Martin Joiner’s Blog Confessions of a binge thinker

Brewmaster Scottish Heavy – 2nd attempt home brew success

I am very chuffed to announce that my second attempt at home-brewing beer is a success. By that I mean I could comfortably drink this until I was drunk! The flavour is almost as good as the professionally brewed stuff that you pay over £3 a bottle for in the supermarkets. But of course this only cost me 30 pence a bottle.

So what did I do differently this time to make it work so much better than the first batch?

1. Bought a bottle brush to really scrub the inside wall of the bottles with steriliser before bottling
2. Used only brown bottles to filter sunlight
3. Brewed in a dark place (my bathroom cupboard)
4. Was very VERY careful not to stir up sediment during any stage of brewing
5. Used a method called secondary fermentation (after the initial 4 days of vigorous fermentation I transferred the beer into a fresh container to complete the process, thus separating the beer from the nasty tasting sediment)
6. Put less sugar in the bottles at bottling

Now I cannot say for sure which of these things accounted for the sudden leap in quality but I think No. 4 was the most important thing. With my first batch I made the rookie error of stirring the beer a couple of days before bottling, mistakenly thinking this would encourage the brewing process. I was wrong, it tainted the beer with a horrible bitter taste and meant most of my first batch went down the drain.

Tasting Session

The beer is nicely carbonated, that is to say it doesn't blow off your sinuses with fizz like some homebrews but it's got enough to compliment the texture which is thin not caramelised. The flavour is earthy but light with a hint of metallic taste similar to stout. Just the right amount of bitterness for my taste, comparable with Newcastle Brown Ale. As for potency it lives up to it's reputation. The term Heavy is an everyday term for the Scots, so my Glaswegian flatmate informs me. One of it's key selling points being that it gets you drunk. During the time it's taken me to write this blog I am already mis-typing words and losing concentration.

Ding ding! Round 2. The home brewing continues. (How I am attempting to improve)

The home brewing community seems wrought with people who are trying it once in a flurry of excitement, failing and then giving up. I found some hardly used home brewing equipment, abandoned in the back of a vehicle in the scrap yard last week. I am finding discussion forums on the net where every single member has stopped posting comments and the whole forum lies dormant, the occasion newcomer yelling into the abyss for assistance and receiving no reply. I am not the kind of person to bring a journey to such a young conclusion. If I am doomed to stop brewing one day, let it be after a few damn good attempts!

So I made mistakes on my first homebrew that lead to the batch having an over-powering bitterness in the after taste. I am not sure what I did wrong but I noticed the bitterness seemed to be coming from the sediment. A quick experiment, tasting the dregs of the bottle proved this. I therefore conclude that my mistake must be due to somehow not allowing the sediment to settle as much as I should

My 2 possible causes (aka. Rookie errors):

1. I kept my fermenter next to my washing machine. My washing machine is old. The vibrations are enough to smash plates and cause waves in the washing-up bowl. I think this vibration might have upset the sediment every few days causing it to never properly settle and therefore create the bitter taste. Solution: I am doing the brew in my bathroom this time, away from any machinery.
2. I stirred the mix when it wasn't reaching the right gravity. The brewing kit and the hydrometer stated different gravities for bottling. Because I was waiting for the brew to reach a gravity below that which the hydrometer recommended, I started to get frustrated. I stirred the brew, thinking this would encourage the yeast to become more active. In fact all this did was kick up the sediment containing gluten and dead yeast which I reckon tainted the flavour causing the bitterness. In the end the brew was never going to drop to what the hydrometer wanted so I should have followed only the instructions that came with the brewing kit. Solution: I'm not going to stir it.

So my theories are pretty flimsy and I am by no means posting them here as any kind of solution. I am mearly sharing my thought process as I attempt to refine my brewing.

Additional improvements:

1. My fermenter was positioned so that it got a daily dose of sunlight. I have read this can be bad so my new brew's position in the bathroom is light-free.
2. I am going to introduce a process called secondary fermentation. It's quite straight forward. You simply transfer the brew into a new clean container after the initial stage of fermentation (about 3 days in the case of my kit). This separates the beer from the 1 inch thick layer of sediment (dead yeast and gluten) that occurs during the aggressive early stage of fermentation. You can now dispose of the crap and let the beer continue to refine inside it's new clean environment.
3. Two days before bottling I am going to introduce a gelatin based product called finings. This apparently aids the clearing of the brew. It also makes the brew unsuitable for vegetarians which is no major loss. I live in a third floor flat so very few of them would have the energy to reach me anyway.

So wish me luck. I will keep you posted and I look forward to inviting you round for a drink if this batch is a success.

Sterilising Recycled bottles and bottling homebrew beer

If you're into self sufficiency, I'd say it's likely you're into recycling too. Of course the best form of recycling is re-use so all these bottles, in their array of differing shapes and sizes, were kindly donated to me from the recycling boxes of various booze addled associates. Poets, barman and policemen all contributed to this stash of second-hand bottles. It took a while to remove the labels but it's therapeutic and if I look after them, it's a job I'll only have to do once. Obviously cleaning and sterilisation was a must.

I used Young's uBrew Steriliser and Cleaner powder. Mix a teaspoon into 1 litre of hot water, give it a good stir, then mix that into 4 litres of cold water to get your sterilising solution. Sit the solution in the bottles for at least 10 minutes and give the bottle necks a wipe with a cloth soaked in steriliser too. Once I'd given the bottles a good rinse with water I was ready to bottle....

It looks a bit cloudy but that is because you add sugar to each bottle. Apparently, so I am told, this is only a temporary thing. In 14 days it will go clear and be ready to drink.

So I've cleaned out my fermenter, filled it with steriliser and submerged all my equipment inside. I'll leave it overnight and pop to Somerset Homebrew in Taunton tomorrow to pick up another ale kit. How come I am confident enough to start another batch before this one is fully settled? Well I accidentally took a mouthful when I was starting the syphon and it tastes delicious already!

Somerset has itself another home brew brewer

So about 3 months ago I was at a party in Bristol and the host was generously serving up pints of this delicious beer from unlabelled bottles. By the end of the evening when everyone's knees were cold and the barbecue embers were pushing out their last glow, I had decided to try home brewing. I had in fact attempted it once before, as a teenager, using a budget storage box as a fermenter and old lemonade bottles for storage. It tasted just fowl. But now I'm a big boy with forty quid in my back burner and broadband access to expert advice.

So I went to Somerset Homebrew in Taunton and invested in everything I need to make 32 pints of my own beer. Now, a few hours later, sitting on top of my fridge is this (see picture). A freshly sterilised Young's uBrew fermenter containing a St Peter's India Pale Ale home brewing kit dissolved in 19 litre of ASDA bottled mineral water (contains no chlorine see). I followed the instructions to the word and even read a few posts on home brewing forums before starting. Apparently, in 20 days time I am going to have 32 pints of delicious beer to drink. All I've got to worry about now is getting enough bottles by Sunday, which is the end of the first 4 day period, after-which I have to decant it for the final stage.