Did a raw ale with heather tips foraged from the forest that turned out pretty good.
And now fermenting a raw pumpkin ale. Added around 3 kg pumpkin mash to the mash. A bit difficult to work with and had an OG of around 1.055, bit on the low end there. Fingers crossed it’ll be drinkable. Assuming it’s going to come in at session strength.
Loving the goblin fermentation vibes you re giving off there. Never stop.
Mostly beer brewer here, so dumb things I’ve done were mostly process related. Fermenting beer with unsanitized wood chips - turned sour. Adding too much rye or pumpkin - took me 12 hours to get the damn thing made - stuck mash.
Fermentation wise, not brewing, messed around with some koji with varying degrees of success.
If you’re doing things like spam alcohol, have you also considered miso as an ingredient?
that link returns a 404 error for me
taking this opportunity to not double post and comment on your post as well
don’t remember where I heard this from, was a long time ago (perhaps during some sort of botany class or another) but hop compounds should exhibit some surface tension action (like what soap does to water), so that might be the explanation for the foam
christmas-y cider sounds awesome.
edit - ninja’d on 404 comment - ignore that part
In addition to everything else suggested here already, I would say maybe cloves or tonka beans, if they suit your palate. Careful though, they might be overpowering. Maybe a vanilla pod or two, depending on the quantity.
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?
Sweet. Are you planning on using any spices or just the apple juice?
I’d say we could probably remove the sticky from the intro posts around this time, to clear up the landing when coming here from ‘subscribed’.
I would also be pro a periodic general discussion like what have you brewed / tasted / whatever related to homebrewing.
slightly off-topic - sorry to hear the job’s bumming your lust for brewing. have you considered doing funky stuff like raw ales or using weird ingredients at home?
Why are you heating your strike water to 71C? is it enough when adding room temp grain to cool down to your target mash (I wonder if you’re not accidentally destroying some enzymes)? What about the age of the grain? Enzymatic activity drops the longer grain is stored. Maybe you got a very old batch?
Using and AIO system, it should have the ability to control temp during the mash. I use one myself and a general all rounder mash program would be this: add the grain at around 45-54 C, then let it ramp up to 63. Hold for about an hour, ramp to 72, hold 10-30 minutes and then mash out at 78. Sparge at 78. I’d rather start too cold than too hot. Plus, there’s some other enzymes in there that work at low temps but get denatured at 63+ (like proteases and beta-glucanases).
mmm, this seems painfully accurate
still, I wonder how many spouses of homebrewers actually participate in the activity but are not identified within the survey
The software calculated efficiency for the Braumeister is spot on for me if just using it like set it and forget it, so about 65%. I can up that with stopping the pump during mashing, opening the thing and stirring the mash about once every 30 minutes in my 90 min mash. Also by milling the malt a bit finer. But too fine, and I get a stuck mash. With this, I managed around 75, or how much the software sets as standard for pot and cooler method, so I’m happy with that.
I also start the brew with 23ish liters of strike water, dump 6 kg of malt in there and sparge with 5-6 liters at 80C. Boil 1 hr and end up with 18-19 liters in the fermenter with the rest full of trub in the Braumeister (2-3 liters maybe?) I never measured how much is left and I can sparge with 4 or 6L. I just eyeball it according to how much wort is in when I lift the malt pipe.
In your case, I’d say maybe the mash did not go very well.
I wouldn’t be too worried about the body. It could be that your fermentation just stopped a bit higher because all that’s left is longer sugars, unfermentable, but good for the body. One way to find out…
What is your brewing setup? I’ve used your grain quantities in BeerSmith with a Braumeister 20L setup for the out of the box efficiency (without stirring the malt during mashing or a finer grind or extra boiling) and it gave me a post-boil of 1.042, which seems to fit with your result so I’d guess you had an efficiency issue. How did the mashing go?
I’ve noticed that when boiling for the standard 1 hour, I get about a 10% increase in gravity (for the digits after the 1 - that is, pre-boil of 1.064 leads to post-boil of 1.070 ish), so in your case 1.037 to 1.041 would check out for me.
For my brewing setup, 30 minutes at 63C doesn’t really cut it, I’ve tried it and noticed 60 minutes or even 90 minutes work way better. But then I mostly use kveik and the indication seems to be for longer mash times (something about it being unable to digest sugars made of 3+ units).
