Home Brew Tips, "How To" Videos
This section contains all the information you will need to get up and running, and to avoid common homebrew pitfalls. If you really want to know what home brewing is all about, watch the videos below. These are excellent and present homebrewing as it really is. You will also get a real feel for the essential equipment you will need, and see how it used by homebrew beer and wine experts.
Applying new techologies to homebrewing has made it much easier, and the quality of homebrew beer and wine has dramatically improved in recent years. These days its quite easy to consistently make high quality beers and wines. The videos below will show you how to it.
There are two fundamentally different ways to bottle beer. After primary fermentation, the beer is bottled (or kegged). At this stage it must be primed with sugar/dextrose so that a secondary fermentation occurs in the bottle (or keg) carbonating the beer with the correct amount of CO2. Carbonating the beer correcly is important because it protects it from air (oxygen), and it also gives the beer its "fizz" and its "head".
This is why wines contain sulphites, and homebrew beers don't. Most wines are not "fizzy", they don't have CO2 to protect them from oxygen. So they require sulphites to prevent them from becoming oxidized. However, homebrew wines contain only a fraction of the sulphites found in commercial wines.
The first way to bottle beer is to move the beer from the primary fermenter to a secondary vessel, and then to mix in the priming sugars. This primed beer mixture can then be bottled. Unfortunately, the process of moving the beer and then mixing priming sugars introduces oxygen to the beer at a critical time. Another dowside is that you need an extra fermentation vessel and there is an extra step: the beer has to be moved into a secondary vessel before it can be bottled.
The second approach is to individually prime each bottle and then just bottle from the primary fermenter. This approach is the one we recommend because it significantly reduces air contact with the beer and gives a better quality result. And it requires only one fermentation vessel, instead of two. If you are kegging your beer, there is no downside. However, if you are bottling your beer, there is: each bottle must be individually primed with sugar/dextrose. Adding a half of a teaspoon of sugar to 60 bottles is tedious, so we strongly recommend the use of Coopers Carbonation Drops. The pack contains 60 glucose/sucrose tablets that are easily dropped into each bottle. This is by far the easiest way to ferment and bottle beer, and it gives consistently great results.
