Bint's Brewery

Well, all the hops and ginger ale seem to have sparked a bit of an obsession with me ;)

We've now got another batch of ginger beer brewing in bottles, plus the ginger beer plant is alive and thriving ready for another batch next weekend. This one is going to have a bit more of a fiery kick ;)

I've also sourced some Root Beer extract from the US, and had a go at making some of this.

Also used this as an excuse to try out the bench capper that was delivered this week.




We've got about 25 real ale bottles that we've emptied ourselves, we currently go through a couple of bottles a week but not enough to cover all of the ongoing brewing. I posted a request on my local freecycle group and now have a couple of people saving them for me and we'll collect them over the next fortnight. :) Gotta love freecycle.

Today has seen the creation of a new drink, Dark Mead. We wanted to make some mead, for our own use and for christmas presents but couldn't find a simple enough recipe that didn't involve us spending a huge amount of money on demijohns and valves and things and stuff.

After reading through some 'basic' recipes I concocted a 'bint' version and off we toddled to make up a gallon of nectar. Midway through making this we decided that a gallon just wasn't enough...so we decided to extend the recipe...but we had no more honey and no intention of buying any more, as it's not the cheapest ingredient.

After a bit of thought, we decided to add a dark sugar syrup that had been steeped in the same spices that were used to flavour the honey water. The results are a very strong dark honey tasting fragrant liquid that will hopefully stay sweet and become quite alcoholic ;)