I’m not sure I get your last point. If your FG is higher than expected, you should reasonably have more sugars left over from fermentation, so more residual sweetness.
Regardless, I’d suggest RDWHAHB, and see what you get out of this. Do share your final results, I am curious what it’s like.
Out of lazyness, I just let all my beers sit in the fermenter for 2 weeks and that seems to work out just fine. Some finish bubbling after 2 days, some after 12.
Edited to add: just noticed from your yeast link, you also use an all-in-one system, does it suffer from the same low efficiency issues as the Braumeister, I wonder?
I use a Braumeister, and grind size is a bit of an issue. Too coarse - bad efficiency. Too fine - dough. My recommendation would be to check what Brezilla recommends. Braumeister has a recommended size on their website. And use that as a starting point. Go a bit finer if efficiency is still bad. Try the size on the Braumeister website if Brewzilla does not have any. I grind at my local homebrew shop and their mill says ‘7’ ish.
Also, even if AIO, during the mash I usually stop 2-3 times and open up the malt pipe and give it a good stir. Improves efficiency for my setup.
Also, true, for smaller grains like rye or specialty black grains, do grind them separately, and way finer to make sure they don’t slip by.
Not sure if the information is still current, as it was a while ago, but I was taught that the yeast for wine originally came from the grapes themselves, it settles on the fruit from the air as it ripens. They named it Saccharomyces ellipsoideus or something of the sort, related to the beer yeast S. cerevisae, but not the same. Nowadays winemakers use lab cultured yeasts for consistency though.
Point being, if you can get hold of some grapes that you know weren’t exposed to nasty stuff (i.e. not grown near a highway), try not washing them and just smashing them, skin and all, and see what ferments. Put an airlock on to prevent acetic acid formation and try going from there. If using water to dilute or wash stuff, make sure it’s chlorine free. One campden tablet to 20L should do it.
The downside of brewing small batches of mead is that you might like it and depending on your brewing method it takes quite a lot to make. I made 5L at one point, took 6 months to clear in primary (I’m lazy, no secondary here) and it then… erm… evaporated in about 2 months. Then I started 10L batches. Thinking of just doing 20L now.
Have never tried doing a classic wort fermentation with it, just the normal soda thing - sugar, lemon and water, but had never managed to get a stable system going. I’d wonder if the colony is well suited as a whole to digesting mostly maltose from a wort or if the yeast will overpower the others.
I like the label, though I see why some of our friends from the US might be a bit sore on the topic.
I’d be careful with the beetroot, it might impart a certain flavour. Had some beetroot stout at one point and it was tasty, but you could feel the beetroot. I’d say maybe try some red fruit or hibiscus petals and if your pH is in the acidic range, it should keep a red colour. Though that might also bring some tartness. Could balance that out with some residual sweetness I guess. I would love to hear what you get out of it and your final recipe, I’ve been trying to crack the illusive red for quite a while now.
I’ve done this for some homebrews where I split the cooled wort into 2 fermenters and used different yeasts.
For instance, for a porter, I used a california lager yeast in one and a kveik in the other. Massive difference, though they were fermenting at around 20 Celsius, so a bit under for the kveik.
I know this is beer and OP asked for wine/cider but I’d expect the same to be true for those yeasts.
waaait… are you a LLM? have I been arguing with ChatGPT this whole time? good one, whomever pulled this!
are you saying developmentally disabled people are incapable of reasoning? that’s a bit rude of you…
In retrospect, I should have saved it, but it was my second beer ever and went for an overly complex recipe also. Knowing what I know now, it would have probably aged nicely.
I’ve discovered boiling is not fully necessary to get a good brew and that heather tips make it awesome. I’ve just added maybe 1-2 handfuls now to the mash. Next autumn I plan to go nuts on collecting the thing and will try to fit maybe half a kilo in there, see how it comes out.
Honorable mention to red yeast rice, I have this notion of doing a rice mash for maybe a week with it and then plopping that into a raw ale mash to get enzymes and flavour of red yeast rice wine in a beer, as I’ve noticed that its enzymes also work up to 70ish Celsius.