Homebrew thread

[Ferris]

Standard. The lukewarm, flat contents of the hydrometer vase usually gets necked even in the early stages.

It's a free pint. Bang it straight in.

[sirhenry]

The content is worked out from the difference between the start and end readings.

AFAIK If you didn't take a reading at the start or have some nominal 'best guess' reading (like I did when I didn't bother) from the kit then I'm not sure there's much you can do with this batch.

The science is here:
https://www.lovebrewing.co.uk/guides/wine-making/how-to-use-a-hydrometer

But really all you need is a start reading, your current/end reading and an online calculator.

It turns out that there is a way to test the strength of a beer or wine after it's ready - the vinometer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny2h6Q1gPAc) and it seems to work. The 'session' meads register at 4% alcohol and the standard ones at around 15%. As expected, but still good to know.

Unfortunately, in order to test the viability of the concept, I didn't add anything to the 'session' meads but some Liquid Smoke so there's one batch of Smoked Applewood and one of Smoked Pecan (usually for making instant chipotle flavour in chillies, etc.). The idea was that there wouldn't be anything else in there to speed up/slow down/affect the brewing so I could get a proper scientific result but it did make for really bland, flavourless results. The idea was to make a mead that could be drunk within 4 weeks, but they have only become palatable a month or two after bottling which rather destroys the point...

On the other hand the Orange and Cinnamon that I made one evening on the spur of the moment ("What can I do with 3 sticks of cinnamon?") has turned out remarkably well and already (bottled it this morning) tastes like Christmas. Those of you who remember my CaB Radio catchphrase ("Xmas on the hour, every hour") may have an idea of just what a mess today has become...

[nb]If anyone is annoyed with me posting about my stumbling along on a parallel path to everyone else in the thread, just let me know and I'll stop dribbling on your beermats.[/nb]

[Blue Jam]

Ferris, I know you're not a brett fan, but I am now making a Brettanomyces Bread starter as described here:

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,79079.msg4260847.html#msg4260847

Ordered a mystery box from BeerHawk which included some bretted beer and being a nerd meant I read the stuff on the label about the yeast species and decided I just had to do some experiments with it.

I just poured a bit into the jar, kept it well away from all my beermaking equipment. It's been producing a lot of hooch so I fed it a bit of sugar and it seems much happier now. Will probably try baking some bread with it on Tuesday when I'm not at werk. Via PubMed I found a paper whose authors said it was among the yeast species they had failed to make bread with but it was in PLoS ONE so who knows ;)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5077118/

[Ferris]

Ferris, I know you're not a brett fan, but I am now making a Brettanomyces Bread starter as described here:

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,79079.msg4260847.html#msg4260847

Ordered a mystery box from BeerHawk which included some bretted beer and being a nerd meant I read the stuff on the label about the yeast species and decided I just had to do some experiments with it.

I just poured a bit into the jar, kept it well away from all my beermaking equipment. It's been producing a lot of hooch so I fed it a bit of sugar and it seems much happier now. Will probably try baking some bread with it on Tuesday when I'm not at werk. Via PubMed I found a paper whose authors said it was among the yeast species they had failed to make bread with but it was in PLoS ONE so who knows ;)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5077118/

Ooh good luck! I like bret beers, I'm just too much of a fraidy cat to get some at home and I know very little about using it so I imagine I'd make a bollocks of it if I tried. I know some brewers cheat a bit and use a mixed culture of bret + sacch to get their beer more predictable so maybe that's worth a try?

I'm really interested in the bread though, I don't see why it wouldn't work? Fingers crossed.

I've never done a very good job of saving yeast strains - while clearing out my fridge last weekend before moving to our new place, I found 2 jars of yeast from 2015 that I intended to propagate but obviously forgot were in there. One is the strain I got from a can of Heady Topper and the other is from a local brewery's equivalent (thanks for the labels, past-Ferris!) I think I was going to do an experiment and ferment half a batch with each but obviously just drank the beer and forgot instead. Useless.

[Blue Jam]

Yep, chuffed to fuck with this:



I had my doubts as the starter was producing a lot of hooch, then I realised that as Brettanomyces was bred for winemaking of course it was going to produce more alcohol and less carbon dioxide than a Sachromyces strain. Had to keep feeding it sugar as well as flour  but it was happy enough to bake with by last night.

I let the dough rest overnight in the fridge and then today I gave it a few little kneads and long proves over the course of the afternoon. The bread didn't rise hugely in the oven but LOOK AT THOSE HOLES. It's a bit lighter then I expected, just dense enough to make it nicely chewy. It doesn't taste as sour as I expected, just a bit of a tang to it, but it is nice and rich and flavoursome and I will be making it again.

