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Oh yeah, there's Stephen Harrod-Buhner's classic book of weird arsery Sacred Herbal and Healing Brews or maybe it's Sacred Healing and Herbal Brews, but whatever. I always get it mixed up. I find his herb quantities are usually reliable and his advice on the properties of various herbs is useful...

Today I'm all about the glechoma hederacae, or alehoof. Did a mash this morning: 1 kilo Maris Otter, 1 kilo Rye, 9 L of water (after boil), 55 g of alehoof in the boil. Simple! Gravity is 1.053, which I'm not too displeased about. Alehoof has a definite quality - tanniny and minty, with a...

Let's think. Okay, so you may be able to find a few Belgian lambics and the like that feature fruit and herbs prominently. There are one or two classic ales that have gruit herbs - you may be able to buy 'Fraoch heather ale' which contains heather, bog myrtle, and ginger. Secondly, there are...

^Missed this comment, sorry. No, I do it mostly out of interest for historical methods of brewing, and partly to break out of the 'hops all the time' mentality. Oh, that, and a fondness for weirdness :)...

Doubtless you could have done a wild cider and not bothered with a commercial yeast too. I haven't heard of Fuji apple cider - I suppose they have some tannin in their skin - but you could supplement that if you wish with oak chips in secondary.

It'll be fine, wouldn't bother with the dextrose personally though.

You could have the Minute Waltz as background music.

I wanna see you do the same review after drinking 10 of them straight.

I suppose so. I've brewed a number of herbal beers though so I've some idea what to expect, and it didn't taste so weird in that context.

Secondary ferment appears to be under way in the bottles; my plan will be to drink these fairly fresh. Looking forward to when they're ready.

I fear wormwood. I made one beer with it and it was undrinkable - the flavour is so strong. But it is a good bitter for that reason; you probably only need a slight sprinkle to get that peculiar essence. Mugwort is a better herb; it has much more pleasant, tea-like flavours that are more...

For other folks planning on brewing a gruit I would just say - expect tartness; absent a strong hot bitter flavour such as you get from hops, many of the natural fermented flavours will be much more prominent and seem much more extreme. So, expect tart/sour and design your recipes accordingly...

Klangers, it depends from herb to herb. Mugwort is fairly easy to find, a commonly grown plant and a relative of the even-more common wormwood (which can also be used in brewing - Mugwort tastes nicer, though.) Dried mugwort is sold at many herbalists. Yarrow is also quite common. It's a...

I've got a gruit sitting on the bench settling down, waiting to be bottled, probably tomorrow morning. In the end I didn't follow any of those recipes provided in detail, and for convenience sake I added a good deal more gruit herbs than outlined in any of those recipes (ie, it was easier to...

Yeah mine are usually smallish. It depends how many frames we take out of the hive. At any rate I never have very exact measurements as , once I have crushed honey out of the comb, I soak the crushed bits of comb in water, and that then becomes the base for a mead. I add more honey if I want...

Oh, I finished my bochet a while ago. It turned out alright, I had originally planned to do it with only a minimum of burnt honey so I could hopefully get some of those fresh mead flavours and smells too. Turns out the burnt honey completely dominated the flavour and character of the brew, but...

Yeah - I was looking into using almonds in a mead recently to get that smell; the amounts of almond used are piddling. I think to make 'almond essence' you add 12 almonds to a pint of spirits. No-one ever died from eating 12 almonds. So it's probably similar with plum and cherry pips.

I made a plum mead that seemed to come out alright, partly because I think the plum acted as nutrient for the yeast - in addition to some ginger that I added during the boil. The mead matured relatively quickly and was very pleasant. Recently I had a Japanese plum wine that was very pleasant...

Yeah they're really designed for less sophisticated tasks like storing and improving 10 L of cheap port. That said I find them useful enough for my ciders and meads.

I've got one of those little 9/10 L barrels that I use for ageing various brews. Started with a cider, then moved to a spruce/fir ale, now I'm ageing a honey-rye-malt-juniper braggot in it. It'd probably be a bit ********* for serving directly out of, really, because the brass taps are tiny...