Jim's Beer Kit

With that much redcurrant I'd definitely do wine. We have a bush that yields about 4kg per year and almost all of it ends up as wine. I've given up keeping exact notes because if you add 250gm or more per gallon of blackcurrant to any berry mix it comes out nice. However we also have plenty of raspb...

I've made a lot of cider I deem "credible" with ordinary concentrate. Other people who've drunk it seem to like it better than a lot of the commercial rubbish out there. You just need to add tannin and maybe adjust the acidity. I do always base the recipe around Suma concentrate which has a great fl...

Also, what bottles are you using? I had trouble with Wychwood bottles.

I hated both 2lever ones I had, snapped a few necks: went back to the old hammer-on style until I could get a bench capper. All the ones like this are OK. This is just the first link in google. Sorry about the long url! https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/184580223917?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=710-15331...

There's very little difference between from- and not-from- concentrate juices. It's only concentrated to make shipping from China cheaper. It's got the same apple, sugar, etc as any juice. It's diluted to make a drink that tastes good, and the taste is what matters. OTOH... My base recipe always inc...

I bought 2kg. Will try one as a 1 gallon run, see how it comes out. Will need amylase. The second kg I may try to roast a bit harder - they currently only do pale - as t'missus prefers mild.

Maybe you all know this and I just wasn't paying attention, but there's a company called AltGrain (altgrain.co.uk) that can supplied malted millet in 1kg (home brewer) or 20kg (microbrewery) packs
Haven't tried them yet but heard about them on Facebook.

Most TC recipes include another juice or cordial or syrup, to broaden the flavour profile. You know how it's possible to make quite tasty wine with just sugar, a boxful of fruit teabags, and maybe a bit of tannin and/or acids? Over on a Facebook group, somebody asked if you could use fruit teabags i...

For sweetening I now always use lactose. It can go in at the start as it's not fermentable, and has none of the off tastes other artificial sweeteners have

ClarityFerm destroys the protein, it makes the beer properly GF, given time to work. As far as I understand it. The 20ppm limit set years ago was mostly due to the assay method used not being able to measure anything smaller. Nowadays it's possible to measure down to 5ppm and so some countries do se...

ISTR The Alaskan Bootlegger's Bible has a recipe for potato wine. With parsnips and carrots, freezing, or maybe just a fridge, will get some of the starch converted to sugar.

I jut dump ordinary sugar into the bottles. As the cider goes in it gets stirred up a bit. The yeast will find it.

Your 1l juice spread across 23l of cider is only about 0.25% to add to the ABV. Ignore it

According to the interwebs, it's 1/6th the sweetness of sucrose.

I've tried a few artificial sweeteners in my turbociders. Some don't taste good, even in 'just take the edge off' quantities. And I suspect they may be causing the headaches t'missus gets the day after - she never used to. So I'm thinking of trying lactose, a natural sugar that doesn't ferment. Migh...