Beer Fridge!!! with STC-1000 temp control.

Got hold of a second hand fridge this month, and it is now installed in The Cabin Brewery as a fermenting fridge and also for conditioning and cooling the beers come drinking time.

I've made up a temperature control unit for the fridge, as the directions in THIS THREAD explain.

Fitted a tube heater to the bottom of the fridge and now it's ready to roll.

It's currently keeping a full pressure barrel of Wherry nice and cool (6'C). Will be using this in a few days to ferment the Boddingtons Mild  (House Mild).

Racked : Yellow Plum Wine

The Yellow Plum Wine has been racked again to clear. I have stopped the wine from fermenting so it is going to be a sweet wine and also added 1ml of Clear-It wine finings.

So the wine is now sat clearing in the demijohn on a granite slab to aid the settling of the yeast.

Brewday : Boddingtons Mild aka (House Mild)

Well today is the day to try out the new boiler and the BIABacus spreadsheet for the first time.

Decided that I would do a "Mild" as I haven't got any mild in The Cabin Brewery to drink. Graham Wheeler in his book Brew Your Own British Real Ale has a recipe for a Boddingtons Mild so I have used this recipe as the template for this brew.

Bottled : Old Grumpy Hen (Old Speckled Hen Clone) BIAB

Well the Old Grumpy Hen has finished fermenting in the small bucket, the final SG ended up at 1013, so that brings this beer in at 4.8% ABV

Got 18 pints from this Brew and they have all gone into 500 ml bottles with 1/2 a tsp of castor sugar to prime. The beer had been sat for quite a while so when I came to bottling time the beer was clear and bright. In fact it sat in the fermenting bucket in The Cabin Brewery for 17 days in total.

Had a little taste during bottling and it's going to be a good pint. Really looking forward to this one when it's bottle conditioned.

Racked : Ginger Wine (2nd Batch) + last lot of Sugar

The final sugar stage has now been completed on the Ginger Wine. The last 1lb of demerara sugar has been put in a clean demijohn and the wine racked on top of it.

Again this will be left to completely ferment out, then racked again to clear.

Recipe : Thai Style Pickled Garlic

Was down the Allotment and harvested the Solent White garlic that had been growing since last year. Got around 20 bulbs of Garlic in total, the smallest of which I have preserved as a pickle.

 

Took ages to peel all that garlic so I hope this comes out okay. The recipe is loosely based on the one in Carol Tennant's Book of Preserves. 

 

The chilli used was one of my homegrown Apache F1's that I grew last year and dried in the Food Dehydrator

 

Thai Style Pickled Garlic

Makes 1 small Jar

 

Ingredients

• 
  
  Garlic (peeled) enough to fill the Jar


• 
  
  Red Wine vinegar (One full jar)


• 
  
  Water (One full jar)


• 
  
  Sugar - 40g


• 
  
  Salt – 1 tsp


• 
  
  Chilli – one small dried hot chilli (Apache F1)


• 
  
  Cloves – 2


• 
  
  Black peppercorns (whole) – ½ tsp

Method

 

Put all the ingredients into a small pan, bring to the boil and simmer for 15 minutes, then pour into a hot sterilized jar.

 

Store for at least 1 month before serving.

Not Suitable for Freezing – Store in refrigerator once open

Thai Style Pickled Garlic

Was down the Allotment and harvested the Solent White garlic that had been growing since last year. Got around 20 bulbs of Garlic in total, the smallest of which I have preserved as a pickle.

Took ages to peel all that garlic so I hope this comes out okay. The recipe is loosely based on the one in Carol Tennant's Book of Preserves. 

The chilli used was one of my homegrown Apache F1's that I grew last year and dried in the Food Dehydrator

 

Thai Style Pickled Garlic

Makes 1 small Jar

Ingredients

• Garlic (peeled) enough to fill the Jar
• Red Wine vinegar (One full jar)
• Water (One full jar)
• Sugar - 40g
• Salt – 1 tsp
• Chilli – one small dried hot chilli (Apache F1)
• Cloves – 2
• Black peppercorns (whole) – ½ tsp

Method

Put all the ingredients into a small pan, bring to the boil and simmer for 15 minutes, then pour into a hot sterilized jar.

Store for at least 1 month before serving.

Not Suitable for Freezing – Store in refrigerator once open

First big Harvest: Garlic and allotment tidy up

Spent the day down the Allotment yesterday, mostly a good tidy up, weeding and hoeing and more weeding.

The beans are recovering after the bunny attack, so that is a good thing.

The tomatoes in the polytunnel are doing well, spent a good hour in the heat of the polytunnel pinching out the side shoots and tying them up. The Cucumbers are also doing pretty good. It's going to me rather packed in there once they all start shooting up the strings.

Courgettes are all quite happy growing away outside, some signs of the 1st flower or two as well. The pumpkins (for making beer) are also quite happy,growing away nice and strong.

