Jim's Beer Kit

In short a refractometer will probably work fine as long as your RI: gravity table has been constructed from the same product that you are examining. If you make a beer/cider/wine from consistent ingredients to the same recipe I would expect that a table could be constructed that shows near perfect ...

Here is my take on refractometer vs hydrometer which was posted on the Mead topic. Essentially the correlation of SG: RI is dependent on the calibrating sugar. For accuracy then it would be necessary to create a scale based upon the wort being processed i.e. take hydrometer readings and RI readings ...

No you are not missing anything. Sucrose is a disacharride of glucose and fructose. That means that honey does not naturally contain much fructose, which is not that surprising. There is a belief among bee keepers that the water content of heather honey is higher, due to the refractive index being h...

Essentially, I see edible acid additions as seasoning, very much like cooking. Once you have a presentable mead you can season it with acid additions. So, to date, as I do not think I yet have a finished mead I have not gotten around to seasoning the mead. It is getting close with some of the early ...

PAA is a good sanitiser but so is this and it smells better. Sodium percarbonate will decompose into hydrogen peroxide and sodium carbonate (washing soda). It is the basis of Vanish - the laundry stain remover. Look here and do not overpay. Do not use Vanish as it contains enzymes. The solution need...

Your are right. Dealing with the cappings is not as easy as it seems and you will have a lot to wash. Volume wise I tend to wash about two 15 litre buckets of cappings for around 20 ltrs of must. Some cappings are more honey rich than others and much depends on the bees making perfect frames which i...

In my other post on why honey is expensive I was asked to comment on heather honey in mead making. I am not expert on mead having only been brewing the stuff for about one year. Some of it is now coming of age but there are no hard and fast rules. I recover my mead making honey from cappings which i...

Many thanks of all the positive comments. Message for Bigbud78. I regret that we do not have any means to accept on-line payments. I refuse to accept Paypal's T&C's and we are too small to use other payment methods. Most of our sales are to locals who either buy direct from us or via some local reta...

My wife and I are bee farmers and I would like to put into perspective why honey is apparently so expensive. We run about 80 hives and have a policy of quality over quantity. In the bee keeping world there are the professional bee farmers and the hobby beekeepers, though the latter is often a bee lo...

When I have harvested yeast I always make a starter. In my case I use about 200 g honey and around 100 ml of wet compact yeast made up to 1 litre. It goes into a conical flask and then onto a magnetic stirrer plate with a magnetic stirrer. Cover the top with a coffee filter and spin away. 12 hours i...

After making my introduction I was asked to explain my yeast starters using honey. Here we go After reading Ken Scrhamm's book on mead he made a comment about yeast starters and I followed this up with other research and it struck an accord. I wanted to avoid boiling the must for mead making and a s...