit tricky. Perhaps I could manufacture something similar myself using a bottle jack to raise and lower t...

Seems everyone has very different experiences. I've not had a problem using the twin lever capper with Wychwood bottles. I tried putting vaseline on the bell of the bench top capper and I'm not really sure it improved things. It certainly still didn't do as good a job as the twin lever capper. I mig...

They don't come better than this . https://www.themaltmiller.co.uk/product/floorbench-capper-large/?v=79cba1185463 I have this and the same model for corking wine bottles That was the one I bought when I wasn't happy with the one above. I still wasn't happy with the way it closed the caps. James

I'd certainly recommend all-grain brewing. The quality of my end-product increased significantly when I did, even when I was basically fudging it with the kit I already had (grain bag for the mash, and a hop filter made from 15mm copper tube pushed into the back of the boiler tap fitting for the boi...

Oh, yes, to be fair once in a while I do get a bottle where the top breaks off. Most recently today, in fact. Some of my bottles are even older than the capper and quite possibly date back to when I gave up making beer from kits in the early 90's. Some of them might have come from Boots, too :D Afte...

Grabbed everything from the brewery and did the photos on the kitchen table instead :) This is the twin lever capper I generally use. It's fairly old now, perhaps as much as twenty-five years. It's even possible that I bought it from Boots. The mechanism looks different from the one previously poste...

Do you mean these... https://brew2bottle.co.uk/products/tappatrice-metal-twin-lever-bottle-capper?currency=GBP&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=Google%20Shopping&stkn=f51ba00cee25 Is there a nack? cos I could never get a satisfactory result with it. That's pretty much what I have, yes....

I've tried a couple of these cappers and never found that they do as good a job as the double-arm ones that I have. They never seem to crimp the cap as far around the top of the bottle.

James

Yes, I was just looking at the absolute minimum possible amount of energy required to heat up the water from the tap until it boils. All things being equal, it's just not possible to get 30 litres of water from an estimated "tap temperature" of 10°C to 100°C without putting 3.15kWh of energy into it...

Didn't we sort of know yeast was good for us before? That aside, this bit made me chuckle "Last year, a study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry followed 22 men who drank a little more than half a pint of beer every day " They should have recruited from the forum 😁 If they'd done tha...

Still under £10 a brew just. But that didn't include leccy. Next brew gets the energy meter plugged in, but I doubt that will exceed £1 That would be interesting. I'd do mine, but the sockets are awkward to get to once I have hot wort splashing about. My gut feeling is that for a five gallon brew l...

The cost is roughly twice my what my beers work out at. With the yeast I'd guesstimated that they work out around £2.50/litre. I've not worked out the electricity costs to run the HLT and boiler recently, but I'd hope to be getting much closer to three times what mine work out at, perhaps even more...

Resurrecting this thread rather than starting a new one... I've just bought the 3rd edition as it came up for much cheapness. I already have previous editions, one with a white cover from 2001 which is looking more than a bit dog-eared these days, and one with a cream cover that predates that which ...

I've not heard of this "no chill cube" thing before now. Or if I have I've paid it no attention. However, I regularly run the wort out of my boiler into fermentation buckets with snap-on lids to allow it to cool overnight which I guess is largely the same thing. I've found that if I leave stuff in t...

No problem. Your answer did at least push me down a path I wasn't even aware existed.

James