06.21.11 Orange Metheglin

This mead was another attempt at the JOAM. Only instead of being tossed together with quick ingredients like the JOAM I used the following recipe that called for more effort and better results.

http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f80/malkores-not-so-ancient-orange-mead-50201/

I scaled the recipe down to one gallon and used the below:

½ of an orange juiced
little more then 1tsp zest grated off of orange
1 stick cinnamon
1 clove
4lbs honey (1.814kg ~ used 1.826kg)
½ tsp dap with wort and one day after start
½ tsp Fermaid K with wort and one day after start
Re hydrated Lalvin 71b with Go Ferm

I heated 2 liters of water to just before boiling, added  the zest, juice, cinnamon, and clove – left for 20 mins... This should have been less time but I underestimated the time it would take to clean out the jug. I strained the stepped mixture through some cheese cloth and then added another liter of cold water in order to cool it down before I added the honey.

I tried just adding the honey to the jug through the funnel but it was taking too long. And in order to speed things up I added the rest of the honey to another liter of warm water to dissolve and then add. See what I did here? 4 liters of water and 4lbs of honey has a volume greater then 4.5 liters... As it was I had some must left over that I couldn't fit into the jug... 

But at least I remembered to shake it this time!

My target OG was 1.120 and with the little bit wasted I ended up at 1.116, which makes me happy that I didn't end up too far off. The 71b yeast has a tolerance of 14% so this should finish around 1.007 and be a dry-semi sweet. Which is what I was going for as that the JOAM ended at about 1.008 if I recall correctly.

As it stands I no longer have anything else to blog about after this. The better part of my jugs are filled with mead fermenting away and the ones that are empty I'll need to use when racking. Though I'm thinking about picking up some more jugs and making a couple of different kinds of cider that I want to try. Once I get the jugs and have the recipes nailed down I'll toss up a post.

05.29.11 Habanero Capsicumel

 After my first attempt at a capsicumel failed at obtaining any heat from the jalapeno. I decided to go all out with this time and used a habanero including the seeds and the pith for maximum heat potential.

Will it work? I hope so, it should end up rather sweet and with a good kick. I tasted some that overflowed when I was adding nutrients and after only a day with the habanero I could feel it already. Six months on the pepper should be absolutely wonderful/hell depending on your heat tolerance.

 I ended up using a similar recipe from the home brew forums that inspired the jalapeno capsicumel.

5lbs Honey
Water to 1 gallon
1 habanero with seeds and pith
½ tsp Fermaid K and ½ tsp DAP day after pitch
½ tsp Fermaid K and ½ tsp DAP two days after pitch
Lalvin 71B yeast rehydrated with GoFerm

And in true me fashion I made a mistake with this batch as well. I topped the mixture of water and honey with fresh water, Took a gravity reading, added the habanero, and then pitched the yeast. It wasn't until I looked at the gravity reading and the way that the yeast didn't drop down to the bottom right away that I realized I didn't shake the bloody thing. >.< And so there was a layer of thicker honey and water sitting at the bottom of the jug.

I used the mead calculator over at the Got Mead site and it gave me a suggested SG of 1.150 for 5lbs of honey in a one gallon batch. The yeast is good up to 14% and should give FG around 1.044. With such a high FG it would be considered a desert mead, but if that heat sticks around it'll be quite the quaff. I'm thinking that this will need to be served in shot glasses or something to limit intake.

05.24.11 Home Brewed Ginger Beer Take 3

Ok, so this is the 3rd attempt at the ginger beer, see the first and second attempts for more information. I've learned something new with this batch, and that is write down the directions and don't try to follow the ones in your head. Since this was the 3rd time I tried to have a go at it just using my memories...  Which caused me to forget the correct number of teaspoons needed to feed it each day, I used 4 instead of the 6 the recipe calls for. It ended up not being too big of a deal, I had pre-measured everything out and was just spooning the ginger/sugar mix into the plant. As it was I just poured in what was left and waited another day before bottling.

This time I had made sure to strain the plant properly and even left some of the liquid behind in order to avoid getting any yeast into the bottles. I noticed as I was mixing the liquid into the water and sugar I that some yeast still made it through past the cheese cloth... It didn't seem to cause any problems with the carbing and they are now sitting in the fridge after two weeks. Next time I'm thinking that I'll try to double filter to try and limit the amount of yeast at the bottom of the bottles.

The batch tastes much the same as the first one, fairly sweet with a nice ginger taste without any sort of bite like commercial ginger beer has. Which if that is what you are going for it's nice and refreshing, I on the other hand would like for it to have just a little bit of a bite. I've read that some people have added habenero or bird's eye peppers to try and accomplish this. Next time I'm either going to try adding a pepper or maybe use real ginger instead of the powder (or just more powder >.>).

