The elderflower champagne is proving to be even more volatile than we expected. First it was just one bottle that kept on blowing its cork, but now we’ve had 15 cork ejections so far, each of which is accompanied by a fountain of sticky, fizzy wine.
So this weekend we finally opened the home-brew beer and it was… quite nice actually. In fact, very nice. Between four of us we got through the best part of four pints and the empty bottles now stand lined up, waiting for sterilisation so they can be used again.
After two weeks in the fermenter, it was finally time to bottle the beer this weekend. So, we hoisted the fermenter onto the worktop, tested its gravity and got our sterilised bottles ready…
Beer is very easy to brew, and it’s one of the most cost-effective self-sufficiency moves you can make. You can quickly and easily set up a small brewery under your kitchen counter and, a week or two later, be snapping open your first few home-brewed pints. Here’s how.
We’ve finally cracked open the sloe gin. It’s been slowly fermenting for the last six months, since we headed out into the meadow to pick sloe berries from the blackthorn trees. The result is a wonderful, sweet, syrupy drink best enjoyed as a shot.
A week in and the sloe gin is turning a wonderful red colour. I’ve only shaken mine once since making it, but Rich and Andrew (with his sloe vodka) have been shaking on a daily basis, and theirs are even redder than this.
Sloes in the bottles There are half a dozen blackthorn trees in the horses’ field, absolutely covered with sloe. There is very little you can do with sloes, as they’re so bitter, apart from bottle them with gin and wait for them to ferment. So over the weekend we headed out with mud-proof shoes and [...]