Homebrewing - Beer, Mead, Wine, Cider

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

Came out like a slightly savory barely fruity pickled cucumber or olive like flavor. It's only useful for sauce complexity. It has a sustained savory aspect to the aftertaste that is more positive than the initial slightly vinegar like bite.

...but maybe round two will be better.

A plum is in the tiny jar.

Hi, made this Marzen beer to throw an October party inspired by Oktoberfest. It's a pseudomerzen, since I'm using lutra kveik for speed and less fuss. It's almost done fermenting in less than a week.

This one is going to be ACTIVE. Hope I can keep up.

I have definitely been posting in this community a lot over the last few weeks/days so apologies if it’s a bit much lol, things should slow down since I’m running out of jars and fermenters though. But here’s my fermenter with plenty of sugar, blue razz jolly ranchers, and lots of nutrient. Along side my meme I’m going to turn into moonshine I’ve also got a fall beer my girlfriend requested. I’ve made the pumpkin ale loads of times but this is the first time I’m doing it without pumpkin (the one I bought was rotting when I cut into it and I didn’t feel like going back out and buying another)

I don’t quite know why I didn’t realize I’d have to individually unwrap these and it’d be a pain in the ass, but there’s no going back now. Blue razz jolly rancher distillate soon. I’ve also got my sweet potato beer fermenting (it’s supposed to be pumpkin and sweet potato but the pumpkin I bought was rotting on the inside, so I just rolled with what I have). I also ended up making 80 dog treats from some of the spent grains from the beer, if pupper is happy I’m happy. Over all I think I’m coming back from my one year brewing break with a vengeance.

@homebrewing Displacing disinfectant with CO2 from fermentation

Hey, I’m trying to do what the folks here did: https://brulosophy.com/diy-projects/using-co2-from-fermentation-to-purge-serving-kegs-do-it-yourself/ (with the additional mini keg as an overflow vessel)
My yeast has already chewed through a third of the available sugar and I see no movement of the liquid. Do I have to be concerned?

From left to right. Blueberry brandy with home made blueberry syrup for color and flavor, 48% ABV. Blueberry brandy, no additives, 54% abv. Flamin hot Cheeto liquor with 15 dehydrated Carolina reapers added to it for a few hours (it’s so spicy it makes my stomach hurt) 48% abv. Cheeto liquor 48% abv. All my fermenters are empty now. Let’s see what else we can do. Think I’m gonna do a beer and another meme spirit, but sadly I can’t find bulk sour warheads in a single flavor online so I’ve gotta spin my wheel of random shit to brew

This was by far the weirdest distillation I’ve done from a process perspective. I’m a fairly green distiller but usually I can tell when something is hearts or heads or tails but this? Strong Cheeto flavor the whole way through. I’ve never seen color come off a still but it came out with a yellow tint the entire time. Split it into two batches, one just straight on its own and one sitting on a handful of dehydrated Carolina reaper peppers and some other hot peppers. Clocking in at 48% abv. What’s it taste like you might wonder? Wash all the powder off of a Cheeto and suck on it for 5 minutes. After that take a shot of vodka. I think the flavor will be almost dead on to what this tastes like. Admittedly, I poured 750 mL down the drain, I can’t justify using another jar to store a meme. Over all, 10/10 would science again.

Shoutout to poleslav for telling me to ignore the thermometer and giving general encouragement. My distillation efficiency was absolutely terrible and I got the balance of juniper and hibiscus way off, so it's sweeter than I intended, but it's definitely pleasantly drinkable.

For those that can't read my handwriting, it was a super basic barley mash to make the base alcohol, then juniper, hibiscus, rose, and elderflower as botanicals.

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/17858876

I found both dark and light rye bread at the store but it was the factory-made kind. I definitely made mistakes with both batches including adding way too much bread to the light kvass.the bottles need a day to carbonate then we shall see how well they turned out. Not that I have any reference for the flavor.

Some old stale vegan oatmeal raisin cookies for brew.

There was a video posted on this community from the brushow on YouTube, and while most of the things were cool, I found this to be brilliant. Seeing as one of my other hobbies includes 3d printing, I decided to give it a go. Not sure if it’s entirely homebrewing related but, once I get the single screw to mount it to my tap, I feel this will be an awesome addition whenever I stop making horrid creations and go back to doing beer

Making some apple soda with store bought juice and a ginger bug. Previous juices have needed 2 days to carb and that was supposed to be today. Yesterday, one self vented, so I burped all 3. Today, one exploded. Never expected it.

Is store bought apple juice different than other store bought juices? Is my ginger bug different than last time? Idk.

Well, can’t call it anything besides sparkling beverage since it wasn’t produced in the Cheataeu region of France but… it’s done fermenting. Came in at a whopping 12% ABV. For something that fermented completely dry it’s got an unbelievably sweet flavor to it. It has the tiniest hint of the hot Cheeto flavor without any of the spice. Maybe like if you licked your fingers 10 minutes after washing your hands post Cheeto binge. I’m assuming there’s some sort of artificial sweetener in the Cheetos that the yeast couldn’t quite chew up, it smells similar to the corn ale I made but taste wise is much different. Next step is to let the liquor fairies have their way with this the next moment they have some free time.