06.13.11 Cider tasting

I brought the remaining cider I had to a friend's place for a party at the beginning of the month and got a some feedback on them.

Concentrate Cider

Out of the two ciders there was less of this cider left at the end of the night. I'm not sure if it was just because people were turned off by a dry cider or because they wanted to try something different. (It has been explained to me that most commercial ciders in the area are pretty dry.)

It was described as having more taste then the Turbinado cider, which would make sense considering the can of concentrate that was used to back sweeten and carb it. When I had some it still seemed to be a little bit sour to me. And I believe that if I could reduce the sourness a little it would make for a more refreshing drink and something you could have more then one or two of at a time.

Turbinado Cider

This one had a muted apple taste to is and since it was lacking the concentrate turned out to be smoother. Although the dryness gave it an edge of its own. And from what I remember it seemed to be a little more winey then the other, I've heard that this has something to do with boosting the ABV with the turbinado sugar.

That's all I can remember about this one, not many people tried it so I wasn't able to get many opinions other then it was better then the concentrate cider. I'm thinking that it might be worth trying to either back sweeten it a lot with turbinado sugar or try priming with a little bit of concentrate.

Over all I think that both of these need more work. I want to either let them sit longer before bottling, or try a different yeast strain. From what I understand people have had some good results using ale yeasts. If I can find an easy source of them in town I'll give them a go next time instead of the wine yeast.

04.02.2011 Turbinado Cider

When I made the second attempt at the Concentrate cider I also tried making a dryer apfelwien like cider. The recipe was the same as the apfelwien, only instead of racking it and letting it age I gave it three weeks and then primed and bottled it. I tried to guesstimate the right about of sugar to prime it with from looking at beer recipes and came up with 35g. Looking at the finished results it carbed up nicely in about three weeks and maybe could have used just a little bit more. The carb was fine, but when compared to the Concentrate cider it seemed a little lackluster, though the concentrate cider was probably over carbed. When I make this again I'm thinking that I might try it with 40-45g of sugar to see if I can't find the upper limit.

Recipe:

4 cans Allen's apple juice

200g turbinado sugar

Lalvin 71b yeast

(On a side note, it might be worth while to dissolve the sugar in some warm water. Otherwise the foam from shaking takes too long to settle and causes problems when pitching the yeast. Though with saying that it is always possible to pitch the yeast on top of the foam and just shake it again to mix... )

Primary for 3 weeks and then prime with 35g turbinado sugar and bottle condition for 3 weeks.

SG: 1.056

FG: 1.000

ABV: 7.3%

When asking which one people preferred between the concentrate and the turbinado ciders it was always the concentrate one. They said that it had more apple taste where as the turbinado cider was a little bland. Which makes sense because of the concentrate that is used to prime the concentrate cider with. I'm not sure how I can increase the apple flavor of the turbinado cider. I have two idea right now; One is to back sweeten until it reaches the level of the concentrate cider, and the other is to try adding some spices to the primary (like cinnamon or cloves). Of course, I could just try both and see how they turn out.

04.02.2011 Concentrate Cider again

Back in April I started a second batch of the Concentrate Cider that I made in Feburary. This time I decided to not rush it and waited and additional week before bottling it. I figured that the extra week would allow more time for the yeast to fall out as well as clean up after itself. Once bottled I left them for 13 days (compared to 3 last time) before tossing them into the fridge. The caps had started to raise a little and looking back at the ginger beer it meant that they needed to go into the fridge right otherwise they could have become bottle bombs.

In addition to letting the cider sit in primary longer I also used a different yeast, Lalvin 71B. I had heard that it was good at malic fermentation and hoped that it would help with the sour taste that the last one had. It's still to early to tell as that I only had a little bit, I cracked a couple and shared them with some friends and they seemed to like it. It still seemed a little sour to me, but not as much as the first few from the last batch. With any luck when I crack the next one it will have mellowed out some more. Also it was mega carbed, the first sip that I had was all carb and bubbles. Which is a neat experience considering that cider doesn't really have any sort of head retention. I probably left them out too long to carb, but as long as they don't explode I don't mind. I'm holding onto them until the start of June when I'll be getting some friends to help me finish them.

Something that I found interesting was that even with the extra week the cider only fermented down to a FG of 1.000. I'm guessing that the concentrate is providing some sugars that are harder for the yeast to eat and end up being left behind. I also took a gravity reading of the cider after priming, it came out to be around 1.010. I believe that this is at the upper end of the dry range and would be considered a semi-sweet cider. Which, depending on what you like, could be better then the dryer commercial ciders.

