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I've been herbal brewing for a few years - brewing a number of brews entirely without hops, concentrating mainly on historical brewing herbs like the Artemisias, Sage, alehoof, yarrow, etc etc etc. And giving my own brews out for tastings - and tasting other people's brews - I've come across...

Marsh rosemary (check!), bog myrtle (check!), yarrow (check!) - it seems I have all the necessary ingredients in my very house to make a proper medieval-style gruit ale. Now this is not quite something I've ever done before - all my experiments with herbal brewing do give me some idea as to...

Right, so on the cards early next year is a proper medieval style gruit. Gruits, the flavourings for medieval brews, were, as I'm sure you know were a mixture of several herbs - the base was usually yarrow, bog myrtle, and marsh rosemary. Also usually with other herbs thrown in, like Mugwort...

It's an idea that I really shouldn't be thinking about because it's hell expensive but I can't not think about. Australian native bee honey brewing (sugar bag honey). Has anyone done it? Anything to report back on the flavour or qualities of native bee honey? Does it have similar preservative...

I just heard through the grapevine that an Eltham and District Winemakers Guild have a sudden need for a mead judge this Saturday. Long story but.... anyone suitably qualified here that feels like a trip to Bulleen on Saturday? Don't think there's payment - but you do get to drink a shedload of...

This has been the year of cider, wine, and mead for me. I've generally been quite pleased with my various brews - had some good successes with my ciders and meads - but I've started noticing an issue with my brews. They taste good at home - but when I take them somewhere - to a friend's or to a...

It's mid-October, it's warm, there are flowers everywhere - and bees. We're coming into peak honey season. Anyone know of any good honey deals? Are any beekeeping brewers reading this with some good bulk deals they can offer the rest of us? Pimp your honey here! (Thread started...

So my various experiments with doing weird herbal beers are going quite well but I'm getting repeated difficulties with one particular issue: tart beer tastes, especially in my dark brews. I have two or three ideas as to what may be causing this, but I wanted to get the learned opinions of the...

So. I have a cider. (Well, six of them, but more on that in another post....) About 9 L of cider, can be easily tapped off when I need it. I also happen to have a barrel that I very much want to put the cider in. About 10 L, a small thing intended mostly for people who want to barrelise port...

Cider brews for this year - it's been a long list: 1) Cyser, made from early ripening apples collected around January. When milled and crushed they produced a very low gravity must (about 1.020), but we added honey to this to get the gravity up to around 1.080. Fermented on wine yeast, this...

Got a siphon recently from the local HBS assuming it would be simple enough and would, in general, improve on my normal cruddy methods of filtration - pouring out of the demijohn through a cheesecloth. Well not only did the bloody siphon keep on coiling up and falling out of the pots I was...

So my blackberry-yarrow-elderflower-Munich-malt thing - latest herbal brewing effort - has sme kind of an infection. Lacto-bacilli, most likely. It might have got in when I filtered out the fruit and herbs the other day, or could have just come from the berries. A bit puzzling because the...

Lemon verbena, for those who don't know, is a rather lovely herb that really springs to life in spring and summer and then tends to go dormant in autumn and winter. It has a strong lemon scent - (no shit, Sherlock!) - that you can smell from the other end of the garden. Since we've used it in...

So my wild yeast Brett thing that I captured from apple peels last year is going great guns. Does the primary fermentation quickly, doesn't need temp control (my philosophy has pretty much been, if it's learned to survive in the wild, it can keep on doing that), and doesn't ever seem to get...

Do dark beers make you pee less? Possibly because they tend to have fewer hops in them? Just thinking about my stints at my usual watering hole, the Dan O'Connell - when they have dark beers on tap (my preferred drop) I tend to go to the dunny less.

It has come to my attention that my brews don't much like being taken on long expeditions. Turns them into gushers. Can anyone enlighten me as to why this might be? I started bulk priming last year - perhaps because I was getting little/no secondary fermentation out of this bulk priming at...

Hmm, this is an interesting one. The other week I made some cyser with early ripening apples and honey from our hive. What with the juice from the crushed apples and the added honey I had a bit too much for the fermenter, so I ended up setting as much aside as I could, deciding to use it to...

I've got a little brewing dilemma, pretty much expressed in the title here. I've got a strong honey dandelion porter which I bottled almost three weeks ago which is definitely coming into its own now. It was originally intended to pair with another honey brew - a mead, to which I've added some...

Yeah you read me right! It's a very old style, check out as an example the recipe in Digby. Essentially a combination of chicken and ale! Anyway, this year as a result of both our own and my mother-in-law's expanding chicken flocks, it seems very likely that I'll have one or several roosters to...

Fresh from the genre of historical fiction that takes a lot of time to say a lot about a very small thing (boxes, shipping crates, whatever) comes a book that may be of interest to brewers.... Wood, Whiskey and Wine: A History of Barrels. Wood, whiskey and wine provide a snappy alliterative...