During last year I deviated from my method of propagating yeast and bacteria from flowers in incremental steps and added a bunch of heather directly to demijohn without any additional yeast. This was partially an experiment, partially laziness and partially opportunity as the heather was in flower when I had spare wort from a brew. … Continue reading Heather ale

A couple of years ago I split a recipe for pale mild three ways and flavoured each third respectively with spruce tips, nettle and ground ivy (aka ale hoof). Last year I created a variant of this with meadowsweet, woodruff and sorrel and mentioned them briefly in the blog as a portion of the base … Continue reading Foraged pale mild

I want to incorporate locally foraged and seasonal elements into my brewing and back in August 2016 the field edges locally were thick with the candy floss heads of Meadowsweet and their heady aroma. Apparently it has been used to flavour mead, which is where the name derives from. It was also used as a strewing … Continue reading Meadowsweet Saison

A few years ago I attended a gin making class at Adnams, redistilling their vodka with botanicals. I subsequently made a compound, or bathtub,  gin at home by steeping botanicals in vodka. For this I followed an article on the Guardian and substituted some of the botanicals from Adnams course. Recently I decided to break … Continue reading Deconstructed compound gin

This page summarises my blog posts about the MegaBlend which started on 12 November 2017 at the London BrewCon.  There were 20 contributions to the MegaBlend; a mixture of wild cultures, house cultures and bottle dregs.  Brewlab took these away, screened them, propagated the blend and distributed it around the world. Brewlab did this all … Continue reading London BrewCon MegaBlend