04.02.2011 Anniversary Mead

When I was at a friend's wedding last summer I found out that the bride's parents had bee hives and were giving away small jars of honey to the guests. During the reception the day after I was able to mooch some of this honey off of the bride and had planned to make it into an anniversary mead once I felt that I had enough feedback and experience. I had tasted the JOAM and Jalapeno meads in January, and even though they were still pretty young I felt that they had progressed well enough that I would be able to start this without wasting the honey. The only issue was that I didn't have a source in town for the yeast I wanted to try (Lalvin 71B) nor the nutrients needed to help the ferment along (Fermaid K and Go-Ferm).

It took me until the end of March to find everything that I needed, I had no luck online and ended up sourcing some from a local wine u-brew shop. Here is the recipe used:

4.5L Glass jug
Tap water left out overnight for the chlorine to evaporate
1.647kg of honey (it had crystallized quite a bit so I warmed it up in the sink with hot water)
Lalvin 71B yeast
Go-Ferm in the yeast re-hydration water
1/8 teaspoon of Fermaid K after lag time and a day after lag time
1/16 teaspoon of DAP

SG: 1.078

I was hoping to get a higher SG, the recommendation that is given as a standard on the home brew talk forums is 3 to 3.5 lbs (1.36 to 1.58kg) of honey for each imperial gallon for a target SG of 1.090. At the time that I made this I thought that was for the US gallon and upscaled the recipe for that. Only, the honey ended up having more water in it and the SG wasn't nearly as high as I hoped. When I rack this in a few months I think that I'm going to try and add some more honey to it in order to raise the gravity and so that I don't have to top off with water.

My digital scale isn't accurate enough to measure out the grams necessary for the nutrients so I tried to guess how much would be correct. I didn't read this until after the fact, but the one book that I have with mead recipes in it lists 1 teaspoon as the amount a nutrient needed. I ended up adding some more after the first week to try and make up for the difference.

Right now it appears that it has started to clear, I would like to take a gravity reading. But I still need to find a good way of taking one from a jug that doesn't end up reducing the final amount so much. A gravity reading takes from 150ml to 200ml or so. And when you only have 4500ml of liquid readings and rackings can quickly diminish the amount of final product.

05.16.2011 Basic Mead Update

I had a lot of issues with this mead and I think that part of the problem was that I was still new had yet to learn that it's best to forget about it and come back in 6 months. It started out in a brown jug, which meant that I couldn't see what was going on inside. And when I noticed that some lees had formed and looked pretty thick I racked it out too soon being paranoid that it was going to cause off flavors. As it was there ended up being very little lees and it only looked to be a lot from the way that it stuck to the sides of the jug... I believe now that this early racking took away a lot of the healthy yeast and if not directly caused all the fermentation issues it certainly didn't help. I now know that it's best to wait until at least primary fermentation has been completed before racking to secondary. Another problem with this mead is that I don't think that I used enough nutrients and that I should have taken more care to allow the yeast to adjust to the half fermented must I was adding it to. But oh well, learning is what makes things exciting right?

Back in October of 2010 when I bottled the JOAM and Jalapeno meads this one was still cloudy and looked the same as it did when I first racked it into the clear jug. I can't remember if it was still fermenting or not, but I put it in the very back of the closet and pretty much forgot about it. I had thought about throwing it out at the time, but a lot of advice given on the home brew talk forums says to never toss something out unless it tastes really bad and that in a a lot of cases giving something time can help out with just about anything.

I pulled it out for a look sometime before April and was rather surprised to see that it had cleared! The next time that I was at a LHBS I got what I thought was a smaller jug to rack it into. I don't really like the idea of topping up with something other then what I'm making, which was the reason for the smaller jug. As it was the new jug was either the same size >.< or only slightly smaller and I ended up topping it off with some water anyway. In the end topping the mead up with water ended up being a good thing, I kept an eye on the airlock and about a week or so later noticed that it had started fermenting again. I'm thinking that introducing the water diluted it enough to un-stall the fermentation and kick the yeast into action again. And I'm also wondering if the closest may be too cool for the yeast and that adding room temperature water warmed it up to a more agreeable level. If I remember I will pick up some thermometer strips to stick to the side of the jug. Also given the gravity at the time of racking, 1.026, the yeast still had the potential to ferment out the rest of the sugars and end up below 1.000. I'm not sure how long it will go for, but I'm willing to forget about it until fermentation has been completed.

