Christ, I left it alone for just a few hours. Beer needs more headspace than I thought. I thought I knew how to hooch responsibly.
Dark malt extract, honey and hops in a bucket, with a particular Norwegian baker's yeast made for sweet dough that actually flocculats well. If my calculations are correct, it's a sort of brown ale.
Well, obviously I haven't spent a vast fortune on shiny stainless steel thingamajigs yet, but I thought it should be possible with any water heating system, such as a stove for doing a medium-sized home brew batch. If they could do it without electricity, what's my excuse?
However...
Went for a 10L batch to start, should be manageable. Can't exactly do it in a 10L pot, but I can start out with less water for the mash and add the rest later, it'll just be a higher gravity temporarily. Hack it and make it work while no one's watching.
Sooo... the genius behind this plan realized only too late that there's only one 10L pot in the house. All that grain will have to come out of the liquid, be rinsed off and squeezed dry so we can use the only big pot for the boil.
Yeah.... every other pot and bowl was full to the brim with grain and wort, using a small strainer to sparge bit by bit, which took a bloody hour!
The mash was also too hot, so I guess it's gonna be sweet. Try riding the temp exactly right and hope it doesn't go over when you've never done it before on an electric stove.
And we fell slightly short on the gravity and volume, even when making up for the water on the back end. Efficiency: Poor.
And I don't think it's been strained nearly as well as it should. Oh well... we'll have an ale that is brown, but if it's an actual brown ale, only time will tell.
What I can say with absolute certainty is that this will never ever be done again. Not until we have the bare minimum of proper gear. 4/5 hours of swearing and sweating, of course it would have to be a hot day all of a sudden.
I need a drink.
I'm a mead guy, I've never done beer myself. However, I really have my heart set on a braggot, aka 50/50 mead and beer all fermented together as one. I know the beer brewing process in basic terms, but you can just assume that I need to have everything explained as if to a child (with beard and of legal drinking age somehow).
I'm having this idea of a black as ink porter style bochet braggot with deeply caramelized honey. Big and bold, maybe around 7-8% ABV. Fermentable sugars split 50/50 between malt and honey.
Is this absurd? Possibly, but it's worth doing a 5 liter mad scientist experimental batch to find out.
My question is about how to approach it.
Make a mead and simply add malt extract and hops?
Make a known all grain porter recipe and add caramelized honey?
Something completely different that I haven't thought of?
I'm very unsure about the choice of grains that would be complementary to the caramelized honey, that's why I hesitate to follow a recipe that doesn't take that into account. I don't have experience to be able to tell what's going to work. Any suggestions?
I'm thinking we go relatively light on the hops overall, since it's not the style to be all floral and fruity, and there will already be some degree of bitterness. Probably gonna need some decent residual sweetness to balance against the more "heavy" elements.
Would be cool to hear if someone's done something similar.
Honey, water, raisins, bread yeast and yeast nutrient.
I just need to feed my home made raisin vinegar with something stronger, so it gets a tiny brew. In this house, we prototype on a small scale. 😄
First time trying, and I think it turned out fine. Took about a month from alcohol brewing to having a thin, but distinct mother floating on top of the liquid. It's mild, but has a very nice flavor. I made a jar of "infinite vinegar" that I'm gonna keep feeding, gonna try to up the ABV on the next batch of raisin brew and see if that kicks it up a notch. I'm sure a bit of age is going to help too.
Jar
Water
Tons of raisins
A bit of extra sugar
Bread yeast
Yeast nutrient
Didn't measure a thing. I can't do gravity readings and calculate alcohol when the sugars are inside the raisins anyway.
Let it ferment until activity stopped, almost a couple of weeks.
Strained the liquid, let it sit for a day.
Poured the liquid into a new jar and left the yeasty sediment behind.
Added a splash of raw apple cider vinegar and let it sit for a couple of weeks.
That's about it.
First time brewing, apart from my proof of concept kilju with water, sugar and bread yeast. (would not recommend)
It has been the final frontier as a semi-decent home cook. It's evolved into baking with yeast, then sourdough, then simple lactofermentation and vinegar making, and now making alcohol. (I'm planning to make a vinegar of it if I have enough left after bottling.)
1250g honey
400g frozen blueberries
400g frozen mixed berries
5g Mangrove Jack M05 yeast
2-ish grams of yeast nutrient
Water up to 4.5 liters (roughly, I honestly didn't get it measured properly.)
