Strawbery Wine

On top of cider, we made some Strawberry wine before I left for NY. The strawberries at the local grocery store were buy 1 get 2 free....kind of hard to pass up the oppurtunity.

Here's our basic recipe:
30 lbs strawberries
3/4 tsp tannin
5 lb corn sugar
4 lb cane sugar (unfortunately we ran out of corn sugar)
2 gallons of water
1 pkg K1-V1116 Lalvin dry yeast

OG of Total: 1.078

We started off by adding all the ingredients to the 6.5 gallon carboy. In order to make sure your fruit (now must) is sanitized, you need to add sulfur in the form of Campden tablets. The goal is to get 50ppm of sulfur into the must. This will kill any bacteria. Since we were using 6 gallons, I needed to get 300ppm for 1 gallon in order to equal 50ppm for 6 gallons. Since my Campden tablets give 30ppm per gallon, I used tablets...this gave me my 300ppm for 1 gallon or my 50ppm for 6 gallons. After waiting 24 hours for the sulfur to dissipate, we're ready to pitch the yeast.

Using a carboy for an initial fruit wine fermentation was my first mistake. If you're going to make wine, make sure to do it in a bucket, not something with a narrow neck.

Here is why:

The fermentation was "vigorous" to say the least!! Upon filling the carboy up to about 6 gallons, I capped it with an airlock and bung. However, one thing I didn't think about was that the strawberries would float. Once the liquid underneath the strawberries started to produce CO2, the strawberries on top were pushed up the neck of the carboy. The airlock quickly plugged with strawberry gunk, and eventually exploded out of the neck, and into the air!! The carboy then spewed molten strawberry lava for the next few hours!!

However it wasn't all bad. The strawberry lava, actually tasted great! They tasted like strawberries dunked in wine, and covered with pop rocks (the CO2 they released made them fizzy).

Needless to say, we had quite the mess to clean up. However when all was said and done, the wine kept on bubbling away without spewing anymore. It's now aging in the cupboard waiting for its first rackings.

Hard Cider

For the month of November I'm going to be working at the New York NWS office. Unfortunately that means I can't brew ....sad.... However, that I can still do some cider!

Leah's parents came down to visit before I left, and they brought 9 gallons of unpasteurized cider with them from a cider presser in MI. The sweet cider tasted great. Hopefully that translates over to a good hard cider, however in the most recent issue of BYO, I read that sweet cider doesn't usually make good hard cider. We shall see.

Here's the recipe I came up with:
4 1/2 gallons unpastuerized cider
1 lb buckwheat honey
1 pt maple syrup
1 lb clover honey
2 cups brown sugar
1 pkg EC-1118 Lalvin Dry Yeast

OG of Cider: 1.050
OG of Cider w/ all fermentables: 1.090

First, we added 1 gallon of the cider into a pot on the stove, and warmed it up to 160 degrees. We then added the honey, syrup, and sugars. After the sugars have dissolved, we cooled down the mixture, and added it along with the other 3 1/2 gallons of cider to the carboy.

I've read that by not pastuerizing unpastuerized cider, the results can be unpredictable, however the best yeast to use for cider is generally the natural cider yeast already found in the cider. I'm hoping that by adding in a packet of wine yeast, the wine yeast will work witht the wild yeast to produce a nice enough product. However this is a big if. For our first cider though, I think it will be an interesting experiment.

Another problem may be that our cider may turn to vinegar. Bacteria turns cider to vinegar, Yeast turns cider to hard cider. However bacteria cannot survive in a CO2 environment. Hopefully the bacteria is poisoned by the yeast producing tons of CO2.

Blueberry Ale

This just looks sooooo tasty!

I put together a quick recipe on a blueberry beer, and we brewed it a few weeks ago. I just wanted to post a quick few pics on the carboy. The blueberries add a very prominent pink color to the beer. I added the blueberries into the secondary during the primary to secondary racking. I've just racked this to a tertiary fermentation carboy in order to help it clear some more. I'll be crash cooling this over the next week, and then bottling.

