It’s been a while since my last post, work has been keeping me fairly busy lately and my free time has been spent giving me a bit more time to have some time to myself.

On the brewing front, things have been quiet - the liqueur thing isn’t really working out too well, I’m still having issues with the sharp nose on my spirits - but I’m still attributing that to the quad-stacked Turbo Yeast in my 100L wash… still trying to finish that one up so I can start stilling my normal recipe… expecting that to be a bit better.

When that has been wrapped up, I’ll try my hand at some limoncello and macerations. Also on the agenda is putting some of my Ginger Beer into the fridge and giving that a taste test, as it’s been almost six months since that was bottled.

The other big brewing plans I’ve been thinking about for a while is Cider. It’s tasty, it’s cheap and it’s quite fashionable at the moment. Nobody I know has really done one though, so I’ve been a bit uncertain who I can bombard with little technical questions.

Ever lucky, my local brew store sent out an invitational for a Cider tasting and voting session for a new brew pub in West Perth, The Brown Fox. These guys have been open since March this year and have made their own wine and are moving onto brewing and selling their own Cider in the pub.

Unfortunately, due to a fat finger error when putting the event into my calendar - I missed the event and presentation by the owner on the technical side of making cider, not to mention the taste testing! Bugger.

Fortunately they had a really positive turnout and the owner, Greg, decided to invite those who were interested to come back for a monthly cider tasting/discussion at his venue. After a few quick emails, and several calendar reminders later - I attended my first monthly cider meeting.

Okay, so despite the big turnout at the first meeting - there was only four of us. Two of us were Cider newbies, so there was some really good discussion about cider making in general and some technical tips and tricks on getting the results you want.

Probably the biggest suprise was that the two cider brewers at the table both preferred brewing from store bought juice (preservative free, of course), rather than from the fruit themselves. Obviously there’s a effort tradeoff there, but nobody seemed to think that there was any significant difference in the end product anyway.

So keeping that in mind, I’m keen to get my first Cider under way - hopefully as early as this weekend, assuming I can shuffle things around in my fermenters, maybe at a stretch to be ready for the next meeting, and maybe having something good to actually justify taking into work (yeah, right).