This is meant as general discussion thread, so share everything related to brewing - questions, ideas, what’s fermenting etc.
As discussed in my recent post here I will pin it for about a week and do another thread in a month and we will see how it goes.
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Second attempt at a raspberry sour. This time, allowing a few days of ferment before adding the fruit, and a cold crash before bottling for higher clarity.
What happened with the fruit the first time?
Actually nothing, turned out fine. Just experimenting with how much of a noticeable difference it makes giving the yeast a few days head start on the wort without the fruits.
There’s a lot of ‘folk wisdom’ in the brewing world I’ve found. Recipes which claim “you must do X” or “if you don’t do Y, it won’t work”. So I like to test different theories and see what’s true and what’s superstition.
I’ve got my continuous brew of kombucha going for my daily consumption.
On the more interesting side, I’ve got some spruce tip mead going which I’m hoping turns out well. There was a little bit of a scare where I was concerned it could be infected, but it seems fine.
Sadly, I was doing an experiment with sea lovage spiced mead which succumbed to mold and needed to be dumped. Something to retry next year.
This year’s berry harvest is basically FUBAR. Global warming did a number on it so now there’s near zero salmonberries and the ones which did appear are partially desiccated or only half ripe. So no salmonberry wine this year, probably even not enough for jam :(
Blueberries are way too early, but they’re tasting fine at least. I’ll probably try a blueberry wine or mead. Encountered a few hiccups last year because of their acidity, but I’m better equipped this year so hopefully that turns out well and I can bottle some stuff for the winter.
Last year I didn’t make any cider. I couldn’t find apples. This year it looks better, but they are falling unripe from trees somewhere.
I hope you didn’t have to throw out too much of the mead. I usually do experiments on really small scale (~1l).
It was only a gallon. The disappointment is mostly that I won’t have a really weird drink this year.
I’ve heard cider can be made with unripe apples. Might be worth a shot.
It is, but juice from ripen apples has about 13% sugar content and I am not sure how much it will be with unripe ones. I don’t know how would it age in bottles - more acid and peptides, less sugar.
Also I will find time for it in few weeks, maybe, and they will probably pe ripen.
Brewing up a Multigrain whiskey, scaling to 600l, finding that we need to add more water than expected, which we reckon is a combo between the grains soaking up a bit more, and evaporation from larger fermentation containers
I never liked distillates, made/helped with few fruit ones (I still have ~5l of cherry made few years ago). How it is with whiskey? It has to be more work than putting it in fermenter and wait.
Yeah, more work, being that the grains generally need cooking, but I found it more forgiving than fruit so far.
I will start, this week was uneventful everything was smooth without hiccup (my boss didn’t had time so I had to brew the batch alone 12 h in work yeah).
Last week on the other hand, steam generator broke (hole in pipe), we had to finish the batch and outside temperature was 36°C. So we had to let everything open (doors and windows) to not have sauna in brewery. It was exhausting brew day.
We started testing new strain of yeasts from local lab. It looks good so far, for now we were brewing from 1st but now it will probably be 0’s from lab.
Planning on trying my very first raw ale. So far, was thinking of doing a 3ish hour mash, finishing for about 30 minutes at 80 C, and adding something like 60g Simcoe (14.4%) to the mash. For laziness reasons I’d like to avoid doing a hop tea. Has anyone tried this before?