7.00 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain
3.00 lb Wheat Malt, Bel (2.0 SRM) Grain
2.00 lb Caramel/Crystal Malt - 20L (20.0 SRM) Grain

60 min 1.50 oz Cascade [5.50 %] (60 min) Hops
10 min 0.28 tsp Irish Moss (Boil 10.0 min) Misc
10 min 1.10 tsp Yeast Nutrient (Boil 10.0 min) Misc
7 min 1.50 oz Cascade [5.50 %] (7 min) Hops

Add 6 pints (4.5 lbs) blueberries to secondary at racking.

Mashed Up Blueberry!

I'm worried there won't be much if any of the blueberry flavor showing through the beer. I think 4.5 lbs may have been a bit too little to compete with the crystal malts...but we shall see. Either way, I think it should turn out good. This will likely get bottled Mid-September.

Lagerhead Turtle Mishap

So I haven't posted in a while, however there's a reason for that... We haven't made any beer!! I feel like quite a slacker. The last beer we did make was the Lagerhead Turtle. However the fermentation didn't exactly go as planned.

I first would like to point out a lesson learned... "NEVER USE EXPIRED YEAST". Well I shouldn't say never, but if you do, make sure you create a large starter. I however should have taken my own advice. The yeast was only out of date a few weeks. I figured it would still be okay, however it wasn't.

After 4 days of no fermentation, I declared the yeast dead. Even a gravity reading indicated that no sugar to alchohol conversion had been accomplished. Luckily, I had some dried Nottingham yeast sitting around from a previous kit. I dumped it in without rehydrating... Yeah I know...probably not a good idea. However fermentation kicked in within 24 hours. Since there were so many fermentation problems, I decided not to go with the honey.

So now I should probably call this beer Alehead Turtle... From the rackings I tasted on the secondary transfer, it tasted quite good. We shall see. Sometimes it's better to be lucky then good.

Prost!!

Jeremy

Yeast Washing

I prefer to use liquid yeast in all my brews. While dry yeast will give you enough viable yeast in a dry packet, it doesn't have the consistency from batch to batch that liquid yeast does. However there is a price difference between liquid yeast (~$7) and dry yeast (~$1). In order to start saving a bit of cash, I've decided to start washing my yeast.

Yeast washing is a process by which the yeast is seperated from the trub. The trub is a mixture of hop remnants, dead yeast cells, and other unwanted particulate. By seperating out the trub from the yeast, we are able to reuse our yeast for future batches.

Step 1

Boiling the Jars/Water

Full Sanitized Jars

Seperating Trub in Carboy

The process for washing yeast is quite simple. The first step is to sanitize a few large (I use half gallon) mason jars, as well as 2 or 3 pint jars. I used our boil pot as well as some reverse osmosis water. I boiled the jars and lids for approximately 20minutes. After the boil, I promptly covered the jars with the lids, and set them aside for a day to cool. The nice part about this step is it can be done anytime before the racking in the next step.

Step 2

After racking the beer out of the secondary, I pour the water from all the mason jars into the carboy. The carboy is then shaken in order to agitate the sediment off the bottom. I then lay the carboy on its side. In 20 to 30 minutes trub will have fallen to the bottom of the carboy's side. It is at this point that the carboy is slowly poured into the larger mason jar. The goal of the pouring is to leave most (if not all) of the trub behind in the carboy. Note that the basic premise to this is that trub is heavier then yeast, therefore the trub will fall to the bottom, while the yeast is still suspended. After filling the larger mason jar, I put the jar into the fridge to accelerate the yeast dropping to the bottom. I try to keep the jar refrigerated for at least 48 hours, but for this batch I kept it in there for about a week.

