I gotta be honest. This thread is worthless without samples
SO!
please send all that beer you've been bragging about to 4401........ 
I gotta be honest. This thread is worthless without samples
SO!
please send all that beer you've been bragging about to 4401........
5- gallons of Apple wine (recipe posted earlier)
Begin!
What can I say? It's easy, it's cheap, and it tastes great 
mndsm wrote: Not much of a brag but ima do it anyhow- we do limited batch double chocolate porter about twice a year. It came up and I decided it should have cherry in it as well. The brew master agreed- and we find out Monday if I created a beer.
It's monday. What did the brewmaster say? 
We got a bit behind with work- we had to fire our driver on Friday.turns out you're not supposed to to flip the bird to traffic while driving a truck with a giant berkeleying company logo on it. Who knew? Tomorrow.
I just did a rye beer a couple days ago. Current battle is keeping the fermentation under control and not make a huge mess of my closet.
Seems like anytime I add flaked adjuncts the fermentation goes nuts.
In reply to Hungary Bill:
Whats going on with the hose in the apple wine picture? I am hoping to make some apple wine in a couple weeks once I find some yeast
Grtechguy wrote: I just did a rye beer a couple days ago. Current battle is keeping the fermentation under control and not make a huge mess of my closet. Seems like anytime I add flaked adjuncts the fermentation goes nuts.
I hate running off rye beer. Rye is makes such a viscous wort. It just runs off slow and you're lucky if you don't stick your lauter. It's a shame people love it when I do pilot batches of our rye. 
Tried the chocolate covered cherry. We're on to something. The boss didn't appreciate that I named it IDFK. We need to tone down the cherry a bit- as it came off like cherry coke on the nose, and a bit on the first sip, before the chocolate could get in. I think if we switch to the cherries we use for our cherry cheesecake ( we literally grabbed a jar of maraschino cherries we had and crammed some in a growler for the test batch) we've got a winner.
In reply to fritzsch
Just siphoning from the brew pot into the carboy. The hose was a bit long and I didn't want it in the broth so I let it sag. My brew pot has a valve at the bottom but no spout (yet) so hitting the carboy's mouth with 5-gallons of pressure above it makes for a mess.
Northern Brewer sells yeast at a decent price. I think I get it locally for about a third of their price at a wine shop.
OR you could send me your address and I could send you a packet or two
In reply to Hungary Bill:
Thanks for the offer but I dont think postage would be worth the trouble. I believe you just moved back to the states in the past year and I just moved to Germany. No home brew shops in Aachen, or in most of Germany really.
I feel your pain. I found most of the small "home and garden" shops in Hungary had wine yeast, airlocks, and demijohns for sale. If you do some poking around you might luck out.
fritzsch wrote: In reply to Hungary Bill: Thanks for the offer but I dont think postage would be worth the trouble. I believe you just moved back to the states in the past year and I just moved to Germany. No home brew shops in Aachen, or in most of Germany really.
wait....Germany doesn't embrace homebrewers? That surprises me.
(Well, considering most of us destroy German brewing laws with creativity, I guess I understand)
Beer Baron wrote:Grtechguy wrote: I just did a rye beer a couple days ago. Current battle is keeping the fermentation under control and not make a huge mess of my closet. Seems like anytime I add flaked adjuncts the fermentation goes nuts.I hate running off rye beer. Rye is makes such a viscous wort. It just runs off slow and you're lucky if you don't stick your lauter. It's a shame people love it when I do pilot batches of our rye.
I have knowingly had exactly 1 rye beer. It was excellent.
Grtechguy wrote: wait....Germany doesn't embrace homebrewers? That surprises me.
Readily available cheap decent beer (if pale lagers are your thing) probably has something to do with it, it's to my understanding that ALDI over there is ~50% beer.
In reply to Kenny_McCormic: i actually live ~45 seconds from an ALDI and I think it only has two beers, neither of which are common or popular. A well stocked US gas stat,ion has about as many options as the bigger supermarket around the corner, not considering quality
fritzsch wrote: In reply to Kenny_McCormic: i actually live ~45 seconds from an ALDI and I think it only has two beers, neither of which are common or popular. A well stocked US gas stat,ion has about as many options as the bigger supermarket around the corner, not considering quality
They have Aldi in Germany. It's a bit different there.
Grtechguy wrote: wait....Germany doesn't embrace homebrewers? That surprises me. (Well, considering most of us destroy German brewing laws with creativity, I guess I understand)
Uh oh... rant time...
The German "purity" laws these days are really about labelling, marketing, and industry protection. Most American craft beers could be brewed just fine under the German laws, they'd just need specific labelling to be sold there. It's silly.
