MuteDog

why are there leaves or flower petals in it?

with wines, you generally use sorbate (prevent the yeast from being able to reproduce) and sulfite (kills yeast) to prevent refermentation when you back sweeten and then you wait a week or so to make sure it doesn't start fermenting again before bottling.

Did we learn nothing from the late 90s??

The salt definitely phased what was already there, it stopped yeast activity, that's why this ferment remains sweet. If yeast was active it'd eliminate all the sugar quickly.

I've used it in a number of beers and it's always been a hit.

Wood chips work well, you can also get cubes, that impart the character a bit more slowly, and a lot of people swear by them over chips.

a 5 gallon barrel will impart a ton of wood character to your beer really quickly (compared to a 55 gal or 225L barrel) due to the wood surface area to beer volume ratio. You probably wouldn't want to put a stout into one for an entire year, at least not right away, maybe once you've sent a number of beers through it and stripped out a lot of the wood character from the barrel...

Damn, you could have probably just bought bulk blue raspberry syrup too.

it's possible, I tried making a candy wine once and the chalk from the centers of the atomic fireballs messed it up pretty badly, not that I really expected it to be good, but...

Obviously warheads are sour while atomic fireballs aren't so ymmv

I wouldn't use warheads as their cores are chalky and it'd probably mess with your fermentation pH.

Maybe make Mountain Dew (aka moonshine) out of Mountain Dew?

Thanks! I'm not planing on using hibiscus or rose, I'm wanting to produce a 'gin' with all botanicals grown on my property. Was thinking of using cypress and blue spruce boughs for the 'juniper' (hence the 'gin'), I've got a bit of coriander seed I grew this summer, dried lemon balm, and elderflowers. I've also got mugwort, rosemary, lavender, costmary, mint, and some other stuff. I'm not sure I'm gonna use any of those or not yet.

Instructions about things to not do is as equally helpful as instructions about things to do.