Homebrewing - Beer, Mead, Wine, Cider

Hey all, I have brewed a few meads in the past. I have used capped beer bottles, I have used wine bottles & corks for still mead, and I have most recently used swingtop (flip top, Grolsch-style bottles). All of those seemed to work fine. Do you all have preferences or experiences where one type of bottling works better for you?

How is this done and what tools are needed? I'm going to be following a friend's recipe and instructions for a low abv beer, and borrowing the anton eastdens and smartref from work to measure sg and abv. Will I need anything else?

https://norden.social/@feinschmeckergarten/113895524164193517

It's pretty good even raw. Pils and golden malts,honey, some bitter and some sweet orange peel, cascade hops and coriander.

Just trying to get rid of these trash bottles ;D

Orange on the left, lemon on the right. Lemon looks darker since I did an oopsie with the water level and had to boil for a while. Orange wine is at an fg of 1.006 and tastes very sweet, don’t even have to back sweeten it. It tastes different but I like it! 18% abv. Lemon wine has a very bitter back end. I’ll be screwing around with back sweetening it to see how it is. The lemon wine ended at 1.032 or 10% abv. Girlfriend likes both so I’m not sure which I’ll be turning into brandy but either way, citrus test was a success!

I made some ginger bug fermented pineapple juice into soda. It was my first ceiling painter! No other juice has foamed this much. The pressure was roughly the same, but the foam! So much!

I've recently developed a taste for Blanc 1664, a lemon lager that's produced in bulk by one of my country's big industrial brewers. I'm also a fan of ginger beers. Here goes an attempt to combine the two on a more robust malty foundation than what the store options offer.

I've brewed successful ginger beers before, but my first attempt with lemon in the mix didn't have nearly enough lemon, and the ginger was too strong. Triple the lemon and half the ginger this time around. Didn't check the pH (I only have a full-scale kit that would leave me none the wiser), remains to be seen how it ferments.

Malts are three parts Simpson's Maris Otter Pale Ale, two parts Viking Munich Light and one part Simpson's Premium English Caramalt. I'm trying fancy Saaz hops for the first time – had to look up a few forum discussions on how it's supposed to be used, and as per popular opinion I put a good dollop of the pellets in at the beginning of the boil alongside a little bit of Challenger. I'm hoping my trampling on traditions and not making a po-faced lager with the stuff isn't going to trigger a flame war :D

Lemons, ginger and a fair bit of Saaz and Amarillo hops went into the smaller kettle in a filter bag. I've done this before – not boiling the 'late addition' hops but instead infusing them like tea, and it seems to work great. The smaller kettle is filled with boiled water and let to sit with the lid on for more than the duration of the boil. When there's 10 minutes of boiling left, I add the infusion into the big kettle and burn vigorously to bring back the boil for the last few minutes.

In the picture with the big kettle on the stove, there's a bit of an innovation handed down to me by the previous owner of my brewing gear: a steel bucket with holes drilled in the bottom. I put my own spin on the idea by sitting the bucket on a smaller steel container. The mashing bag can be left to drip there, and I can also heat some water to my mashing temperature and pour it onto the mash bag to get a little bit more goodness out.

One more thing that I've come to appreciate is a pair of reusable coffee filters. Great for filtering while running the kettle into the Kegmenter. Also great for putting a tea filter bag with hops in and adding yet more hops at the last moment before the wort is laid to rest in the fermentation vessel :)

This beer was fermenting normally for about 16 hours then foamed heavily. I guess its infected but I don't know how, usual strict precautions were taken. Outgassing like crazy.

This month photo for this regular discussion thread is from my summer trip, I visited few craft brewerys and tasted local beers.

As usual share whatever brewing related - questions, recipes, successes, bad batches...

I will be away for some time (~6 months) but should be reachable. I will travel through Europe (Spain, France, Portugal, Germany,...) when I post about this in relevant community I will link it here. Keep it chill here so I don't have to worry on road.

My last few brews turned out amazing and I am glad that I will be away and they will have time to age. Otherwise I would have drink them in few months, someone told me that ciders are best after 1-2 years of aging so finally it may get the chance to survive that long.

