Drink!

Wine

We did a quick review of alcohol yesterday. 4 demijohns of wine went down the drain, there really wasn't any hope of them turning good now as over two years old and they take up space. Over the years the only wines that I have consistently succeeded with are blackberry and elderberry, delicious! I'll occasionally experiment with other ingredients but those demijohns then seem to linger around for years whilst we wait for them to mature and hopefully improve in flavour, they usually don't. I'm not making any this year, we've been too busy harvesting our own fruit to get out and find wild berries and most of my demijohns have been stolen by J for his cider.

scrumpy

And talking of my demijohns, here they are. James is happy with his scrumpy so far, he currently has 9 gallons on the go! So far they are clearing nicely.

Youngs IPA and Geordies Mild

With alcohol surrounding us we decided to take it one step further and got out more brewing equipment. In the bucket is a kit that went out of date 4 years ago! We thought that we would give it a try and it is bubbling nicely. Next to it is a newer kit picked up in Wilkinsons last week. This should be drinkable by Christmas.

 

Pasteurised apple juice

And finally, the best bit, home made apple juice! These bottles have been pasteurised in a big pan of water. Many years ago we used to pick up apple juice like this from the farmers markets, the taste is very different from commercially produced juice cartons. Fingers crossed that these work out well as it is the first time that we have tried this. I have a suspicion that I should have purchased new lids for the bottles but the juice had to be dealt with then and there so maybe for next year.

All of this has cost us very little to do. Thankfully we became interested in brewing years ago and bought most of the kit before we had children. In recent years much of this has been hidden in the loft, if we had to start from scratch today I'm not sure if we'd have bothered with so much but it is very satisfying to brew your own and I highly recommend giving it a go.