Homebrewing - Beer, Mead, Wine, Cider

This abomination apparently turned out well.

I have been struggling to stabilise things in my last few brewing attempts. I had been using a combination stabiliser (sorbate and sulfite) from the department store Boyes. It doesn't seem to work.

I know have sorbate powder and I already had campden tablets. I am wondering how you dose them correctly. From what I understand it's dependant on the ABV and the pH. Is there an easy way to calculate this? I take it there is no easy and cheap way to do a free SO2 test.

I am begging to think buying a sous vide and doing pasteurization is easier and more reliable at this point.

I always hear people talk about adding lactic acid for ph control. Is that the only kind? What about citric? Phosphoric? Carbonic? Idk. Just listing some I know.

Modified entry to a local homebrew contest. They gave us 5 gals of wort, lightly hopped, light brown ale. I added 5 lbs blended apples, cinnamon sticks, cloves, allspice. 2 weeks primary, 4 weeks secondary, 4 weeks bottle. Ale flavor is mild, apple and spice flavor is great. Could be a touch sweeter.

(bonus Megas XLR bottle opener, have to brag, lol.)

Some breweries share their recipes online. Let's create a list here of those recipes as well as others that are publicly available. No paywalls please. Let's give this community a place to get ideas for brews.

BUMPSIES: Update and discussion on bitters/aperitif in comments

This particular little wine was supposed to have the fruits in it for ten days. I forgot all about it over Christmas stress so the fruit has been soaking for over a month. I racked it today and boy does it have an aftertaste of the zest. Do you think it can be recovered? Will the zesty bitterness reduce from aging? Or can I do something else about it?

While manually degassing my current 23l bucket of wine, my mind drifted off into dream land of how to save my arms and back in future times. I came to think of those vibration plates for supposed exercise benefit.

Googling it seems people have considered them for making beer but in order to stimulate the yeast or something something carbonation magic - quite the opposite of my idea.

Whaddya think? Could it work for degassing buckets of wine?

I'm thinking of scaling down. When I started brewing, everything was 5 gallons. After having made some terrible beers over my time, and with so many options I want to try out and compare, I was thinking of scaling down. For example, if I wanna compare yeasts, maybe I make a SMASH beer but 2x1 gal. Use yeast A in the 1st gal and yeast B in the 2nd gal.

Also, I enjoy the act of brewing, but I only drink 1 beer a day, so that takes me 1.5 months to get thru 5gal a batch.

Has anyone scaled down? Did anything change or surprise you?

Anyone tried this.

What are the pros and cons?

And comparison with traditional wine ( shelf life , health benefit etc )

Last time I removed labels, I used baking soda and it worked well. I'd like to do it again... but I forgot the soda/water ratio. I was searching for the pages I saw before and found some conflicting results.

1. https://winning-homebrew.com/how-to-remove-label-from-beer-bottle.html 16 tbsp (aka 1 cup) per gallon of water.

2. https://liquidbreadmag.com/how-to-remove-labels-from-beer-bottles/ 4 tsp (aka 1.3 tbsp) per gallon of water.

Those are VASTLY different amounts. Most webpages list the 16tbps/1gal ratio. Only that one site listed the 1.3 tbsp/1gal ratio. While baking soda is cheap and not an issue, I found the difference to be a little weird.

Anyone have any experience with using baking soda and can offer personal accounts of what ratio you used?

I saw an article about a blue cheese beer by some US brewer. Got me thinking, I wonder that this would go? Anyone have an idea how to achieve this? I can only presume throwing some blended cheese into the fermenter would just cause a yeast infection.

I got roughly 12k, which is a lifetime for me. (I bottle exclusively)

It looks to me like a third party just scraped a lot of the content from northernbrewer.com. Some are more obvious than others. The prices are too good to be true as well. I was about to buy a bunch of stuff 'on sale', but it's just too sketchy, I think.

It would be nice if it were legit, though. Those are some good prices.

UPDATED

I decided to try to make a cider from supermarket el cheapo concentrate just for the fun of it, 2/3 pear and 1/3 cranberry/raspberry.

It's gone from 48 Oe to 0 Oe in ten days, so I guess so far it is technically a success. I've been degassing it vigorously and it's going to rest now for a week before I rack it. I had a taste and I can taste the alcohol and some faint flavors from the concentrate, but oh boy it is so bland it makes my tap water seem flamboyant.