Edit: If you want to ask me something about my plans I posted about it on [email protected]

https://sopuli.xyz/post/21139450

Appreciate the mandolin recommendation. Made this go so much quicker and easier. This one is going to be made into orange brandy. In retrospect I should have saved some of the oranges to candy them and toss them into the end product but depending on how lazy I get the next few weeks, I might end up doing just that.

Someone said that orange doesn’t ferment well so naturally, I’m going full send. I bought a mandolin and chain mail glove as recommended by someone on a comment from the lemon wine post. That’ll be in tomorrow so today I’m making a yeast starter for the orange brandy.

Really neat idea and method to isolate wild yeast from his backyard.

Girlfriend wanted wine so I brought up a spare fermenter from my other house, giving lemon wine a shot. This will be my first proper wine (that I won’t be immediately turning into brandy) Glad to be back at it after the hectic holidays. I want to make an orange brandy next, but after slicing 50 lemons by hand (I don’t own a mandolin) I think I need a short break from slicing citrus.

Today I and my dad opened his Christmas beer with rosemary. It is great, lighter for special beer and with notes of rosemary.

This photo is from few weeks ago when I connected with few guys for homemade cider tasting. Mine ciders will be for tomorrow, and all are great.

It's been clearing out at 2,5 °C for over 24 hours already, so I couldn't wait any longer and took a little sampling. And it's a-lovely :D

This is pretty much a classic stout, but with Viking Malt's Sahti malt for the majority of the grist. The void-ness comes from Viking Malt's Black malt (1300 - 1500 EBC). Some leftovers of Tuoppi caramel rye malt and a calculated dose of Simpson's Premium English caramalt also went in. The rye in particular is keen to hijack the taste profile, bringing in the taste of Finnish classic 'kotikalja', a non-fermented malt beverage. That one is kept in it's place, but I do regret not using a bit more of the English caramalt.

The yeast used was the fresh yeast that's a hallmark of the sahti style. It gives a banana-like flavour, and I've found it can be controlled to a great extent by adjusting fermentation temperature. This one was set to 16,5 °C. Around 14 °C the banana aroma tends to get overpowered by fruity hops. Pressurised fermentation at 0,8 bar as always.

I made this batch to use up some leftovers, so I went with a pretty daring dosing of Moutere hop pellets for the first hop addition, followed up towards the end of the boil with Challenger. On this first tasting the Moutere is surprisingly subdued.

Plenty of time to run some xmas bottles for friends and family :) Cheers!

This time of year one thing happens that has absolutely no relation to holidays: late berries (cranberries, lingonberries, rowan) spent enough time in frozen state to develop flavor worth of melomels. A gift for self in several years, something to be safely forgotten until bottling and then again.

Of course, I've kept those in freezer, as I don't want to fight all the birds for rowans (note: they still had plenty, I'm not greedy) and I'm not that good at digging frozen forest floor for the rest.

Semi regular post about your brewing adventures. Share recipes, ask questions, mishaps or successes.

I will unpin it in a week.

Hello brewies,

I'm trying to come up with a neat way to implement the whirlpool in my simple homebrew process. I do brew-in-a-bag in a large kettle that has a faucet / tap thing at the very bottom of the kettle. What happens is that I mash with the BIAB bag in the kettle, lift the bag out of the kettle into a straining contraption, get the kettle to boil, boil with hops and whatnot and after the boil is done, run the wort into the fermenter via said tap through a metal coffee filter cone.

Now if I could somehow get the wort to whirl around while running into the fermenter, the whirlpool effect would concentrate any gunk into the center of the whirlpool and the stuff coming out of the tap, located at the edge of the whirlpool, would give cleaner wort.

I could put together a bespoke stirrer, of course, but I'm looking for a crafty solution with common household items first, those are always preferred :) The solution must be hands-free and account for the fact that the level of wort in the kettle obviously goes down during the operation.