And for the gravities and the like.
OG: 1.118
FG: 1.026
ABV: 12.14%
Expected FG .998~
Expected ABV: 15.84%

At least in a prefect world, I topped it off with around 750ml of water. So everything has been diluted and the ABV will be somewhat less. But considering that it was already at 12% this is going to have some kick to it when it's fully done.

5/13/2011 Apfelwein Update

The Apfelwein that I made last August (Read it here) sat in the closet until February before I bottled it. I had noticed in October when I was bottling the JOAM and Jalapeno meads that there was a patches of film floating on the top of the Apfelwein. I figured that since I had racked it and left so much head space that it must have been contaminated or something and just left it to be tossed out at a later date. But in February when I was making the concentrate cider I decided to take a picture and ask about it on the brew forums.

People thought that it was just left over yeast or pectin that had risen to the top of the jug and that it should be OK. I gave it a taste and it tasted... strange. Not bad, but not really good either. It sorta tasted like apples, and the mouth feel almost as if it were waxy or something. It's hard to explain but that's the best that I've come up with. After I bottled it I left it in the fridge for a bit to see if that would help things. I tried it again and it didn't taste too bad and then I shared some with friends and they thought the same. But, that was it. The rest of the bottles were pretty terrible and I ended up tossing them out. I think that it had something to do with the order that I filled them in, the ones that took from closer to the top being the worse tasting ones.

I've made a batch of cider using the same type of sugar (turbinado) and it too had the film when I went to bottle it. I'm thinking now that it might have something to do with the sugar, maybe it doesn't ferment well or there's something else in it that's causing problems. The new batch is currently carbing, I primed it with the same sugar... >.>, and I guess that I'll see how it turns out. Worst case I've learned to never use turbinado again.

02/13/2011 Concentrate Cider

Back in February I decided to give a quick an easy apple cider a try. I had been lurking around the Cider forum and had come up with a recipe based on others that I had read.

4.2L Allen's apple juice
1 can no name frozen Apple Juice Concentrate with ascorbic acid (Vitamin C)
and another can of concentrate for priming
1 packet Danstar Nottingham yeast

There's nothing to this recipe, just mix the concentrate with the juice, shake and pitch the yeast. At least that is what I thought... I realized that as I was making it that you need to melt down the concentrate before mixing and allow it to come to room temperature before pitching the yeast. Otherwise it could be too cold for the yeast and there could be a rather significant lag time before they get started.

I pitched the yeast on a Sunday and by the Tuesday the yeast still fermentation hadn't started. The closest that the jug was sitting in was 20C, and was well within the temperature tolerance (14 – 21C) of the yeast. I ended up moving it into the furnace room, which was around 25C, to see if I couldn't kick start the yeast into action. And it pretty much took off, I had considered moving it back into the closet to prevent the yeast from throwing off flavors at such a high temp. But after the trouble it had before I decided that it was better to leave it in the furnace room rather then risk stalling the fermentation again.

13 days later I primed the cider by racking it onto another can of melted concentrate and then bottled it. At the time the cider was still fairly cloudy, with lots of yeast still in suspension. But since this was supposed to be a quick cider I bottled it anyways and made sure to keep a close eye on it. I left the lids loose for 24hrs to push out any oxygen and then sealed them. After about 3 days the bottles felt like they had carbed enough and since it happened to fast I tossed them into the fridge in order to avoid bottle bombs. As it was they could have been carbed more and would have benefited from being left out longer.

On to the tasting notes, it ended up being fairly sour with a weak carb that all but disappeared by the half way mark. And I found that as it warmed up in the glass it started to get a bit of a cloying mouth feel. This could be attributed to the lack of carbonation, I've read that the CO2 adds an acidic taste that can offset sweetness. So that as it disappeared there wasn't anything to counter all the extra sugars that I added at bottling. Overtime though it started to get less sour, one suggestion when I asked on the forums was that the cider underwent a malolactic fermentation while within the bottles. And the OG was 1.050 and the FG was 1.000 making for an ABV of 6.55%.

The next time I tired this I left it in primary a lot longer in hopes that it would produce a cleaner tasting product. It is currently bottle conditioning and I'll have post on it within the next few weeks. 

01/01/2011 Home Brewed Ginger Beer

Here I was going to write a post about my second attempt at Home Brewed Ginger Beer started in January and it seems I didn't keep any notes! Let this be a lesson to any one who reads, always always always write down everything you do. That way if you make something really good you can go back and do it again. Or, in the event of errors (which is what happened with this batch), look at what went wrong and remember it for next time. Also, take pictures of everything! I keep forgetting that I have a digital camera now and end up making something to only remember after the fact (hence the last of photos in today's post).

