What an awesome and simple recipe. Thanks heaps for posting it.
I put it down about 2 or 3 months ago, and just finished bottling my first batch today. It clarified about a month ago, but I decided not to wait for the fruit to drop. Its been bloody hot here (40+ with no where cool to hide a demijohn) and I started worrying about the ingredients going a bit off and imparting too much flavour. So just ran it through a fairly course filter and bottled it.
I used some pretty crappy old honey. It was so old it had completely crystallized. I had to put it in a pot of hot water just to get it flowing again. Didn't have the best flavour compared to the new stuff I got for the next batch
but since this was just a test I figured I used it anyway. I used navel oranges. Like others, I used Tandaco yeast. Forgot about doing the top off. *shrug* doesn't seem to have suffered for it.
It cleared to a lovely deep orange colour like an amber ale.
Had a taste of it (of course
and damn its nice for a first go! Much better than my first go at brewing beer haha. The cloves come through a bit strong when its warm but back off to a hint when its refrigerated. Cold, the orange comes more to the front of the palette. There's a slight alcoholic bite to it both warm and cold and it does warm the "cockles of me 'eart" briefly. The alco-burn doesn't linger though. The aftertaste is a bit 'off orange' (which makes me think I should have bottled it soon after it clarified).
I pulled a bit too much sediment through when siphoning it out of the demijohn and the filter wasn't fine enough to extract much. The last couple of bottles have a thick layer of sediment slowly settling in. I might have to rebottle before getting stuck into those. If anyone has tips on dealing with the sediment issues I'd love to hear them
All in all though, really pleased.
Thinking I might try swapping the oranges out for similar weight in plums. Anyone tried other fruit?
