Adventures in Homebrewland (image heavy - you have been warned!)

ampersand

I help at a Charity, situated in a line of several light industrial units. The nextdoor occupants are stable, horseblanket and saddlery cleaning/care peeps and I saw two green lidded, white plastic buckets - ex their special prof. soap powder - out for garbage man. They're perfect for my purposes so far. Each takes the raw material, kilos of sugar and 8-ish litres of water - capacious enough for me.

Gigervamp

Hmm....they might not be food safe plastic though. Just a thought.

nopot2pin

If they stored soap/powder, the chances they are not food safe.

I use the supermarket water containers sometimes... either the 5 litres or the 15 litres ones...
Well consumbable water was once in them, so they have to be food grade plastic eh ??

Gigervamp

Food safe plastic was another thing that came up in the River Cottage thread about elderflower champagne, because HFW used what looked like dustbins. Again, general consensus was it was a no-no due to leaching of undesirable chemicals into the mix.

Pooky

The brewing buckets, with lids, are £7.99 in Wilkinsons, they're calibrated up the side which makes it easier to measure out and at least you know they're fit for purpose.

But ask on Freecycle, you never know your luck.

We brought some demijohns in wilkinsons last year.....went to pick one up to start syphoning off and the bottom just fell out, blackberry wine everywhere, my god that was sticky and messy.....2 days later we heard a "tink" from the brewing cupboard and another one had gone, cracked straight around the bottom but was only leaking slightly, we knew as soon as we moved it, it would be chaos but what to do! (apricot mess this time, didn't stain the lino like the blackberry but just as sticky)

We took the demijohns back, in bits, to the shop as they were only 3 weeks old and explained to the girl on the returns desk what had happened.....she nooded along looking very serious and then pointed to the broken glass and asked "so were they like this when you brought them".......:rolleyes: Bless.

Primrose

Thanks for the warning about demijohns bought from Wilkinsons. We bought a couple from them last year to supplement our stock when making wine from our grape vine and fortunately didn't have any problems with them. However, it's worth being warned in case they were a faulty batch. In future, as we don't know which are the Wilkinson's ones, we will stand the demijohns inside a heavy duty plastic bag so that if the worst happens, there is some emergency catch-it protection underneath. This kind of accident could be distrastrous if you were making elderberry wine. We had accident with that many years ago with over-vigorous fermentation and the fermentation traps being blown out of the jars and liquid spilling everywhere onto our light coloured kitchen worktops. We never did get all the stains out.

Pooky

I must admit we do stand every demijohn in something now, be it an old washing up bowl, tupperware, plastic bags....just anything.

I do think it was just a faulty batch, the fault line was the same in both.

ampersand

nopot2pin wrote: »

If they stored soap/powder, the chances they are not food safe.

I use the supermarket water containers sometimes... either the 5 litres or the 15 litres ones...
Well consumbable water was once in them, so they have to be food grade plastic eh ??

############
Thankyou for this - didn't even think of these. We have one of those water things!
The buckets I'm using were very thoroughly cleaned and sterilised, I should add, but will change to the empty water containers next time.

leon103

Not sure if this is the right place to post but I need help with my homebrew kit. I purchased a full kit from Ebay and bought a Coopers pale larger kit. I followed the very confusing instructions. Well I got confused using the hydrometer and working out how much sugar to use because I was using a 5 gallon keg but instructions are for bottling the larger. I left it for just short of a month and poured myself a glass and its flat, hardly now fizz. Is it because I didn't use enough sugar. I also noticed that the screw top of the keg missing a thread and doesn't sit tight on the keg, could this be the cause?

MrDT

Hello all, I've neglected this thread for way too long!

The sun is out, summer is on it's way, daytime drinking season is about to start! As such I think it's time to dust off the demijohns

I'm hoping to make some nice summer sipping wine that doesn't pack too much of a punch. If it's too strong my good lady won't touch it, so I'm going to aim for alcohol by volume of around 7.5% and an inoffensive taste.

The interweb tells me that 7.5% alcohol by volume means aiming for a specific gravity of around 1.055, that's 1lb 4.8oz sugar added to each gallon of water, or 590g per 4.5l if you don't speak oldfashionedese.

Ok, rough quantities then:
1l white grape juice (includes 115g sugar)
3l water
410g sugar
a sprinkling of brewing yeast

That's 525g sugar to 4l liquid (it's not quite spot on due to some of the sugar being dissolved in the juice, but close enough I think), just about right.

I'm planning to:
pour water into demijohn
add sugar and allow to dissolve
add the juice
add the yeast
pop the airlock on top
leave it in a warm spot for erm maybe 2 weeks
siphon
leave for a further 2 weeksish
siphon
bottle
drink

So, should be ready in about a month. Doubt it'll taste much like wine by then, more like funny tasting grape juice, but I'm impatient I'll let you know how it goes!