Topic: Anyone else out there doing some home brewing?

[Terry in Australia]

You've been waiting to use that one haven't you ?

Ha ha, it was a spur of the moment thing Spotty, I thought it was quite clever!

That did sound like a great prank Dave, I've had no experience with dry ice but I remember the 6 million dollar man's tennis ball, or was it the bionic woman? Anyhoo, that ball crushed good.

I'm looking at Harleys for sale, some blokes really don't want to sell their bikes obviously, some aren't just asking a bit more than everyone else with the same year/model, they're asking like $5-10K more, it's almost like they're just advertising their bike to brag about it, with no intention of selling it, then they say "No low ballers" and I think, wankers............

 

[spotty]

We used to play with 'stones bombs' at bike rallies which was any glass screw top bottles filled about a third full of petrol, placed upright in a camp fire.
The petrol eventually boils, pressure increases , forces the cap to unscrew, petrol turns to gas and forms a mini mushroom fireball, loads of fun and generally harmless
Unless someone gets bored waiting for the climax and runs over to the fire and kicks the bottle, then it will fall over, the lid comes off one shoots a fireball straight at them as they run like fcuk in the other direction, great entertainment
By the way, never use a bottle more than 3 times, the glass gets heat affected and will likely crack letting half a litre of petrol flow happily into a fire and straight out across the surrounding are
.ask me how I know this
And the reason they are called stones bombs is stones green ginger wine was the drink of choice for hard core rally goers back in the 80s

[Terry in Australia]

Stones Green Ginger Wine has always been a favourite for soldiers too Spotty. It's cheap, tasty, warms you up in cold weather and being a ginger product, actually has some medicinal value, especially for settling your guts when you're living on a diet of patrol ration packs.

I remember when I was posted to Brisbane in 1989/90, going on a non tactical "Nav Ex" (navigation exercise) where they would send out teams of two or three guys to navigate a particular route using a map and a compass. It was in summer in QLD, and quite hot. My water bottles didn't last long, so I asked my mate Rick Fisher (an old special forces Vietnam vet) if he had any spare water? He slung me one of his water bottles, and I took a big swig, only to discover that it was full of Green Ginger Wine!

It turned out that all of Rick's water bottles were full of green ginger wine (green whingeing grime) so we just continued on strolling thru the J, drunk as skunks on Stones. Somehow we found our way back to base camp, and I remember I had a great night's sleep after a lovely meal of tinned meat and freeze dried rice. (see how they run)

[spotty]

I'm guessing that you've had a passing acquaintance with its big brother, Stones Mac, then ?
For the uninitiated ( some might say lucky) amongst us, that's green ginger wine mixed with cheap scotch whisky
I be always stayed away from the stones products myself, much preferred a good ( or cheap) bottle of port

[Terry in Australia]

Yep Stones Mac is another soldier's favourite Spotty, we're not pretentious when it comes to booze, if it tastes good, it does the job. I did actually think about dumping a litre of Stolychnia Vodka into Brew No 2, only because I have a litre of it that I'll probably never drink, but then I thought that a good ginger beer doesn't need anything added, it should stand on its own.

[Terry in Australia]

Well I'm sitting in my hotel room in Darwin, missing my home brew (and the wife and kids) but I'm happy at least that I found some Ginger Joes at my local Woolworths store. I did have one moment of panic when I went to open one and realised that I didn't have a bottle opener!

Well desperation is the mother of invention, so I attacked the cap with my nail clippers and had that pesky lid off with no problems. Darwin is the rip off capital of Australia so of course the GJ's were $9 (AUD) per 500 ml "Stubby", but even so, it's my drink of choice, so I'm happy to have it.

[Terry in Australia]

Okay, Sunday the 22nd here, and I'm home again, woohoo! I finished the army work a day early so took an earlier flight back from Hobart this morning, and when I arrived home, was desperately thirsty.

I headed straight out to my bottled "Ginger Toe" stash, and was happy that none of the bottles had exploded, but they are "Gassy Lassies", for sure. I poured myself a big glass. All I can say is, it was all worth it, it is delightful! Cheers!

[Terry in Australia]

Oh man, I had to take a sick day off today because I had to have an ultrasound scan and another friggin' blood test (about the 10th for the year) and so I've reheated a couple slices of pizza, and another of my Terry's Ginger Toe ginger beers to wash it down. This stuff is probably still a week or two away from being entirely ready, but it tastes great, considering that I thought I'd somehow messed it up when the bubbler wasn't doing it's thing from day one.

It turned out that the seal between the lid and the ferementer drum wasn't actually sealing, so the gases caused by the sugar/yeast reaction were just bypassing the lid, and the bubbler wasn't being seeing any pressure. I'll remember that for batch #3. As a result I put way too much yeast and sugar in the first batch, but that will only help the alcohol content, and make it just a little scary to open one inside, as it's more like champagne than beer as far as the fizz side of it goes. I haven't spilled any yet, but once I get to the pop top caps I'm expecting some disasters. We'll see.