The onions however are a bit of a disaster, all the tops got eaten, they started to bolt, they got drowned in the floods. All in all they haven't had a good time of it. Looks like I'm going to have to dig the whole lot up. Pickle the little ones and rescue the slightly larger ones for meals.

The garlic has also suffered quite a bit, they got a drowned over the winter and it looks as though "rust" has set in on the Solent White, but not the Elephant Garlic. I left them in the ground as long as I dare, but thought it best to dig them all up before it got any worse.


They look quite good, some are quite small but all the bulbs have split into cloves, no signs of disease and are all quite happily drying in the back garden.



Some of the fruit bushes are starting to fruit, all be it just a tiny bit. So started filling up the icecream tub in the freezer for a allotment fruit wine.

The chilies are doing okay in the green house, not as good as last year but they are doing okay.

The Hops, well they are getting heavy, bending both the flagpoles in and the strings keep slipping down towards the middle. Hey ho, a lesson learned for next year. I'm going to have to move two of the Hops next year and grow two hop plants wigwam style up each pole next time.

 

Bottled : Easy Cider

The Cider kinda got forgotten for a while, checked on it today and it was crystal clear with a nice firm yeast deposit on the bottom of the Demijohn.

Bottled it up today into 7 and a half 500ml beer bottles after it sitting in the Demijohn for 16 days.

I'll have to add another 250 ml of apple juice next time so I get the full 8 bottles. Put the 1/2 bottle in the fridge for a sample later this evening.

Each bottle was primed with 1/2 a tsp of castor sugar to give it a bit of sparkle, then labeled and put up in the Cabin Brewery to condition.



Not sure if this works out a cheap Cider or not yet, time to crunch some numbers:
4 x 1ltr Apple Juice = £2.40
1 x Packet of Youngs Cider Yeast = 1.35 (only used half a pack)

So a total of £3.75 plus bottle caps and labels at say £0.05 each = £0.35 makes a grand total of £4.10 so thats humm about £0.60 per pint. Thats pretty close to what you can get Cider for in the Supermarket.

Racked : Ginger Wine (2nd Batch)

Stage 3 for the ginger wine has been completed, it's been racked from one demijohn onto another onto 1 lb of demerara sugar, this will still need to be done again in a couple of weeks or so, once the nice yeast cells eat up all that new sugary goodness.

It's quite hard to get all that sugar to dissolve into the wine, so now and again I'll give it a good old shake up.

This batch I'll leave to clear for a lot longer, as the previous batch that was made this year is leaving a heavy deposit in the bottom of the wine bottles.

Racked : Blackcurrant Wine

 Racked the Blackcurrant Wine today, it smells great and has a great colour to it. It had left quite a deposit of junk at the bottom of the demijohn so I thought it best to rack it off.

I may have to top this wine up as there quite a bit of head room after racking, might stop this wine a bit early so it's a sweet wine. I'll check back in on it in a week or so.

Racked : Rhubarb Wine (1st Batch)

The 1st batch of Rhubarb wine had to be racked again off of all the junk in the bottom of the Demijohn.

It's been brewing up now for ages, end of March I started this wine and it's still fermenting away. It only had less than a kilo of sugar added as well. It's looking a lot less like Mud now and more like wine.

Bottled : Youngs Definitive Country Strawberry Wine (Kit)

The Youngs Definitive Country Strawberry Wine Kit has now been bottled. It didn't want to clear very well, so a few days before bottling I used my ClearIt wine finings on it and it cleared lovely.

Had a quick taste of this one, and it has a lot more strawberry flavour than the Wiko kit.

Almost six full 750ml bottles so a bargain.

Equipment : New Boiler 40 litre Buffalo (to do 40 pint batches)

Nice new 40 litre boiler £145 delivered from Nisbets in their sale, I have been using the 20 liter version of this boiler for quite a while now, and now I have the Brewery all set up, I thought it was about time I upgraded to a bigger boiler so I can do full 23 litre batches of BIAB beer.





Got my mother to make me a nice new bigger BIAB bag as well. It's fantastic, nice and heavy duty to cope with the bigger grain bills.

Full webbing handles and seam reinforcements and it fits the boiler like a glove.




Did a couple of electrical modifications to the Boiler before it's first use, changed the Thermal fuse and switch to higher rated ones, and added some insulation to the temperature sensor. See this Forum topic. Did these even before my 1st brew with it, as a just in case, cover all bases type thing as I didn't want the boiler playing up on my brewday.

Racked: Elderflower Wine (3 gal)

The Elderflower wine has now been transferred into 3 one gallon (4.5 ltr) Demijohns, almost got three completely full ones this time. Quite a nice colour as well.

I'll leave this now to ferment away in the Brewery for as long as it takes to finish. I'm hopeful this will clear nice and bright on it's own.