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crazyfish posted:I was figuring on using an entire watermelon, but I might up that to a watermelon and a half. Searching around, people seem to be straining the juice out of the melon and adding that to the beer, which could work better as I won't have to have to throw two watermelons worth of fruit into a 6 gallon bucket that already has 5 gallons of beer in it. You can always just add a bit of watermelon extract at packaging if the flavor ends up too mild. Just be really judicious - I've been told fruit extracts can turn into Life Savers beer really quick.
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Jul 25, 2012 07:25
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When I was thinking about making a cucumber kolsch (still gonna try this at some point when I have more time and a juicer), I was told to take some cucumber juice and dissolve some gelatin in it at a very low temperature - something like a half tsp per pint at 140* - then freeze it in some sort of container. Once it's frozen, wrap it in cheesecloth, put it on a drying rack above a plate or bowl, and let it slowly melt in the fridge. The liquid that melts is supposed to be super-concentrated like an extract, but since it's not processed at all and you're just tying up a lot of the liquid water in a protein matrix, it'll be really fresh and authentic tasting. The more you let melt past a certain point, it'll start being less potent. The person who told me this was a chef and they weren't really specific about volumes, amounts, or times, cause they said it can really vary by type of fruit and even harvest, so it takes some practice to get right. It's supposed to work really well for milder-flavored fruits, though. indigi fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Jul 25, 2012 |
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Jul 25, 2012 07:38
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Angry Grimace posted:Watermelon extract Honestly, I think this is going to be the only way to get any kind of watermelon flavor whatsoever out of a beer.
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Jul 25, 2012 13:26
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Partial boil, top off with watermelon water maybe?
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Jul 25, 2012 13:47
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If I had to guess, watermelon would probably ferment out pretty quickly. I don't know what kind of sugar it is, but it's so sweet I assume it's gotta be a pretty simple one.
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Jul 25, 2012 15:29
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If you keg your beer I would be cautious with using those extracts, specifically the ones from L.D. Carlson. They are alcohol-based and the watermelon flavor will leech into your draft line and holy mother of god that poo poo will not go away no matter what you throw at it. Plan on changing your line when the keg blows.
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Jul 25, 2012 17:18
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What's the best way to add a vanilla bean to a secondary without worrying about infection? Dipped in vodka, then thrown in or slit in half, beans scraped out in to vodka as well as bean shell and toss the whole thing in?
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Jul 25, 2012 18:36
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icehewk posted:What's the best way to add a vanilla bean to a secondary without worrying about infection? Dipped in vodka, then thrown in or slit in half, beans scraped out in to vodka as well as bean shell and toss the whole thing in? Of those choices, the second is better. I cut a bean up into 1/4" segments and tossed them into a Mason jar with a couple ounces of decent vodka (and some other spices, but that's not your goal here) for a few weeks. Or you could just use good vanilla extract, since that's effectively what you are making. I like Penzey's double-strength extract really really well.
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Jul 25, 2012 18:40
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The beans are from Penzey's but I'm transferring tonight. Good to know for next time!
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Jul 25, 2012 18:54
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Jo3sh posted:Of those choices, the second is better. I cut a bean up into 1/4" segments and tossed them into a Mason jar with a couple ounces of decent vodka (and some other spices, but that's not your goal here) for a few weeks. Can't recommend that extract enough. Makes cookies/french toast/whatever you put it near pop.
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Jul 25, 2012 22:16
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No love for Nielsen Massey?
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Jul 25, 2012 22:35
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Well, I made my first kit brew today, after getting several extracts done first. Added a bt of lemon flavour to secondary and I gotta say, the aroma is way stronger than I though and there is just a hint of lemon in it. I shot for around 3.5 abv, and it came out around 3.8, plus it's something my friends will like. Now to make another hop-bomb and a sweet mead.
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Jul 26, 2012 03:05
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Decided to brew an ad hoc gruit-like thing tonight. I used white barley, some roasted barley, a pinch of oatmeal, a few spoonfulls of brown sugar, and "hopped" it with some pot leaves (I don't expect much from this flavor or intoxication-wise, but wanted to use it). I'm going to ferment it with baker's yeast. This will probably turn out complete poo poo, but maybe it'll be drinkable. Either way, I'll also have a batch of properly brewed IPA in a couple weeks, and hopefully will pick up some stout ingredients for brewing next week.