Terry's pizza and ginger beer by Terry Prendergast, on Flickr

[spotty]

leo's a bit slack there, he should have had time between sitting down and taking the picture to get up on your lap and get his little furry face into that pizza

[spotty]

The perfect pint of dark lager ( if such a thing exists outside of my brauhaus )

[Terry in Australia]

Wow, that looks pretty good Spotty! I'm not a fan of most beers, but that does look tasty! Leo was locked outside while I was chomping down on my pizza, so it was pretty safe.

[Trevor from Warragul]

How long does it take you to eat two slices of pizza now?

[Terry in Australia]

How long does it take you to eat two slices of pizza now?

Ha ha, embarrassingly long mate, probably 30 minutes? In the bad old days I could wolf down a family sized pizza and a couple of drinks in that time? Oh well, I've now lost 65 Kg so it is a bit easier to get out of my chair after a meal!

[Old Moe Toe]

This is a great book for the home brewer, it has hundreds of recipes for for beer and wine including fruit and vegetable wine.
At the height of my home brewing I had perfected "Parsnip champagne". It was a real winner, even people who hated eating parsnips usually enjoyed drinking it.
One of the more amusing sounding recipes in the book is for a beer called "Cock Ale". You take the Bones, wings, skin, neck, tail and trimmings of a plainly cooked chicken and steep them in wine for 2 days. Once the beer recipe is fermenting you pour the wine through a strainer into the beer, then put all the chicken into a nylon bag (onion bag) and suspend it in the beer until fermentation is finished.
Must say I never had the guts to try this recipe.
You gotta laugh at the last paragraph of the recipe that says
"This is an extremely smooth and tasty, liqueur-like beer, the like of which has been made for a thousand years or more. It is extremely satisfying and deserves to be more widely made."
If the print is too small to read on the photo of the recipe and you simply, must have a go at it. I am happy to email it to you.

[dave500]

yeah ive heard of that ages ago Moe,when I used to make beer at the local micro brewery I told the owner there and hed never heard of it,thought I was talking #$%*?(maybe chicken #$%*?)

[Terry in Australia]

Yeah bugger that, I like fried chicken washed down with beer, but I have no desire to mix them thanks? My dad told me about an old bloke in Yorkshire or Cornwall (I can't remember which) who had a "Bed and Breakfast" place where Dad and Mum stayed a couple of times, who made his own cider in an old disused septic tank under the ground. Occasionally he'd drop the scraps from a lamb roast (including the bones) into the cider mix, which apparently improved the flavour while completely dissolving the bones over time.

My dad was like me, not particularly adventurous gastronomically, so I was surprised that he would have volunteered to drink cider that was fermented in a used poo tank full of sheep's innards. I had to assume that the taste must have been that good that Dad could ignore the mental picture of what was going on inside that ancient concrete dunny tank under the ground........

[spotty]

hmmmmm, living up in the hills we have a septic tank.....

wonder what mrs spotty will let me cook up in there ?  then again its still in use so maybe not

[dave500]

suddenly the thought of a "Brown Ale"goes out the window!

[spotty]

Never had a cocktail called a diahorea then ?
Guinness and milk....the stout curdles the milk and it goes all thick and lumpy and of course the colour is just right
Surprisingly it tastes quite good

[dave500]

and the glass comes wrapped in soiled dunny paper?

[Terry in Australia]

Well that sounds disgusting men, but carry on, I'm enjoying the banter. I mentioned in the pissed off thread that I'm having more surgery in a couple of weeks, so I'm making sure I drink as much of my delicious home brew as I possibly can, just in case I snuff it (unlikely, but life's like that) and I'm happy to report that each bottle is tasting just that little bit better.

I've decided to leave the second batch in the fermenter for another week or so before I bottle it as there is a fair bit of sediment in each bottle of batch No 1, not that it affects the taste, and anyway, I have to empty the 50-odd bottles I made from batch No 1 before I can refill them. I'm in no rush to start batch No 3, but then again if I get bored after I have the surgery and am supposed to be resting, I might cook up another batch, just for medicinal purposes.......

[spotty]

To minimise the sediment in the bottles I first decant from one fermentation keg to another then leave for 24 hours to settle then bottle
This leaves most of the yeast and goop in the first tank and nowhere near the finished product

I now have 4 kegs so there's always a spare empty one to do this with

eBay is your friend here, people sell off entire kits for bugger all after they've tried one batch and got it wrong, you'll often get bottles, caps etc with the rest of it

[Terry in Australia]

That's a great idea Spotty, I've got an empty fermenter now that I've decanted batch No 1, so I'll do that, I'll empty the fermenter into the empty one a day or so before I do the bottling. Thanks for the tip! I think I'll just buy another couple of boxes of the plastic bottles, the good thing about them is that they hold a bit more (750 Ml) and having screw caps, it makes it easier to relieve the pressure in them when you open them.

[dave500]

not only cracking the caps but drinking em also relieves pressure!

[Terry in Australia]

not only cracking the caps but drinking em also relieves pressure!

Very true Dave, I've necked a couple so far today, and I feel like I'm walking on a cloud!