Home Brewing and Winemaking Blog

Muntons have just released a range of Ultra-Premium Quality 15 bottle wine kits that contain 11 litres of top quality 100% unconcentrated Varietal Grape Juice and no additional sugars.

St Patrick's Day this year falls on a Saturday, so no doubt there will be one or two "Irish weekends" on the 17th and 18th March and quite a few hangovers on Monday morning. With just under 9 weeks to go, now is the ideal time to start thinking about choosing a stout to brew so that it is ready for the big day.

If you got a homebrewing starter kit for Christmas, you should by now be about halfway through the minimum two week maturing period provided that you managed to keep the temperature constant and finished your primary fermentation within 5-10 days.

Happy New Year everybody.

One of the beer kits that we sell heaps of in the shop is the All Grain version of Adnams Broadside so I have decided to make one up to see what it comes out like. I've also decided to make up the Exmoor Gold Ale recipe from Graham Wheeler's book,

Over Chistmas and Boxing day, I finished off the barrel of Jennings Cocker Hoop that I made in early November. In style and ingredients, it is quite similar to  Moorhouses Pendle Witches Brew and is a smooth, rich, pale coloured, malty beer, not quite a Golden Ale, but very tasty and recommended for anybody that doesn't like IPAs or darker bitters. As it is now finished, I have now broached the barrel of Abbot Ale

Some months ago, the manufacturers of Danstar Nottingham Yeast decided to more or double the price, which had the effect of causing all of the wholesalers to drop it as a product line and many replaced it with the Mauribrew range of yeasts. Following requests from many of its retailers and customers,

I've just barrelled the Abbot Ale Clone as the gravity has dropped to 1010 and have noticed that the colour, whilst being more or less at the EBC of 14 that I was aiming for, is a little lighter than I had hoped

The Courage Directors Clone recipe that I brewed a couple of weeks ago using the recipe in the first edition of Graham Wheeler's "Brew Your Own British Real Ales" is now almost 4 weeks old and is absolutely superb. It was intended as my Christmas brew, but I suspect that it may not last until then....

After a short period of uncertainty regarding their future, we are please to announce that Widget World Cylinders, used by many homebrewers to carbonate their Cornelius kegs, are now back on the market. The original manufacturers sold the company durign the summer and shortly afterwards, Youngs ceased to be the main UK stockist for the homebrew trade.

I've tried several times to find a Clone Recipe of Greene King Abbot Ale, but none of the editions of Graham Wheeler's "Brew Your Own British Real Ale" have a version and the one listed in