A Muntons Midas Touch Golen Ale Premium kit, kindly provided by Gavin. This comes with 2 tins of goo, and doesn’t require anything else. 100% barley malt. Otherwise, kit and kilo method.
Heated the cans in a sink of hot water, and dumped the contents into the fermenter. Rinsed cans with boiling water into fermenter. Added 3.5L boiling water and stirred to dissolve. Topped up to 23L with cold water. Pitched yeast.
14/1/2012: Picked 2.5kg of sloes, rinsed them and heated to 80 degrees with just enough water to make a thick syrup, using a potato masher to mash them up a bit. Left them at 80 degrees for about half an hour to pasteurise them, then added to an empty fermenter, and racked the beer on top, mixing it through the sloe syrup/mash. This frothed up a lot, and seeing as it now comes up to 25L, there’s very little head space, so it’s continuing to overflow a bit, so I’ve just left the lid slightly cracked on one side to allow the froth to bubble over in a controlled manner to avoid explosion. At least there are no drosophila around right now. 😉
21/1/2012: Racked the beer off the heavy fruit slurry, using a sieve over the intake of the hose, leaving about 3L of slurry behind. The beer is a deep pink colour and very cloudy. I’ve been keeping it warm with a few pint bottles full of boiling water inside a towel wrapped around the fermenter. A kind of hot water bottle for beer. Trying to keep it between 18 and 19. Given its cloudiness, I’ll leave it to clear for at least a few days now.
6/2/2012: After leaving outside in the freezing winter temperatures and even having brought it in and added pectinase and leaving it for a couple more weeks, it was still super cloudy. So I racked, bulk primed with 100g sucrose and bottled.
9/2/2012: I can’t believe it. It’s completely cleared, dropping around 1cm of very loose sediment to the bottom. I hope it compresses a lot more, then this could end up a good beer, despite its travails.
