Monthly discussion thread about brewing.
Share whatever - success brews, failures, questions…
Fruit season is in full swing, so give the people who don’t know what to do with too much fruits some ideas ;-)
Success- watermelon brandy, turned out amazing. Failure- in expecting my flamin hot Cheeto whiskey to turn out awful but maybe I’ll be surprised? Waiting- flamin hot Cheeto whiskey and blueberry brandy, I was expecting the fermentation to slow down by now but it’s going strong for the 4th day in a row. On deck- my girlfriend wants me to brew my fall pumpkin beer, so that’s planned for one of my two fermenters once my other two brews are done. Besides that, I’ve got a long list of weird stuff to try distilling, dunno yet, kinda feeling smarties or some other candy
I am too conservative for this but I really like your prisonhooch experiments.
I don’t know if you brew pumpkin beer before but it can get really messy. I had to get in to tank and shovel out pumpkin residue last year.
Join in on the fun and get wild! You never know what’ll happen lol. And oh yeah I have a pumpkin beer recipe I’ve done the last few years, i can confirm, it’s very messy lol.
I brew 1000l of it so whole day cleaning filters, clogged pipes and other stuff that usually take few hours. Still better than one time blackout stopped the brewery. Unboiled mash and starches are hard to clean lol.
Finished my ‘try and see’ cider batch. Three kinds of apples from the yard, juiced at the juicers, plus a homeopathic 22 g/L pale ale malt. Fermented to fully dry in 17 days at 14 C and 1,8 bar. After that a couple days at 2,5 C to clear it out. Plenty of forced carbonation. Came out a bit mild, like a dry white wine, but that made it easy to drink. Gave most of it away in 3 L bags, because I want to get the vessel empty and get a beer going.
Lesson learned: much more acidic apples next time, and the malt wort needs to be as concentrated as possible so it doesn’t dilute the apple juice.
I started a Bochet Cyser this month; really looking forward to seeing how it tastes. Its my first bochet and first cyser, so really exploring new territory.
I’ve got my Tang ferment that I mentioned in my other post and some Fireweed wine, which is basically a sugar wine, but its bright fuchsia.
Currently mulling over ideas for what to do with all the blueberries I’ve harvested. I’ll probably just be boring and make a wine but if anyone has any dumb ideas I’d love to try them.
I’m getting ready to bottle a 20l batch of Altbier, this afternoon.
I will have to bottle 70l of cider this week. Fortunately my boss let me use bottling station at brewery so it will take only 45min.
I have finished the brewing stage of what will hopefully be my first gin and now need to gather up the mental fortitude to stare at a thermometer for several hours and potentially ruin all the prior work. I’m not very good at distillation yet.
Honestly screw the thermometer. I’m a bit green to it as well, but with my setup having “high power” or “low” power, I stopped bothering with using the thermometer as an indicator. Now I just use my tongue and an alchometer. Do cuts often, I use a boat load of 8oz jars. Toss the beginning parts obviously, use your nose and tongue to go into tails, I typically stop my stilling at 35/30% abv coming off the still. From there after all your cuts are done have a lot of paper towels on hand. I cover each jar (and there’s lots of them) with a paper towel and let them sit 24 hours to let any volatiles air out. From there I do my blending and this procedure has done me well for the last year and a half or two that I’ve tried my hand at spirits.
Most of my brewing is for beer, so I have heaps of 500ml bottles that I use to make cuts, thankfully. I don’t actually own any tools to properly measure the content of spirits, though. I’m currently going on “is it flammable” and “what does it taste/smell like”. If I can actually get into it a bit more I’ll invest in the gear, but I feel like I need to get over the mental block first
I appreciate the advice though. It’s good to have some reassurance, because man it just fucking sucks to wait weeks to brew something and then totally fuck up the distillation. What’s the thinking behind covering the jars with a paper towel rather than just the lid of the jar (or the stopper of the bottle, in my case)?