I should order random beers more often.

[Ferris]

^thats seriously impressive

[jake thunder]

I didn't know you could do that. Well done!

[Blue Jam]

I didn't know you could do it either! And PLoS ONE said I couldn't!

Cheers guys! I had made some ale bread before, using some of the Vole Porter, but I have never tried using a saison or wild yeast beer before. The stuff I used apparently contains Wicked Weed brewing's "house Brettanomyces culture" and the beer is open-fermented so fuck knows what else is in it. Probably a bit of Saccharomyces in there too. In any case it worked and I've reserved a bit of the dough and will keep a starter going. I'll try putting the dough in a loaf tin next time as well, it looks like this one's a spreader rather than an expander.

Richard Bertinet and Dan Leppard have both done recipes using ale to replace the yeast (or at least to supplement it) and to replace some of the liquid in the starter. Apparently any bottle-conditioned ale will do the job, you just have to avoid anything that's pasteurised or filtered and fined to crystal clarity so you can be sure there is at least some yeast in there.

[Blue Jam]

How was the Heady Topper btw Ferris? Did it live up to the hype? I guess it must have done if you reserved a bit.

[Ferris]

How was the Heady Topper btw Ferris? Did it live up to the hype? I guess it must have done if you reserved a bit.

I remember it being excellent, but... eh. I can get equivalent beers in Toronto without too much hassle.

I think I kept the yeast to test that thesis but I was clearly not paying attention if I left it for 5 years...

[Sebastian Cobb]

I just checked my last batch after 1.5 weeks and readings wise it's very close but still clearly not ready as it's quite bubbly. I'll give it about as long again now I've hopped it, it tastes promising already.

I also drank one of my old batch where I'd clearly dropped an extra carbonation drop in by mistake, and it was much better. I'd been meaning to get a pressure barrel to decant and put a proper solution in before bottling, but the places that aren't sold out have ramped their prices to £40+ quid. But I found brew2bottle are selling fermenting bins with a tap hole bored into it for a fiver, so I picked up one of them and an unbored one + airlock with a view to being able to have 2 brews on the go 2 weeks apart.

It looks like a lot of the brewing places are getting hit, wilko had reduced stock as well. Brew 2 bottle is out of basic brewing sugar too.

[Ferris]

^Seb that's how I do the priming sugar. I decant from the fermenting bucket into the second bucket with the tap (and sugar water already in the 2nd bucket), then use the tap in the second bucket to fill the bottles.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Seems a lot easier. I'm getting one of those little bottler taps so you just need to shove the bottle up it and it starts filling.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I've just received delivery of a paint stirrer thingy you shove in a battery powered drill so I don't have to stir my wort by hand when pitching stuff. Shamefully lazy but fuck it.

[Blue Jam]

Made some pizzas with my La Bonte Brettanomyces starter last week and they were great. Made some more bread today- one tin loaf and one rustique-type thing because I only have one loaf tin:



Just tried the bread with some proper unpasteurised cultured French butter. The bread is chewy but light, sour and a bit fruity and incredibly flavoursome and genuinely some of the best bread I have ever tasted even if I say so myself. I intend to keep the starter going forever and if I fail in this endeavour I will cry.

Enough bragging and dragging this thread off topic... I will be putting the Prarie Vole on to ferment soon. St. Peter's Golden Ale kit plus a load of dried bison grass I got from off eBay. We had the last Glory Vole yesterday and found it had aged really well so I shall try to resist the urge to drink this batch quickly.

[Sherringford Hovis]

Will return to boast about how excellent I am at making cider when saying the word "excellent" is less slurred and spitty.

^The basis of my entire work-flow: pretty much, very simple. (From Real Cider Making on a Small Scale - the rest of the book is interesting enough but there's a lot of waffle.)

This year marks a decade of making my own wine and cider; if beer-making is science, wine and cider-making is more of an art. Making beer is akin to baking a cake: careful application of techniques, precise measures of ingredients, specific applications of heat - controlled result. Cider and wine is more like the stir-fry you make out of your saddest looking vegetables to get rid of them the night before a big shop - just bung a load of stuff in, see what happens, remember what works and what doesn't for next time - either adjust accordingly or go "meh, good enough" and consume.

