Author: Lisa Hayden-Matthews

Home-brewing is sometimes a very tricky business with countless pitfalls – one of which is yeast rafts.  Fortunately, yeast rafts don’t necessarily mean that you’ve got a bad batch of beer, so don’t dump it just yet!  What Are Yeast Rafts?   Yeast rafts (or yeast traps) are clumps of yeast that band together and float…

When thinking of fruits that would make for a good mead, chances are that ‘bananas’ are not near the top of your list. Giving their natural sweetness and thick consistency, it’s pretty rare to find them as a part of any alcoholic beverage – let alone a ‘banana mead’. Is it even possible? Can bananas…

There is no beer without yeast, and so it’s important that when homebrewing you keep your yeast happy and healthy. Stressed yeast, after all, can lead to many unwanted side-effects – they can take longer to metabolise sugar into alcohol, reproduce slowly, and even die, leading to unpleasant build-ups of dead yeast that can ruin…

We’ve all had a lager in the past, and we’re all reasonably familiar with what a lager is – a crisp, light-coloured form of beer that is typically drunk cold. This is in opposition to ale, which tends to be cloudier and is often drunk at room temperatures.  This isn’t the only distinguishing characteristic between…

Homebrewing is a complicated process, and it’s further complicated by the staggering array of optional steps in the process that may well overwhelm a less experienced brewer. One such step is ‘sparging’, a process that requires a bit of context in order to be fully explained. What is Sparging? In order to understand what sparging…

As we’ve previously stated, Mead is an alcoholic beverage with such a long pedigree that it’s believed to have been the first alcoholic drink actively brewed by humankind. That long pedigree doesn’t always mean that it’s easier or more straightforward to brew, however, and indeed, mead can be a bit on the tricky side –…

Homebrewing isn’t the easiest of hobbies. There are a million and one decisions to make throughout the entire process, from whether or not to degas to figuring out if your batch is infected to even whether or not you should keep an infected batch and make yourself some sours.  One decision that you’d expect to…

If there’s one rule that ought to hold firm in the home-brewing hobby, it’s this: if the big-name breweries can do it in their factories, then you can do it at home. It’s that simple.  In theory, anyway; in practice, as with so many things in life, it’s not always that simple. Which brings us…

Fancy yourself as a bit of a mead brewer? You may have just made your first-ever batch of mead, highly anticipating how this beverage will taste. But resist the temptation! One of the most significant things to think about when making your mead is giving it the time it requires to mature. Patience is a…

Mead is one of the oldest alcoholic beverages known, and is thought by many to actually be the first. There are references in Ancient Greek texts to a honey-based beverage drunk to honour Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and the Vikings were huge fans of a horn of mead post-battle. It’s even been posited that ancient African…