Summer fruits cider

Summer fruits cider had always been an easy brew over the summer but last year my usual summer fruits juice went suger free and I could taste the sweeteners.

This year I decided to use real fruit so I used 1.7kg of summer fruits from aldi (£2.99 i think per 1kg) and added 1kg of slugger then pored over 2 kettled (about 4 lts) of boiling water. Once it was all mushy i blitzed it with my stick blender, added pectolase and campton and left for 24 hours. I then added 5 lrs of apple juice and topped up with water untill gravity reading was at 1.032 (approx 12lts bottled water). I then added wine yeast. The wine yeast should give me a final reading of 1 (sometimes 0.998). I would expect the cider to be around 3.8%

St peter's golden ale

So no post in a while but I need to record this one.

Picked up a st peter's golden ale from Colchester home brew supplies. Sterilised all the kit and got the brew on as usual. Kit should do 36 pintd but I added water to make it 40 pints. This will lower the alcohol from 4.7 to hopefully around 4%.

Given the weather at the moment (it's very hot. Hit 32 today) i decided I didn't need to submersible heater.

The starting gravity was 1.042

There is a hop enhancer in the kit I will be adding that later in the process. This should add a little bitterness and more fragrance

Stout

I've been meaning to do a stout for a while. Last week i ordered the simply stout kit from amazon. Really simple to following (as you would expect given its name). I added dark brown sugar as i wanted to give it a treacle taste.
I. G. Was 1.038. I did over fill, was probably closer to 25 ltrs than the 23 I was supposed to.

Usual set up in the garage, with submersible heater set a little lower than usual. I was hoping that by it being a little cooler the fermentation would be a little less aggressive

I'll update when I do the next reading

Overdue update

So it's been a while since I've added anything to the blog. Ive done quite a few brews, a few ales, a red wine, 2 or 3 batches of larger and a lot of cider. I am going to attempt to keep it up-to-date so i can keep track of what I've been doing. I may also add a few updates on the fruit in the garden as i intend to do fruity cider again this year