My wife gave me a home brew kit for my birthday back in August. Ah ha I thought, a new hobby and saving us money as well!!
So, after loading the fermenting bin with a tin of Geordie Lager I trotted of to my local homebrew store to buy 40 x 500ml bottles at a touch under £30 ouch!
. After a week I bottled up the lager and left them in the shed which was warm at the time. The result after 2 weeks was ok but nothing you would give to discerning lager drinkers.
Whilst they were settling down I bought a tin of Coopers Australian Lager. A make shift panel heater was rigged up under the stairs cupboard to keep the temperature to around 25C.
This lager cleared in 4 days and oh bugger it was off down the shop again to get some more bottles.
Loaded up the bottles with ½ a teaspoon of granulated sugar and left them in the cupboard for 5 days before banishing them to the shed for a couple of weeks.
Spending an extra couple of quid on a better quality kit makes all the difference (or is it luck?) Crack open a bottle of the Coopers brew then have a can of the fermented goats urine from the local Spar and it makes you realise was junk you have been drinking!! The Coopers seems to be far more drinkable than the first Geordie batch. This is my opinion only --- I’m sure there are loads of Geordie drinkers out there who would have me hung by the English plums!!
Anyway it was time to move from the stairs cupboard to the shed. I constructed was can only be described as a wooden box with a removable door lined with Jablite expandable foam board with a tube heater and room stat. I’ve got the next batch of Coopers fermenting there now. The temperature seems to hold at a nice 25C without using too much juice.
The next task was to source more bottles. Covert bottle runs in stealth mode were made to all the local recycle bins where 40 ish bottles of Bulmer’s were recovered along with various 500ml local brewery browns.
I’ve read a lot on previous posts about going to your local pub to source bottles. Wouldn’t local landlords be a bit miffed if home brewers kept turning up on his / her doorstep for bottles they could ultimately be drinking out of from his / her pub?
Oh hell it’s much more fun spending an afternoon with your legs hanging out of a wheelie bin with the wife and kids on lookout.
Has anyone used Budweiser /Stella/San Miguel bottles. I’ve picked up loads of them but they seem a little light. Our local Isle Of Wight brewery bottles that were acquired in the stealth mode mentioned above are excellent and exactly the same as the ones you buy from the local homebrew shop. The clear ones are good for keeping an eye on the conditioning. I use one bottle per batch for this purpose.
I’ve also set up a make shift racking system for the deluge of bottles that will no doubt result from the weekly stealth runs to the recycle bins!
That’s it for the moment. It’s now just a case of keeping up with supply and demand. That’s a struggle !
im either going to have to turn the whole garage into a bar, or else squeeze a minibar into the house somehow 