Here is the post from the first attempt, it has the recipe and process that I used.
07/18/10 Ginger Beer Plant (bottled 07/25/10)

From what I remember I only did two things differently. I juiced four lemons and used that instead of the 120ml. The 120ml was just what I had on hand and this time I remembered to pick up the lemons. I believe that four lemons yielded around 300ml of juice or so, but I'm not entirely sure. I also used a different yeast, Nottingham ale yeast instead of the Muntons Premium Gold. As far as I can tell from the little that I drank it didn't really make much of a difference.

There are also a few observations that I made while researching other similar recipes. This isn't really an alcoholic Ginger Beer. The yeast only have a small amount of fermentables to work with, 28tsp of sugar, before being diluted with 6.5 liters of water. It seems that the yeasts only job is carbing the bottles and perhaps some other mysterious function that will boggle mankind for eons.

The second observation is that yeast are hungry little critters, and it's a good idea to try and keep as much as possible out of the liquid you take from the jar. The cheese cloth slipped a little when I was filtering and I didn't think anything of it at the time and mixed it in with the water and bottled away (really, I was just lazy. shhh). This ended up with the making the bottles carb really, really fast, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing... But they geysered all over the place when opened, disturbing the yeast that settled in the bottom and making for a cloudy, yeasty beverage that wasn't really that appealing.

And the last observation is that a sanitizing agent, say Potassium Metabisulphite, is not a good thing to leave a stirring implement in, say a spoon. It will tarnish, eat through, and ruin the spoon and if you don't notice right away could be used to stir whatever if it you are working on. Which then could potentially cause off tastes or harmful effects. At the very least the tainted concoction shouldn't be trusted. It was a combination of this and the geysers that caused me to end up pitching this batch out :( Better to be safe then needing new kidneys or something.

05/02/2011 JOAM and Jalapeno (Capsicumel) update

 OK, so it's been a while since I've posted anything here. Brewing slowed down during the winter as the room in the basement that I was using was also the furnace room. Which means that it was a pretty much a constant 25 degrees Celsius. And that is way too hot for a lot of the things that I was making at the time. So until the summer when the AC is on I've managed to find some space in a closet in the basement, it is a lot cooler than the furnace room, 20 degrees Celsius or so. And has allowed me to continue brewing small batches of cider and mead.
For the first post this year I'm going to talk about the Joe's Ancient Orange (JOAM) and Jalapeno (Capsicumel) meads that I made last July. I left them in primary until about October, I didn't have anything smaller to rack them into and wasn't really sure how to proceed. This was when I noticed that they appeared to have cleared and decided to bottle them. Which wasn't the greatest idea, they ended up clearing a little more and dropping some lees in the bottles. The current mead that I have going I'll be sure to rack it at least once and give it as much time as it needs to clear before bottling to avoid this. For eye candy the image at the top of the page is from today (JOAM on the right and Jalapeno on the left), and the images at the bottom of the page (JOAM, Jalapeno) are how they looked at the time of bottling. Looking at the images I don't really know how I thought that they had cleared all the way...
Now onto the good stuff, I got four 750ml bottles and two grolsch 500ml bottles of the Joe's Ancient Orange mead and three 750ml bottles and two grolsch 500ml bottles of the Jalapeno mead. I used the grolsch bottles as tasters so that I didn't need to open and waste an entire bottle in the event that the mead wasn't ready to be drank.
All four of the grolsch bottles are now gone, the first two went sometime in January and the other two in mid April. As for the tasting notes, the JOAM has a nose that contains some of the orange, clove, and cinnamon that it was brewed with. It tastes similar to the nose but is still hot and burns just a little on the way down. If or when the honey starts to come through it should get a whole lot better. Since I only have the 750ml bottles left I'm going to try and save at least one for the two year mark to see what it is like then.
The Jalapeno mead has a very peppery nose with a very peppery taste. The last time that I had some I was able to detect just a hint of honey coming through. With any luck the change in taste will continue and make it a little more likable for me. At least that's what I'm hoping, I'm a little disappointed with this one. I wanted something that had a bit of a zing to it, but it currently only tastes of pepper with no zing at all. Which isn't a bad thing if you really like peppers like my one friend, he really likes it and has asked that a I brew another batch for when this one runs out. I might try that batch with a habenero in an attempt to kick up the heat a little bit more.
Oh, and we can't forget the ABV. The JOAM had an SG 1.076 of and a FG of 1.008 making it 8.9% ABV. And the Jalapeno had a SG 1.068 of and a FG of 0.996 making it 9.5% ABV.