Yes, leftover brewing or whatever I can find (in case of apples for cider) is the best kind of homebrewing. I am usually pleasantly surprised what comes from them.

Yeah I know the days when anything that could go wrong goes wrong. In my case it is usually my attempts to correct my mistakes that makes it even worse. And I am still genuinely surprised that I made something good.

In our case it is issue of quantity, we have 40l batches and it is too much for one person to pull the bag/manipulate with pots.

We have false bottom pot on lift and it isn’t ideal but still much better than BIAB. It needs some work/ new pot for heating (we got the induction heater for free) and because the bottom valve is bad.

After trying/helping some friends with their systems I think that our setup is maybe the best you can have.

When it’s apple season, loads of people reach me and my friend if we want some. This year we had to stop taking new apples because we didn’t had the capacity to process them all.

Now I have about 40l of archive worthy cider (some was consumed/given away already).

I tried to use wood chips and it turned out amazing.

I will start.

Last month I helped my dad with converting his settup to BIAB. It didn’t go too well, he thought it would be simpler and less work. Tldr it is simpler but it requires more work. So he will probably stay on current settup. We have to upgrade the pots for induction (it is needed after 15 years some valves are falling apart).

After giving away some juice, we decided to make 50l of simple cider and two test batches with hops (Summit) and spices (cinnamon, allspice, pepper and cloves). Because of weather we had to, fortunately, leave it in little inconvenient space so most of it will end up in bottles and nobody will bother to go there and drink it

Getting bottles ready for filling next week.