Step 3

After most of the yeast has settled to the bottom of the gallon jar, you should be able to see 3 different layers. The top liquid layer is the mixture of beer and water. The second layer is the yeast, and the bottom layer is the little bit of trub that made it in from the carboy. You can see to the left the before and after pictures of the gallon jars. When the water/beer mixture starts to become translucent, it is time to transfer over to the space saving pint mason jars.

Step 4

Seperating Trub in Gallon Jars

Filled Pint Jars

In order to save space in the fridge, I have to consolidate yeast. This step involves decanting off the water/beer mixture from the gallon mason jars, and then transferring them to the smaller mason jars. This is essentially the same as step two just done on a smaller scale.

The yeast will eventually settle to the bottom of the pint jars in the same way it settled to the gallon jar. This yeast then can be stored for a period of months to be used in another brew. However, reused yeast should likely not be pitched as it is. It is best to create a nice sized starter to make sure you have enough viable yeast. The Mr Malty website has a nice calculator for determining how large of a starter you'll need based on your beer.

Lagerhead Turtle Recipe

So I put together the Lagerhead Turtle recipe a few days ago, and brewed it last night. Here's the basic recipe:

5.00 lb Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM) Grain 46.51 %
4.00 lb White Wheat Malt (2.4 SRM) Grain 37.21 %
1.00 lb Wheat, Torrified (1.7 SRM) Grain 9.30 %
0.25 lb Aromatic Malt (26.0 SRM) Grain 2.33 %

60 min 1.00 oz Cascade [5.50 %]
7 min 1.00 oz Tettnang [4.50 %]
0 min 0.50 cup Lemon Balm

Add pastuerized honey at high krausen

Primary fermentation (14 days at 50.0 F)
Diacetyl rest (3 days at 60.0 F)
Secondary fermentation (14 days at 52.0 F)
Lager (60 days at 35.0 F)

Full Recipe

My father-in-law, David Roche, helped out with brewing this beer. (It was a great bonding experience! :-) ) We ended up a few points short of the pre-boil gravity. I have a feeling, I didn't get my sparge hot enough, and may have been a bit too warm on my mash temps.

There are conflicting ideas on how to pitch the yeast for a lager. Some say that cooling the wort to fermentation temp then pitch work best, while others prefer to pitch near ale temps, then cool down slowly to fermentation temp. For simplicity sake, I chose the latter. However, doing this will produce enhanced diacetyl (buttery tones) to the beer, so we'll be doing a diacetyl rest at the end of the primary fermentation to allow the yeast to clean up the diacetyl produced.

This will also be my first beer with honey, and herbs. We added the lemon balm at flameout, and will add local honey to the primary during high krausen. I'm not quite sure how this will turn out yet, but I'm excited to try. I don't want to get too strong of a lemon flavor in there, but if I can't discern any after primary fermentation, I may dry hop some more lemon balm in the secondary.

Prost!

Jeremy

New Local Brewery!

I was paging through the April/May edition of Southern Brew News tonight at our favorite pizza shop, when I saw a brief article that caught my eye. Every issue, they have a "What's Pouring In" section that describes brewery happenings across the SE states. In the NC section, it stated that a new brewery was under construction in Eastern NC. The name of the company is Mother Earth Brewing. They're eventually going to institue eco-friendly practices into their brewing. They have a slogan of "Peace, Love, and Beer" which is quite simillar to what Tim and I envisioned as a slogan of our eventual joint brewery dreams!

Mother Earth Brewing will be located in downtown Kinston, NC. The downtown area of Kinston has experienced some hard times, and as such, most of the downtown area seems very depressed. This brewery will be a first step of many to hopefully revitalize the historic downtown area.

It looks as though the first beer they've brewed was their Kolsch...which ironically was the first Leah and I brewed! :-)

I can't wait to see what this new brewery has to offer. They are posting updates on their progress on the Mother Earth Brewing website. I definitely wish their operation well, and can't wait to visit!

Prost!

Jeremy