Magnetic stirrer probably wouldn't work because the kettle is stainless steel. A regular home mixer ran with one beater would tie up one hand (and having to hold it would probably mean some foreign material like cat hair off the sleeve in the wort). I'm also wary of doing it with a circulation pump like the commercial homebrew automaticksch do, because wort is hot and cleaning the pump and pipes is too much work.

But I'm sure Lemmy has the compound genius to solve this :D

The stove in my new apartment was a fluke, but with a couple immersion heaters I got better boils than I've ever had!

I've been doing homebrewing together with my wife for quite some time, and at some point we started collecting a yeast library. There was a point in my life where we had an opportunity to start a company that does something we enjoy; we've tried starting an analytic lab for microbreweries (as we are both actually doctors in chemistry), but it didn't take off at all due to lack of demand (and COVID breakout), we had to switch to doing whatever brings cash (of course IT stuff it was, mostly, I feel ashamed).

But yeast library kept growing. We've decided to give it another try, got permissions from the Big Brother, and rolled out a small production!

We've deployed a webshop at https://store.zymologia.fi/ , there is other stuff that's kind of a byproducts of whatever other things we've had to do to get along (some of it was and is fun after all). The idea is that I don't think it makes sense to scale it up any further, we just have proper but minimalist equipment to do sterile pure culture cultivation, not large tanks, only glass that could be properly washed and autoclaved, and full-grain growth media because I hate smell of extract (and proper preparation of wort is about as difficult as getting extract clear enough for yeast making). Anyway, it's an actual commercial operation, I'm curious to see how far we can go with such attitude and whether it would become profitable or just another "make the world a bit happier place".

Most of yeast on sale is listed as "not available" which means we'll just have to wake them up, feed them up to speed, and package, which takes up to 2 weeks, which is less than beer recipe planning and preparation phase, at least for me. I don't think keeping an inventory with live yeast is a good idea anyway - many times I've had sad starved liquid yeast fished out of fridges in stores only to see lags on 30+ hours. That's also why I'm reluctant to go to resalers, though I might try it.

What I really think should be happening is yeast exchange. I don't want to keep things any more commercial than the general Finnish anti-soviet spirit tells me, so let me propose this idea: yeast growth takes time and effort, but sharing is caring - I'd be happy to share a swab of yeast culture with anyone who comes to our place (just tell me when, of course most of the time there is only yeast in the lab) with their own sterile slant carrier - I won't be shipping these, for I'm absolutely certain delivery services will mess it up, and also I (or whoever would be hanging around at that time) won't get to have a chat with you. (Please do this if you know what you are doing though, storing culture and scaling it to a starter is a bit more complicated than just making a starter, mistakes multiply badly with exponential growth and it's not very feasible to propagate without going through single-cell plating or something similar. If you don't know what that means, learn it first, or it's worth just buying a ready liquid yeast, the great purpose of sharing culture material is to let other people have it in their library, which would require you to go through single-cell propagation at least a few times a year).

We also have an opensource (all we do is opensource, I believe in the idea) piece of software to keep yeast lineage in check here: https://github.com/Alzymologist/yeast It's a bit underdocumented at the moment to say the least, but it uses Bayesian inference to analyze yeast parameters and catch mutations, and it was able to detect deviations before we've tasted the outliers blindly, I think it's quite cool too. I don't think anybody did this before.

Sorry for self-advertisement, I've asked moders if this sort of thing is OK here before posting. I hope this is interesting enough to be worth being here.

Last fermenter is about to be empty. This one is my blue razz jolly rancher. Smells amazing. Tastes terrible (without back sweetening) Came out at 11.8% abv. Back sweetening with simple syrup down to 8.5% seems to be the winning combo, if I were drinking it as a wine: smells much stronger than it tastes of the delicious artificial blue razz flavor. Over all a fun YOLO project. Guess we’ll see how it tastes as a spirit in the next few hours + 24 hours for the angels to have their share. Now to determine what to make next… I’m thinking of trying pressure fermenting in the keg for my beer, a wine for my girlfriend, and the third fermenter for whatever meme spirit I feel like whipping up next, which I haven’t the slightest clue of what I’m in the mood for yet.

This sucks! :D