Alchometer should only be like $20 USD, though if you wanna just use taste, that absolutely works too! I did that with my watermelon brandy (accidentally sat on my alchometer during distillation lol) for the paper towel vs lid or stopper, paper towel is far more permeable to volatile compounds. Could you get away without doing it? Yeah probably. Does it make a difference? Honestly, maybe, maybe not, theoretically to me it makes sense so I’ve done it every time, but I haven’t read any research papers on the topic. But letting it “air out” and let the more volatile stuff out (without letting bugs or fruit flies in) makes sense to me so I do it haha
Ahh okay, that makes sense. Thank you!
Just brewed a carmel pumpkin stout. Fermentation is going well so far.
Did a raw ale with heather tips foraged from the forest that turned out pretty good.
And now fermenting a raw pumpkin ale. Added around 3 kg pumpkin mash to the mash. A bit difficult to work with and had an OG of around 1.055, bit on the low end there. Fingers crossed it’ll be drinkable. Assuming it’s going to come in at session strength.
I’ve got a pineapple habanero cider in its last week before I bottle it right now.
Used apple juice as the base for primary, infused habanero into pineapple juice and added into secondary fermentation. It’s pretty spicy, I’m going to back sweeten with pineapple concentrate I think and then pasteurize.
I made moscato wine from my grapes a couple of weeks ago and then a second wine that fermented on the skins that I pressed last weekend.
My apples have been harvested so I will probably grind and press those either this week sometime or next weekend to make hard cider.
I finally finished picking all the hops (Glacier and Mt Hood/Tettnang) off the bines that I harvested 3 weeks ago, I’m don’t have any plans for any sort of fresh hop beer or anything but I would like to maybe brew something soon. I was thinking about a high (50+%) wheat saison while using chopped up wheat straw in the mash for a filter aid and fermenting with some of my wild yeast cultures.
Brewed a Pale Ale with some leftover hops I had from last batch. Sadly I accidentally replaced (due to it being out of stock) ~60EBC crystal with a ~110 EBC crystal, so it’s quite red. Then the BIAB bag broke during sparge, smashed down into my wort, splashing about 40% of it out onto the ground. And myself.
So we’ll see.Success - Blond smash. Once again proves that 5 weeks in the bottle is a magic number. 4 weeks? Eh. 5 weeks? AMAZING.
Failure - Watermelon wine. It’s just sour. Not in a good way, at all. Tastes kinda like the rind, though there was no rind in it. Maybe backsweetening?
Waiting - choc hazelnut porter. choc comes thru, hazelnut not at all. Needs more aging time. I feel like darker beers need more time. It’s almost 3 months, gonna test it.
Fermenting - ginger bugged root beer. Made root beer syrup to make root beer soda. Was ok, needs work. Remaining half into a 1 gal fermenter. It was due 2 weeks ago, but it’s fine. It’ll need back sweetening and bottle carb, but that’ll be another drumroll 5 weeks.
On deck - It’s time for a holiday beer. Something spiced. IDK what. It takes 2 months, so it’ll be ready early December if I start now. Hmm…
Hmm that’s a lot of things. What to say Good luck or “Dej bůh štěstí” (Czech brewmasters saying).
That’s only the alcohol stuff, lol. I also do sourdough, yogurt, other natural sodas, and lacto pickles.
Picture is my test cider with hops. My boss said that if I told him it is some kind of beer he would believe me. He really liked it.
@plactagonic Care to share the recipe? Sounds great, especially since I know some folks who can’t take in gluten.
I always make cider from apples I can get my hands on so not specific in that way. But I recently shared here this blog post and it has everything you need to start brewing.
Juicing is the biggest problem so if you sort this out you can start experimenting with it. I will finalize some recipe for it next year.
@plactagonic I’ve made wine from multiple fruits before, the part with the hops was most interesting to me. That’s what eludes me when reading your post. When, how much, etc!
It is the same as dry hopping in beer. So in primary fermentation for ~week. If you let it for too long it gets grass tones (like bad grass taste).
This one had too much hops (~10g/l) for next time I will add 1-5g/l. As for what variety to choose go for some aromatic hops for dry hopping (it is usually specified in shops/e-shops), I used Summit.
@plactagonic That’s more specific, thank you!
I haven’t brewed anything in a while. I was thinking of doing some kilju soon
Now is proper.