On a whim I sliced up a thumb of ginger and dropped in, hoping it would give some flavor. It's what I had at home. Any other suggestions of how to add some taste? I've got xylitol, citric acid and tannin at home. I don't want to add more sugary fruits because it already tastes a little bit too boozy for the lack of body. There will be a bit sugar before bottling for carbonation though.

UPDATE: Racking and having a taste a week later and it's a world of difference. Thanks for the advice @[email protected]! The ginger, nutmeg and cinnamon brought some body that it was desperately lacking. I think I may have had a little much ginger, two large thumbs in the end, because it's a bit heavy on the ginger basement in the flavour. We'll see how it matures. Surprisingly it was still gassy, despite vigorous shaking until flat a week earlier. Maybe the sugars in the ginger were enough to give it another go. I brought alon g the nutmeg and the cinnamon because why not. Now it's going to rest for another week and then it be another racking, sugaring it up for carbonation and bottling. Considering the low aspirations, I hope it will be ready for some early bottles by Christmas.

Welp! This is it!

It’s a fairly low abv (4.6%), perfect for my fundamentalist family.

It’s quite tart, but no back-sweetening needed. This is definitely better suited for a wine with wine yeast, I used cider yeast so if you’re considering a long term project (at least a year) this might be up your alley.

Its that time of year here in the US of A that sweet potatoes are on sale, so I thought about making a beer with them. I found this https://youtu.be/rwcEllQZpLE

Anyone tried something like that?

What about sweet potato wine?

Designing some custom labels for when I start bottling before Christmas, so I finally have to get around to coming up with names. The cherry has had its name since before I even started it, as well as a tagline and description. So cherry is set. Need to come up with something along the same lines for the blueberry and the mixed berry. But I got nothing. Thought about some kind of "blue balls" joke for the name of the blueberry, but I didn't really like it. It was easier naming my jerky.

Lost Cherry Woods

The first time's a mess, but she's a keeper. ...and tastes like cherries.

Premium cherry Melomel, handcrafted in my kitchen using only the finest bee vomit, in the most premium of plastic buckets, and aged to perfection in the back of my closet.

Blech. Tepache failure. It's supposed to go for 3-5 days, but mine didn't kick off for a bit. Day 6 & tastes good, but smells like a barn has gym feet. So weird.

Previous post https://lemm.ee/post/14223949

This is my first cider. I threw in some grapes I'd frozen a while ago. I bottled directly from primary. 2 weeks in the bottle and I checked on it, saw the sludge on the left. A night in the fridge and then poured off the clear cider into one glass and the sludge into another. So much sludge. A good 15-20% of the volume. Lesson learned - rack to 2ndary for clarity sake.

Making my first tepache! Using TheBruSho 's recipe. https://youtu.be/dRlPG-9Y9aw

He breaks it down into 1st batch vs 2nd. Once you get past the first batch, that's pretty decent.

I put a beer brew on just a simple wit barrel brew, but a cold snap here in nz has dropped the average temp to just below 20c and it has stopped bubbling away after only 4 days. Is there a cheap and easy way to get the temperature back up and keep it up. I don't have a heating pad.

I've been brewing for little shy of one year and thought I'd make some content for this fine group and say hello :) Here's what I do, with what it's done with and some little tips that work for me...:

I've been brewing two recipes that I kind of feeled together with Brewtarget the software. One is a pitch black stout style number with caramel rye and coal black Viking Malt roast atop Viking Malt Sahti-malt, the other a light, pils-style number made with a special malt made from a local farmer's select grain and a little bit of Viking Malt's Sahti-malt mix on the side. Both are brewed with a particular fresh yeast (available in all shops and only 0,375 € for a 21 litre brew XD ) in keeping with the Finnish Sahti tradition; the yeast produces strong banana-y esters, but I find that can be controlled to a great effect by brewing under pressure and in lower temps.

In the beginning there was a big kettle and a Brew-in-a-Bag that I got cheap. Then came a Kegmenter 29 l pressure-capable brew vessel and a round drinks cooler that fits the Kegmenter neat. Built a table on top, picked a branch from the woods to hold a Nukatap. Filling bottles happens with the glass funnel with a piece of hose attached, and the big syringe is good for cleaning the lines by shooting hot water down the spout of the tap.

For fermenting, I connect the red Kegland valve that sets a threshold pressure level to be maintained in the fermenter; after that, excess is released through the airlock so that it keeps me entertained :D The setup allows for temperature control during fermenting, I've been experimenting and starting to like 14 °C most.

And what can I say, is it not the best hobby in the world! Cheers :)