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Elderflower wine is beautiful. Parsnip wine, too, is supposed to be one of the best wines you can make, oddly enough. I haven't tried that yet.

Allow me to put in a word of recommendation for the simplest of all wines - the sugar-based Country Wines. Don't even need a kit. Their trick is simply dissolving the sugar in water, and usually at some point adding some kind of a garden ingredient - eg, boiling the water and steeping...

For fetta the cultures you'd be looking at would be the two mesophilic cultures on this website. Thermophilic culture is typically not used in making fetta. It would just be getting warmed up at 37 Celsius, whereas 37 C is more at the top of a mesophilic culture's range. To summarise, the...

Yeah, fetta is usually made with a mesophilic culture. I looked up the cultures on the Mad Millie website before and they say each sachet is suitable for a 4 L batch - ie, you'd want to add substantially more than 1 drop. I'd contact the Mad Millie company. It looks like somebody's goofed up.

If it was a dehydrated culture, you would have got best results by reculturing it overnight in some milk (8-12 hours), and then adding some of the yoghurt to the milk. For my batches - usually 4 L - I add about 2-3 tablespoons of culture/yoghurt. If it was an active culture - well, see...

1/64 of a teaspoon starter culture???? I suspect your problem is there.

Give us some details about the instructions and we might be able to help.....

I might be tempted to suggest it might be a good idea to toast the herbs a bit in the oven to kill off wild yeasts. But as you are splitting up your fettas maybe don't bother as it's incredibly unlikely that both will fail. (Also, the most likely point at which wild yeast enters into a cheese...

pH of milk can vary, I'd probably tend to be a bit more careful about milk variety and pH control if I was doing something like camembert with an extra culture. I know the lactobacilli seems to be adaptable to different environments, but other cultures might be more fragile.

I am not certain about pH questions, my guess would be so long as they are together the curds and whey will stay the same pH but I could be wrong.

Rennet is the enzyme that helps the process along. Left on its own a mesophilic culture will curdle milk anyway into a kind of yoghurt. But with a little rennet it will curdle much quicker, and more efficiently.

Huh, well, the mesophilic aromatic culture would be the proper starter, the one that starts the milk curdling, turns the lactose into lactic acid, and contributes the basic flavour, texture, and aroma to your cheese.

1. pH, nope, don't check it, though I should. For the cheeses I do I find it's not mattering so much at the moment - though it probably would help with mozzarella, which I do on occasion. 2. Kosher salt or non-iodised salt are pretty much the same thing. Other terms you'll find in use are...

I loved making wild cider this year (it's all gone now, alas), but in spite of temptation I didn't re-use the wild cider dregs - I now see from this thread it may have been a good choice on my part: the results would probably have been very different second time around, and possibly given over...

Funny, with all these brewing techniques I always get caught up on the smallest things. So I do a yeast starter; then how to pitch the yeast from that? Chuck it all in? But the bigger I build up the starter, the more it will alter the consistency and taste of the brew. Besides, the best stuff is...

Wine brewing material too. Cider and fruit presses, apple mills. Possibly some quality varietal honey, with potential for bulk deals, as it's a product that's good for both mead makers and brewers. One problem is there are different sorts of brewers - beer brewers don't always interact with...

Yeah, they're great. We got some stuff from them (including I think vanilla vines, though they just don't like the Melbourne climate!) They're not brilliant on brew herbs (it's not exactly their market) but they do have some alehoof/glechoma hederacae - which everyone should grow. A very pretty...

Kunfaced, Buhner in Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers describes it as having 'feeble opiatelike effects'. His whole passage on the harvesting of the sap - the bit for flavouring (and medicine) - or 'lactucacarium' is hilarious. ...a rather prolific, unpleasant two-to-four-foot weed covered with...

See what you mean Manticle, and hey, anything that makes me look like less of a weirdo trying to source an obsolete international narcotic and hallucinogen has got to be a good thing.

Haha well rhododendron honey is an ancient poison - it once paralysed an entire Greek army. True story bro. I heard another story from a person who ate it while on holidays; his words - "I thought I was going to die". Not impressed! So merely the fact that marsh rosemary is in the rhododendron...