What are you brewing?
Easter is in few weeks maybe you have some special beer prepared or just your normal #homebrewing experiments. Let’s share what is fermenting, some good tasting #beer you made, something that didn’t end up how you liked, happy little accidents that ended up well… Just everything homebrewing, #wine making, #cider , #mead …
I used to make these posts once per month but didn’t make them for about a year, let me know if I should start again with them.
Just found this community and happy to see it semi active as lemmy is a pretty quiet place for the niches I tend to frequent.
I started brewing a couple of years ago with a simple stovetop extract kit and a plastic barrel fermenter, but after only a couple of brews that way I went straight to all grain and a fermzilla.
I have 24L of a not-quite Neipa in the fermenter at the moment, should be ready to keg in a week, I say not quite neipa as I generally do them in the 6.5-7.5% range with tonnes of oats and wheat, rolled and whole malted, Golden naked oats (try it), chit and cara, lots of lactose and hop loads in the 7-10g/l range, etc, bit heavy dense things. but this one is much more down to earth at 5.8%ish (we will see when its done) and a more restrained form of my usual hazy grain bill. starting gravity was 1063 and expected FG is ~1017-1020, higher FG is by design as it is lighter in ABV than the ~8% recipe it is based on so it should balance out.
Should be pretty tasty, Golden promise, wheat malt, chit, carahell, golden naked oats, rolled oats and a bit of lactose has been my go-to for big neipas for the last few brews, just been playing with the hop bill and timings, and a few different yeasts, this one is more diluted overall (24L vs 21L) and more base malt in the ratio. still expecting a very hazy beer but not not to the extent of it looking like a milkshake or orange juice this time.
Here’s a picture just as it was starting to take off. will update once it has cold crashed and I can put a nice sample in a glass. It will clear out and lighten a fair bit but still be a bit cloudy.I’ve got some pseudo Sahti on tap. It was on nitro but I lent my nitro tank and tap to my FIL who brewed a Guinness clone for St. Paddy’s Day.
For my next brew day I’m planning on a West Coast Pilsner and a fig leaf and chicory Blonde Ale.
During this week I got to know this quite odd brewery at my university - the picture above. It has lot of weird quirks because it is just ~150l setup with same technology as 1000l+ setup. It sometimes doesn’t make much sense but you can brew pretty much anything in it.
Yeah I will probably be down there quite a lot during my studies ;-)
@plactagonic
Yesterday, I bottled a batch of Kölsch-style ale. In a few days, I am going to try a new (to me) recipe for a Rhenish-style Altbier. After that, I’ll be spending a few months focusing on various meads.Currently a couple of different apple based ciders in a second fermentation for residual complex sugars with brettanomyces. I’m trying out ciders with saison/farmhouse/brown beer style of funky funk without the lactic acid acid component.
are you really going to get much from brett in secondary in a cider? Apple juice is all simple sugars and primary would have completely dried it out.
One of them has spray malt added that isn’t consumed by saccharomyces and the other was pitched with brett at SG of 1.010. I want the funk to give notes and texture and not to be the dominant flavour.
My homebrewing is very much experimental and process oriented rather than purist or specific results so we’ll see and regardless it will be a learning experience.
I have just finished a small batch of rhubarb mead - my first time using rhubarb for brewing. turned out well, but a little cloudy.
https://goldendrop.blueether.net/recipes/eAXKGn7t3kf7XURALz22/rhubarb-mead
I have ~30L of Luisa mead, this had just a hint of Luisa, and on early tasting is going to be very nice
https://goldendrop.blueether.net/recipes/4a45MqhNsLIc5yIGKWrt/larissa-and-pear
Little cloudy is good. Today brew was cloudy a lot. We used some flocculant for the last 10 min of boil but it didn’t help that much, it helped a bit but not enough.
The photo in the post is from this brew and because of the cloudy residue it foamed a lot. So yeah I get that cloudiness is sometimes bit of nuance but the difference is “I don’t like how it looks in glass” and “it makes a lot of mess and I don’t know how to keep it in the pot”.
Good luck on your mead I hope it turns out well and only problem will be the cloudiness.
@plactagonic @homebrewing My cider is still aging… poorly, I’d guess!
@ascentale @homebrewing my cider usually don’t have time to age - I drink it too quickly. Maybe it will get better with age I am usually quite surprised when I find some forgotten 1+ year bottle.
These days I experiment with sugar brews. I used to make mead but anything other than the bottom shelf supermarket honey became too expensive. Over $10 per litre for mead I have to put all the work into and which might suck in the end just doesn’t appeal to me.
So now I’ve got a hard lemonade, a hard limeade and a pseudo-ale going, all cane sugar based. I expect the lemonade will be drinkable, the other two might be going down the sink, who knows. It’s only about a dollar in materials down the drain if it sucks.
But I am also considering getting one of those small capacity electric pot stills and making wacky experimental things with it, like the YT channel Still It.
oh, I also have a cold brew coffee mead bulk aging
https://goldendrop.blueether.net/recipes/3FA5VXRlE9r3ozsxGKrV/coffee-with-a-punch
Damn, that’s interesting. Never seen anything like it. Thanks for sharing, I might actually try it!
this is the second time Ive done this, it really needs to be aged for at least 6 months and back sweetening
Right now, I have a strawberry mead in the fermenter. Hopefully it will turn out okay.
I also gathered just enough baja blast bottles to do a batch of mountain mead. I did a recipe with the original one years ago and a friend of mine really wanted me to try this variant.