Germans already had a wide variety of good beer and didn't need to brew their own to drink something good. They do not have the DIY culture there the same way we do here. They believe much more strongly in leaving things to skilled, trained, certified tradesmen. Brewing is not an exception to that.
Germans are convinced their beer is the best because they've never tried anything different/better, because they are convinced their beer is the best.
Pears were falling off the tree faster than we could eat them (and give them away). I snagged 15lbs of them bad boys today and thought I'd try to put them to good use.
Hungary Bill's (yet untested) Back Yard Pear Wine
15lbs Pears (peel, core, and all)
6lbs sugar
3 gallons of water
Chop the pears into large cubes and drop in the water. Boil for about 3 hours or so (covered, at a low boil) until those things fall apart. Place large fruit straining bag completely around the rim of a bottling bucket and pour in. Mine filled almost to the 5-gal mark.
I removed the bag of fruit and strained out the liquid I could about a day and a half after the cook, after which I pitched the yeast.
1 packet Red star Premier Cuvee yeast
Potential ABV 10% (I was hoping for 13, maybe next time)
Re-racked on 8/29. Hydrometer shows dead-nutz-zero potential alcohol reading. Now we wait for it to clear up some.
I plan to continue re-racking if or as necessary
We'll see how it turn out. I'm kinda making this up as I go
Edit: Bottled and being consumed, but a little back sweetening might go a long ways with this one. As it is, it's kind of medicine-ish.
hmmmm... I have access to pears as well...
My hops grew!
Grtechguy wrote: hmmmm... I have access to pears as well...
I'll have to let you know how this stuff turns out. Usually my first try ends up tasting something like cough syrup
(sometimes I get it right on the second try...)
Started a pear wine #2! My wife and I had a scheduled delivery of our second child (Simon Michael) on the 1st of the month, so on the 29th of last month I decided I better fill one more carboy
Here goes:
Hungary Bill's (yet untested) Pear Wine #2
Same process as the last one. You're pretty much making pear sauce and straining every last ounce of water you can out of it (I don't own a cider press, so I'm trying this as a workaround). After getting all the liquid I could (about 4.5 gallons) I added the sugar which brought it up to about the 5+ Gallon mark (slightly above 5gal).
Initial Abv read 20% potential. I expect the yeast to die before that level is reached, but I'm wondering if the brown sugar may have had some effect on that reading... meh. We'll see how it tastes when it clears. Just like the last one I'll update the post as it goes.
I hope to do a side by side test when I'm done.
This recipe came to me when I made a large batch of pear sauce. Adding the brown sugar gave it so much "body" that I thought it'd be worth a try in a wine recipe.
If you're going to try this at home, a table spoon or two of cinnamon may do it some good. Although I was too chicken to try this time (although I DO have another 25lbs of pears in the freezer...)
Anyhoo! Next in line is the Skeeter Pee recipe I saw posted on page 1. After that it's looking like I may not have much brewing time anywhere in the foreseeable future. Who knew a second kiddo would add so much work Easily more than double the workload of the first
Cheers ya'll!
Update: this stuff fermented completely dry! It also tastes strong. Instead of adding the sugar from the get-go, I might suggest using pear recipe #1 and back sweetening with brown sugar.
Till then though, I have every intention of drinking this batch of 20% swill I seem to have created (hey, they can't all be good)
Throw an touch of spice (clove, star anise, cinnamon) with that brown sugar, taste like candied pears.
Not quite homebrewing, but I picked 39lbs of Concord grapes of the weekend and have them smashed up in a bucket right now with some camden tablets.
Will have to squeeze the solids out tonight or tomorrow and add wine yeast.
Ok brewmasters. Critique my recipe for a Lebkuchen beer for my annual holiday batch:
Lebkuchen beer
US-05 yeast
7.5 lbs English Maris Otter
0.25 lbs. English Chocolate Malt
0.25 lbs. Briess Caramel 120
0.25 lbs. Belgian Biscuit
0.25 lbs. Briess Special Roast
magnum hops 0.5 oz 13.4% at 60 minutes (22 IBU)
6-8 oz molasses (half if blackstrap) at end of boil
Cinnamon 2-4 sticks in fermenter
Cloves-2 or 3 whole cloves at 5 minutes
Allspice ½ tsp at 5 min
Nutmeg ¼ tsp at 10 minutes
The base beer is the recipe for Northen Brewer's Brown Ale. The molasses and spices are based on a traditional Lebkuchen recipe and my best research/guess into how much to use and when to add them in the process. I plan to make test tea with spices, and adjust them based on how that goes.
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