Cider:
Yearly: 2-4 gallons each of single variety Bramley, Discovery and Pink Lady, plus another 2-3 gallons of 'Special Vintage' out of all the odd ones left with some high alcohol yeast. Bramley needs at least 1.3kg of sugar per gallon added at the beginning to finish at 5-6%; the other two are sweet enough to finish at 4-5% on their own, or be pushed harder with more sugar or honey added later on. Discovery seems to be very good at carbonating in primed bottles, Bramley less so, despite using the same Sparking Wine yeast in both. Pink Lady is never around long enough as my wife guzzles it as quickly as I can make it... I've only got a tiny 6litre hand-screw press, which generally takes two goes to fill a gallon, and I hand-quarter/eighth the apples then scrat them in a cheapy Pulmpaster bucket with a wonky electric drill.

Wine:
To make wine, just replace the first three steps above with starting fermentation over 7-14 days in a loosely lidded bucket or old cooler. Why? The initial fermentation can be quite vigorous and geyser out the demi-john's airlock spectacularly, plus you'll want to leave in skins, seeds etc to start with to add flavour.

Per gallon, I use maybe 4-6kg of fruit and 1-2.5kg of sugar to make a wine that'll stop at 7-8.5% ABV (you can make it go to 14%+ with extra sugar and effort, but I usually can't be arsed). No need to use a scratter or press: you can either simmer the fruit in a couple of litres of water to break it down a bit, or just wallop it straight into the bucket with the sugar and tip a few kettles of boiling water in on top, stir a lot then come back in a couple of hours to beat it into goo with a hand blender on a low setting (on a high setting, seeds get more broken up and you'll have a hazier wine, which can be ameliorated by adding pectolase at the first or second racking or left alone if you don't care; wine that's in a demi-john for 14+ months will generally clear by itself). After a week to two weeks in the bucket with a daily stir to let the bubbles out through the crust, strain through a fine mesh bag into another bucket, tip into demijohn with a funnel, bung on the airlock, and you're away.

Wot I make into wine every year (1-2 gallons of each):
Gooseberries
Rhubarb
Blackberries
Black grapes (grown by a neighbour - done it 2 gallons 4 times in 8 years, mostly success)
Blackcurrants (I always keep a gallon of 7-9% BC in reserve, if I fail making anything else, I just mix it 50/50 with this and hoorah - drinkable. Out of the <>170 gallons over a decade, I've only had 1 unredeemable fail and 3 that I've needed to mix. I also sometimes mix all the above at the bottling stage with cider - Rhubarb & Bramley 40/60 is a particular triumph.

One-offs I've done for a giggle:
Carrots (plus a drop of vanilla essence: carrot cake wine!)
Courgettes (& Muscovado sugar - home-made sherry!)
Strawberries (easily turns itself into runny booze jelly, if you like that sort of thing)
Raspberries/loganberries (delicious, but such a waste of lovely fruit: only in a glut year)

I haven't worked out a definitive answer of when's best to add pectolase to clear things - mostly, the cider and blackcurrant doesn't need it, the gooseberry only does if I've been too rough with the blender and smashed too many seeds up. Sometimes I'll 'kill' fermentation before bottling with a tiny amount of sodium metabisulphate; sometimes I'll prime, sometimes I won't - the sweeter something is on bottling, the more likely it'll take a good prime. If I'm going to be drinking the wine or cider within a month, I just bottle it in empty 1litre Aldi tonic or rootbeer bottles; if I'm priming, maturing or keeping for a while, 500ml swingtop brown glass.

If it wasn't for being blessed with an abundance of free garden produce that's 85% my wife's efforts, I probably wouldn't bother with any of this messing about except the odd gallon or two of blackberry wine - they're free, just pull 'em off some brambles in a field - nice. Everyone should try it - there's nothing quite like getting spannered on booze you've made yourself, even if it is revolting sometimes.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I'm upping production.



One on the left seems to be ready based on the readings but I'll give it another week as there's still a fair bit of crap floating at the top and I wasn't planning on having to sort the bottles out.

One of the left I just pitched, Pilsner by a different manufacturer - Jon Bull, with an ugly bulldog on the tin.

I've also got 40 bottles of lager conditioning - will be two weeks tomorrow so will get fired into them next week.

[Ferris]

Love it. Did you ferment the lager at a lower temp out of interest? I know some people don't bother, and some people swear by it.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Love it. Did you ferment the lager at a lower temp out of interest? I know some people don't bother, and some people swear by it.

Nah. Whatever temp the cupboard is, which at the moment seems to be about 20c. I don't really have the means to bring the temp down.

Now it's a bit warmer, I've had to start sitting the fermentation bins in a bath full of cold water for an hour or so to bring the temperature of everything down to about 22c before chucking the yeast in as a gallon of near-boiling sugar water, hot wart and nearly 20 litres of cold water ends up over 30.

