Brewing Lessons Learnt

Sanitation

• Baby bottle chemical steriliser can be used in place of bleach.

Ingredients

• Sugar in a beer recipe can be replaced with more malt extract for a fuller taste.

Bakers Yeast whilst cheap is not ideal. This is because the flavour profile is an unknown quantity. Baking yeasts are selected for speed of fermentation and CO2 output not for flavour. I would recommend doing a test run first with some before doing a larger brew. I found Alisons Easy Bake Bread Yeast added a bitter flavour to the brews I used it with.

Bottling

• Measure the volume of your demijohn and how many bottles it is equivalent to. This will save running out of clean bottles mid way through bottling.
• Modern capping and corking tools are very efficient, and quiet (if you have a baby sleeping up stairs).
• When dealing with lees at the bottom of the demijohn, slow and steady is best. You don't want those lees in your bottles or next fermentation vessel.

Bottling can be fiddly with one hand controlling the racking wand, and the other hand operating the siphon tube. A good tip is to fold the siphon tube in half creating a crimp. This allows one handed control of both flow and direction and is an easy way to bottle with little mess.

Prior to bottling, once racked off the lees, it is I feel a good idea to leave the brew for another week or so, just incase more sediment falls out.

Noted that The Long Bar (seemingly renamed to The Cider House) has its bottles collected at 0800 on Wednesday. The bins were unsecured and I would imagine they are available for the deft of fingers for a few hours before collection.

Labelling

• 6.5cm by 10cm for 284ml Stella Bottles
• 10cm by 10cm for Wine Bottles