Decided to start on one of the cider kits I picked up on my last Brew2Bottle order, a cheeky Blueberry number from Mangrove Jack’s. Using one of these pouch-based kits is just as easy as using one of Mangrove Jack’s beer kits, it just contains liquid syrup instead of ready made wort, and you need to add brewing sugar (not included) and sweetener (included) according to taste. There’s also a printed instruction sheet, a sachet of cider essence and a sachet of yeast, the latter of which you add once you have 23 litres of syrupy gunk in your FV between 18 and 28 ℃.

Getting the brew started is pretty easy; just add 3 litres of boiling water to the syrup from the pouch, pour in a kilo of brewing sugar, then top up with cold water to the 23 litre mark. I was using cold water which had been chilling in 5 litre Tesco mineral water bottles, and it turns out that just one of these is enough when you’ve almost-frozen it to crystallisation. On my first attempt I used three of these bottles and had to supplement the rest using boiling water again, because I lowered the temperature too much.

As it stands I pitched the yeast at 21.5 ℃ after getting an OG reading of 1.048, then stored the vessel at 22.3 ℃.