Dispatched a bottle of my recent Banana effort up to Birmingham for the Green Cushion (an old housemate). Although it still needed several months in the bottle to mature, the plonker couldn’t resist opening it for a sample. He then had the cheek to say it didn’t taste good!

Patience is a fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22) and I was dissapointed that my friend was lacking in this essential virtue.

One thing you need with country wine is patience. They often need a good few months to mature after bottling before they are quaffable.
Often, if a wine does not come out as I wanted, I leave the rest of the batch for several months (or years!) and it can taste complete different the next time you come to it. Several bad batches have become quite pleasant after a few years maturing.

I got the thumbs up from Scrubs today about my sloe gin! I gave her a bottle so that she could celebrate the end of her exams in style.
I usually dont use good friends as guinea pigs for dubious brews, so I was quite relieved that she liked it.

She said it also helped her sleep. Well, I did warn her it was strong stuff…

The other thing I got done this weekend was bottling my Cranberry Wine which I made with the cartons of juice that were left over from the Church Christmas Party.

Using cartons of fruit juice is probably the easiest way to make wine. You can just put it straight into a demijohn so no need for a fermentation bin, or mashing or straining. To learn how to make wines using this method, check out the post: How to make wine from fruit juice.

The cranberry wine was a lovely rosé colour and tasted pretty good. You can definitely taste the sharpness of the cranberries but I guess it will mellow out after a few months in bottles.

All in all, a fairly good weekend of brewing activity.

I’m still sore that Fendog stole my idea of making mead. So whilst he’s busy preparing his Leviticus sermon, I thought I would get one on the go this weekend so we can have a good old fashioned brew-off.

Although Fendog’s mead is now in bottles and looking good, it tasted pretty rank at the racking stage, and I’m confident that I can make something far superior.

I’ve gone for a much sweeter recipe than Fendog, although the Tesco Value honey could prove to be my downfall…

1.9kg Tesco Value honey
~4l water
15g citric acid
1tsp wine tannin
1tsp yeast nutrient
1tsp wine yeast

I added enough water to the honey to dissolve it and boiled it for a few minutes then skimmed off the scum. This sterilises it and gets rid of the impurities. Then added water to make it up to 4.5l and added the other ingredients (you could start the fermentation in a smaller glass or bottle, but I couldn’t be bothered). Then shoved it all in a sterilised demijohn with a clean airlock. The hydrometer reading was 1.1

It looked strangely beautiful, but not like anything you would ever want to drink. It was a lovely clear golden liquid with weird jelly-like solids suspended in it with the yeast particles. There’s going to be one heck of a lees. I’ll be surprised if I get 5 bottles out of this.

Fendog and I have been preaching a series on the book of Leviticus. This Sunday its Lev 15 – Bodily Discharges. And owing to his experience in this area, Fendog volunteered to do this passage. So while he’s busy preparing for that, I spent the weekend catching up on some wine-making.

First up – Pineapple Wine from Tesco Value tinned pineapple chunks. I know my obsession with the Tesco Value range could prove to be a schoolboy error, but as a poor minister of the gospel, I can’t afford to be choosey.

Making wine from tinned fruit is really simple and a great way to experiement with different varieties. There’s no need for picking, peeling, juicing, boiling or anything like that – makes life really easy and also less sugar is needed because you can use the syrup it comes in. For a full guide to making wine in this way, check out the post: How to make wine from tinned fruit.

I’ve got to admit the pineapple must doesn’t smell as pleasant as I imagined, but you can never tell what the finished product will be like by how it is at this stage. We can but pray.

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Well… I didn’t get a very good taste of it, but the ginger smelt like ginger, and seemed to taste ok too. I think this is promising. Excited about getting that brandy in and seeing what that does to it.

Having had the pleasure of tackling the appearance of God’s glory at the first sacrifices of the first Aaronic priesthood at our Church’s evening gathering, I felt due a day off, and I was glad to get back to that dandelion.

Squeezing all the goodness out of those dandelions and raisins into the demijohn has given quite an impressive lees… looking unlikely I’ll get anything like the much coveted six bottles out of this puppy.

Finally got round to bottling the sloe gin that should have been bottled and drunk months ago! I’m not sure what the effects are of leaving the sloes soaking for so long. But I’m hoping its not too disastrous.

My batches of sloe gin over the past few years have been pretty amazing and I dont want to let the side down with a ropey vintage.

I’ll have to arrange to crack open a bottle with the Fendog soon before unleashing it on the wider public.

This week, I was delighted to discover great encouragement in our homebrew exploits from Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle and one of the most influential church leaders in America at the moment. I have been blessed by listening to some of Driscoll’s teaching lately, and so I was well chuffed to see he reckons brewing and theology go hand in hand. As someone who is reformed in theology, committed to expository preaching, but not afraid to be “culturally-liberal“, Driscoll is sure become more influential as conservative evangelicals catch up with the emerging church in terms of cultural engagement. But he’s also pretty controversial so it will be interesting to see what people make of him.

Anyway, in his book The Radical Reformission, he reflects on the possible impact of brewing on the kingdom of God:

“Thankfully, the resurgence of microbrewing in the United States is helping to overcome the great loss and to resurrect the art of brewing. I personally long for the return to the glory days of Christian pubs where God’s men gather to drink beer and talk theology.”
 - Mark Driscoll, The Radical Reformission

That tradition of drinking beer and talking theology has a fine history here in Oxford with the likes of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien meeting for a pint at the Eagle & Child, and Oxo and his homeless mates discussing the finer points of substitutionary atonement outside the butchers on Magdalen Road.

Driscoll also recalls some the great brewing heritage in the Christian tradition:

• Saint Gall was a missionary to the Celts and a renowned brewer
• After Charlemagne’s reign, the church became Europe’s exclusive brewer
• When a young woman was preparing for marriage, her church brewed a special bride ale, from which we derive the word bridal
• Pastor John Calvin’s annual salary included upwards of 250 gallons of wine to be enjoyed by him and his guests
• Martin Luther once wrote of the Reformation, “While I sat still and drank beer with Philip and Amsdorf, God dealt the papacy a mighty blow.”
• Luther’s wife Catherine was a skilled brewer, and his love letters to her when they were apart lamented his inability to drink her beer
• When the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock, the first permanent structure they erected was a brewery

Following my failure to tend to the dandelions picked by myself and Trenchfoot, they consequently picked up rather too much flavour for my liking, such that the utility room began to smell much like a dead cat I found curled up in the corner of the grain store one summer. However, Goggles McGee came to the rescue a few days later, asking if I’d fancy some dandilions she’d seen on a meadow. Obviously.

However, once we’d stalked them all, we were still somewhat short. So Goggles and I headed out to pick some more. Frustratingly there were few about, and I lacked the boldness to steal them from people’s gardens in case they were moved to bring out the mower and take me out along with the dandelions I was trying to liberate from their overgrown gardens. Shall add the recipe when I can be arsed.