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.