SG: 1.096
FG: 0.996,
13% ABV
As is now evident, doing a brew with fruit in a carboy was a bad idea. It created a berry rocket that shot straight up into the airlock. I had to make sure to swirl it multiple times a day because the fermentation went mad, and the berries kept climbing up. After a week it started to calm down a bit, slowly tapering off.
I finally got to siphon it off the fruit 3.5 weeks later and leave most of the sediment behind. It looks like brain matter, and also don't try to eat the berries. They taste awful.
There was a lot of floaters, and the siphon kept sucking up a bunch, so I'm gonna have to do it again, hopefully leaving all the solids behind. I've let it sit for a week to verify the gravity readings, and it is indeed done fermenting.
It's been clearing up for a week, and I had a taste.
It's actually good! I can't believe this came out of my first attempt as a complete beginner. Very acidic with a really dry mouth feel, it's certainly really young... but there's a sweetness in there somehow. It's like, I'd buy this if it was more mature. Like a dry red wine with various berries and the floral notes from honey without the sweetness.
Plan is to back sweeten slightly with honey and then pasteurize it. Hopefully it'll be 4 wine bottles plus a little treat to celebrate.
Apart from beginner mistakes, this is so much easier than i had imagined. So much more to learn, but fundamentally it's just mix and wait. It makes itself.
Title.
You're supposed to push down into a bottle while using both hands to start the pump with long strokes (tried short, it won't do). This seems impossible.
What do you do?
I made a simple brewing prototype with cloudy apple juice, sugar and bread yeast (Norwegian type). Just a proof of concept kind of thing, brewed in the bottle it came in.
Well, I started at 1.100. Almost 3 weeks later, it was 1.010, and I expected it to be pretty much done. Impressive result.
But 5 days later, it's at 1.005, and it's still going! That's 12.5% ABV. Might actually go dry at this rate.
All I've done is to give it a swirl to de-gas once in a while.
I tried to check if anyone has any idea about the alcohol tolerance, but I can't find anything. Just some brewing forum where people write it off as nonsense, not worth trying.
My case study says otherwise. It's actually a beast.
There's a colonel of truth.
Store bought grape juice
Mangrove Jack CR51 wine yeast
Yeast nutrient
Wine tannin
Additional sugar
SG: 1.094
Here goes nothing, first time attempting to make a "serious" wine. My first one was an apple juice with bread yeast and tons of sugar brewed in the bottle it came in. That fermented up to almost 12% ABV and tasted like a semi-affordable white wine with residual sweetness, surprisingly enjoyable. This one should go dry on paper, we'll see what happens. It's wildly active right now after a few days, foaming and sounding like the ocean.
Well fuck! Tire flip taketh away again. :(
Not another open crumb discussion, but related.
We all love the lacy crumb, because it's so dang soft and delicious, easy to eat. However, as much as I keep chasing wild open crumb, I also want to make bread that has the same pleasant quality in a more practical and versatile format. Everyone who keeps complaning about "you can't put jam on that", this is all your fault. :D
This one turned out super light, pillowy and soft with paper thin cell walls, I think I'm on to something. It's significantly softer than any tighter crumb loaf I've done before. The crust is crispy, but not as tough as it often becomes. There's no oil in the dough or anything, just standard lean dough. Do you think it qualifies? Am I reinventing the wheel, writing someone else's song? Is it a fallacy?
700g dough. Norwegian bread flour, Manitoba Oro, stone milled whole wheat and emmer (about 12% of the whole grain flours)
80% water
20% starter
2% salt.
One hour autolyse with roughly 80% of the water. Added the starter and salt in a stand mixer, then added the rest of the water gradually after the dough had come together. I got a super strong result this way, in hindsight I should have increased the hydration, or used less of the strong flour.
Bulk and coil fold about 5 times. I did the final fold just as the dough had puffed up maybe 80% and let it sit a bit longer, exactly what you wouldn't want for an open crumb loaf. I did almost nothing for shaping, since it was so marshmallow-y and delicate, just flipped it over itself and into the banneton. It held the shape well enough due to the recent fold and the dough strength. About 12 hours of fridge time in 3-4C.
Baked at 250C for 20 minutes in a dutch oven with lid, then 210C without lid for another 25 minutes. Left in the oven with the door cracked for an additional 10 minutes to vent the excess moisture.