Homeebrew o rama rama

I've invested in the ol' homebrew quite heavily recently. I was given 2 demi johns by a kind soul on freecycle, which inspired me to head to the homebrew shop.

While buying more brew sugar and various yeasts with which to make turbo cider, my eyes fell upon a new kit - the woodfordes great eastern ale. I've heard good things about this kit and it's on my to do list so i thought 'why not, when in rome...' and bought it with the intention of getting it going in my new house.

Well the move went well, all stuff transported smoothly until...

I lugged our mattress around and managed to split my one fermenting vessel. Darn it! My mind moved on over the next couple of days due to pressing home diy things until we had a rush on picking blackberries. Hang on, i thought, can these be made into wine.

A quick homebrew forum search confirmed so, which gave me the opportunity to purchase a new fermenting bucket alongside the nutrients required for blackberry wine.

Well, i'm using a cjj recipe, who i understand is the king of country wines. I've adapted slightly, to make benefit of my equipment. It's now fermenting away in a bucket, and will be syphoned into one, maybe two demijohns early next week.

Then it's a few weeks clearing in the dj and into storage in bottles.

I haven't yet started the ale kit yet, partly because i'm busy doing other house things, partly because we don't have things in their rightful places yet, so i'm not 100% sure of the space i've got for it. Well, i have the space, just depends where it is!

Other than that, i need to check potential locations for their temperature ranges, very important for the fermentation process!

Also, the newly formed Didcot Brewing Collective, DBC, has decided to commemorate our English ashes victory with an adapted lager. We're going to infuse a coopers australian lager kit with some traditional English hops, Fuggles. It will be named 'Ponting (run out Flintoff) in honour of the big man's contribution to the oval test!

I'm looking forward to getting this going, because it'll be the first time the DBC has come together to create something. Plus it means andrew and i get to brew another beer!

Since we got homebrewing this year, i think we've put in a decent effort. I've brewed 3 lagers, fairly successfully, an elderflower champagne which was great, and 2 small batches of rasberry gin/vodka. If i remember rightly, andrew's knocked out nettle beer, pear wine, a couple of wine kits, elderflower cordial (the champers didn't quite work out!) , lime and damson gin, and currently has plans on 3 fruit wines (strawberry, elderflower and something else!), more wine kits and i hope some more normal beer!

I certainly have been aided slightly by the previous owner of our new house. He had a love of german beer and had a supply brought over. These plastic crates of empty beer bottles are now sat waiting for me to sort through whether any are useable or not. At the very least i've got some spot on storage crates!

My homebrew costs spreadsheet is ever changing, but the price per pint is still less than 80p, so it's all good!