[Ferris]

I've never bothered but some people get all touchy about why it's super important or whatever. I'm way too lazy to care

[Sebastian Cobb]

I've never bothered but some people get all touchy about why it's super important or whatever. I'm way too lazy to care

Much like cooking, I follow the instructions meticulously the first time, then after you just get a feel for it innit. Chemistry set precision doesn't matter I don't think, or maybe my pallet is bollocks and I can't tell  the difference... I found the cumin from a madras I made the other day in my spice grinder, I hadn't noticed its absence tbh.

[touchingcloth]

We are renting out our spare room as an Airbnb at the moment, and recent pair of guests were Americans working as wine distributors in Lisbon, for natural wines specifically.

They asked if we would join them for a drink one evening so they could pick our brains about Algarve life, and we got through more than a bottle each of their stock, and that natural shit is delicious. Apparently it's the wine equivalent of sourdough in that no commercial yeast is added, but whatever it tasted great and it somehow didn't give me a hangover.

[Ferris]

Much like cooking, I follow the instructions meticulously the first time, then after you just get a feel for it innit. Chemistry set precision doesn't matter I don't think, or maybe my pallet is bollocks and I can't tell  the difference... I found the cumin from a madras I made the other day in my spice grinder, I hadn't noticed its absence tbh.

Yeah to be honest I completely agree. Once you have a feel for it, the need for meticulous measuring/instruction-following etc is just not necessary (with the caveat that my palate is also not cicerone standard and I also don't massively care if my beer is right on the BJCP style guide or whatever).

We are renting out our spare room as an Airbnb at the moment, and recent pair of guests were Americans working as wine distributors in Lisbon, for natural wines specifically.

They asked if we would join them for a drink one evening so they could pick our brains about Algarve life, and we got through more than a bottle each of their stock, and that natural shit is delicious. Apparently it's the wine equivalent of sourdough in that no commercial yeast is added, but whatever it tasted great and it somehow didn't give me a hangover.

Mixed feelings on the old "natural wine" dealy. It's like wild fermented ale or cider - you might get lucky, it might be complete shite. Why take the risk when you could just use a commercially designed yeast? The spontaneity I suppose. I don't know. I've had 2 beers so I've lost my thread.

[touchingcloth]

Yeah to be honest I completely agree. Once you have a feel for it, the need for meticulous measuring/instruction-following etc is just not necessary (with the caveat that my palate is also not cicerone standard and I also don't massively care if my beer is right on the BJCP style guide or whatever).

Mixed feelings on the old "natural wine" dealy. It's like wild fermented ale or cider - you might get lucky, it might be complete shite. Why take the risk when you could just use a commercially designed yeast? The spontaneity I suppose. I don't know. I've had 2 beers so I've lost my thread.

The ones they had brought were all blends which I guess removes the element of a dice roll, plus I suspect they were pricey bottles what with them being in the industry. Anyhoo, I enjoyed them and would consider again.

[Ferris]

My opinion is of no value because I know nothing about wine. Well I know there are two different colours, and that I like Malbec.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I like all the reds... Cab Sauv, Rioja, Malbec... all of them.

[Sebastian Cobb]

BTW if anyone's interested aliexpress have refractometers for about £6. Might make things a bit easier than dicking about with a hydrometer and trial jar.

£30 on brew2bottle for the same one.
https://brew2bottle.co.uk/products/refractometer-0-to-32-brix-scale-wort-sg-1-000-1-120


https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20200819013108&SearchText=refractometer

[Ferris]

They're dead good, a proper triumph for the lazy man.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Aye, it's going on my next aliexpress haul. Hydrometers are a messy faff, especially if there's a bit of foam at the top.

Just looking at the amount of priming sugar required for a weiss. 3.3 - 4.5 volumes by the looks of it. My Lager came out better with sugar but I thought it could've done with a little more (I picked a midpoint of 2.5 on the calculator), I'll stick to the low end with the weiss the first time I think.


https://www.brewersfriend.com/beer-priming-calculator/

[Sebastian Cobb]

The refractometer arrived but I think it's fucked. It looked ok with both deionised and normal water, slightly over but whatever... about the same as my hydrometer, but when I tried it with a batch of beer that's nearly done, that reads 1010 on my hydrometer it's reading about 1030. Now obviously hydrometers can be off, but I'm more inclined to trust it since the start reading was about what the box said, and it's now getting to what the box should be and if I was bottling things at that sg, the'd explode!

I dried it before putting the beer on, and it didn't show a reading from the residual water, so I don't think it's that, but I don't see what else I could be doing wrong.