Recent content by Wasabi

Tescos often have 500ml cans of Old Golden Hen for£1 each as long as you buy 8 cans.

That's interesting! I can use a euro sign but the posting choked on a pound sign! Does that Farage guy know about this? ;) Or maybe this forum is being readied for post independence Scotland?

My Wilkos didn't have any sale sign up, however I noted that the price stickers of most things was 25% lower than normal. At the till they rang up the normal price less 25% off bringing it back to the marked price. However some items on the shelves, notably Wilkinsons Golden Ale, were still...

When they did the half price sale last year it was timed to coincide with a price rise of some items which meant you got stuff at half the new price which made the discount less than what you expected as the shelves still showed the old prices. It's possible that the same thing is happening again.

Is it off everything again? I could do with a new syphon tube and a few other odds and ends whilst I'm at the shop picking up a golden ale or wherry (or both!). And is the in-store discount 20% or 25%?

The Food Programme on Radio 4 is always worth a listen IMHO. If you check their podcast list you will find one they did on cider (21 october 2013). I was surprised to hear there is no legal definition of cider and therefore a lot of the stuff on sale is little more than fermented...

My instinct is that honey is more likely to enhance beer than wine, but with so many types of fruit juice available for making wine from it wouldn't surprise me if honey helps some of them. I think it might enhance pear flavours for instance, though I've not seen pure pear juice on sale, though...

I find 1/3 tspn of pectolase is enough for the wine to come out totally clear. As for yeast, it's generally felt that you can't subdivide that and that you should use at least 5g pretty much regardless of volume. I've not experimented with quantities to see for myself, but the one time a...

Does the mild use a different yeast? My first thought is that some yeasts do better at low temperatures than others.

Don't know about purple but Sainsbury's sell red grape juice for £1/L or £2.50 for 3L, they've been doing it for about 6 months now in fact. Sugar content not particularly high for grape juice (10%) but I've been using it in my wines with no problems.

Looking over this thread it seems most people are using wine yeast or champagne yeast. I recently switched to using ale yeast (Wilkinson's finest ;) ) and I think the results are much better. In fact a very simple concoction of 1L apple juice, 40g powdered ginger, 400g sugar, 5g ale yeast, 1tsp...

They were still selling the Value apple juice at 16p a litre when I was in Tesco this weekend, picked up a few cartons for my next batch of ginger beer. That's 49p/litre off the usual price, must be a loss leader I think! Some of their other juices are £2.50 for 3 litres, which seems to be a...

Temperature isn't really critical for hydrometer readings: the density change for +/-2°C is within the typical reading error for a hydrometer. Digging out my old chemistry data tables reveals that to the nearest thousandth, the density of water at various temperatures is: 0-10°C = 1.000...

Thanks, I think I may try either the Geordie bitter or Scottish Export. Re supermarkets, people have periodically mentioned getting homebrew stuff from Tesco, Sainsburys and now Morrisons but I can't find any homebrew stuff at all in any of these supermarkets (apart from fruit juice and sugar...

There has been plenty of discussion of Wilkinson's Golden Ale and Woodford Wherry but they also do some cheaper 1 can kits that I can't find any reviews of. Has anyone tried these, such as the Scottish export beer or newkie brown? Due to the price hikes of the Golden Ale (£22 now! was £17 only...