Hop Spider

I'm not much of a DIY kinda person but I had a go at making my own hop spider the other day and it turned out surprisingly well (for me!), it's undergoing sea trials right now brewing up a classic Hobgoblin clone so far so good. The point of the bag in the middle is to suspend hops in boiling wort (beer) so that all the bits of hop don't end up in the beer and the whole process of cleaning and filtering is made just a tad easier, hopefully ending up with a cleaner and clearer finished product.

In other brewing news (Saturday morning is my brew day) I bottled a porter that I made a couple of weeks ago. Porter is a very dark style of beer made with lots of dark toasted malts including crystal and chocolate and is often flavoured with fruit or spice. I had a go at flavouring mine with blackberry and vanilla which is one of my favourite flavour combination in puddings so this is a chance to see what it's like in beer. I did have a tiny bit left over after bottling so I tried it, wow, really dense and flavorsome, almost sherry like, can't wait for it to secondary ferment in the bottles and gain some bubbles, should be nice.