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Jul 26, 2012 05:39
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CalvinDooglas posted:Decided to brew an ad hoc gruit-like thing tonight. I used white barley, some roasted barley, a pinch of oatmeal, a few spoonfulls of brown sugar, and "hopped" it with some pot leaves (I don't expect much from this flavor or intoxication-wise, but wanted to use it). I'm going to ferment it with baker's yeast. Pizza Port's Chronic used to be brewed with pot, but they stopped for obvious reasons. I understood everything up to not using brewer's yeast.
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Jul 26, 2012 07:05
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Angry Grimace posted:Pizza Port's Chronic used to be brewed with pot, but they stopped for obvious reasons. I understood everything up to not using brewer's yeast. Pizza Port Chronic didn't have pot leaves, it had hemp seeds. Also Dubhe from Unita is brewed with hemp seeds.
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Jul 26, 2012 10:56
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Angry Grimace posted:Pizza Port's Chronic used to be brewed with pot, but they stopped for obvious reasons. I understood everything up to not using brewer's yeast. I don't have any, and multiple sources said that baking yeast also produces alcohol. 8 hours after pitching the yeast, fermentation seems to have stopped. The experiment may have failed. No big deal, I'm going to the brew shop today for some big bottles and I might just get some brewers yeast.
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Jul 26, 2012 14:29
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As far as I know, baking yeasts may be able to do a little with some of your sugars but they're a completely different family from brewing yeasts, usually bred to produce lots of CO2 and very little alcohol. On the other hand, brewer's yeast (from a healthy starter) works for pizza dough and makes a wicked good crust.
Splizwarf fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Jul 26, 2012 |
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Jul 26, 2012 15:22
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Bread yeast and beer yeast are both S. cerevisae, but very different strains. There are even some styles (e.g., Sahti) that are traditionally fermented with bread yeast. So it will be... interesting, but may taste very different than you are used to.
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Jul 26, 2012 16:08
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Splizwarf posted:On the other hand, brewer's yeast (from a healthy starter) works for pizza dough and makes a wicked good crust. Tell me more?
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Jul 26, 2012 16:56
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If you're ever in Downingtown, PA (about an hour west of Philly), go to the Victory brewpub. It's an unadvertised pub tucked in behind the brewery proper (they grow hops all the way up the outside walls of the pub  ). They make brick-oven pizza from one of their yeast cakes, I think from HopDevil. It's the best pizza I have ever had.More locally, we made bread and pizza from the cake from my first Belgian and it was excellent, if almost too strong to eat the bread straight (sourdoughy/sharp). So we made croutons, breadcrumbs, and grilled cheese and Reubens from it. 
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Jul 26, 2012 18:29
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Bread yeast will ferment stuff just fine. I did a cyser with bread yeast that was good, and right now I've got a half brown ale half dr. pepper beer fermenting with bread yeast.
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Jul 26, 2012 19:12
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Ew, Dr Pepper
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Jul 26, 2012 19:20
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Josh Wow posted:Bread yeast will ferment stuff just fine. I did a cyser with bread yeast that was good, and right now I've got a half brown ale half dr. pepper beer fermenting with bread yeast. My thought wasn't that bread yeast won't work (there's a fairly well circulated mead recipe involving a box of raisins, an orange, clover honey and a milk jug that uses bread yeast), but I have to imagine it would taste generally worse, or more people would use it.
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Jul 26, 2012 19:26
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As far as I know it's an efficiency thing.
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Jul 26, 2012 19:28
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CalvinDooglas posted:8 hours after pitching the yeast, fermentation seems to have stopped. The experiment may have failed. No big deal, I'm going to the brew shop today for some big bottles and I might just get some brewers yeast.
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Jul 26, 2012 20:08
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SO I finally got my kegging system together, and I'm about to put my whiskey and oak infused Irish Red (Calling it Finnegan's Wake) into keg #1. I just got invited to a river tubing trip two weekends from now, and I was asked to bring some homebrew as my payment. I'm loathe to bring the boozy, oakey red on a river, so I'm currently brewing up a version of an extract "Panic Button" Heffeweizen I found on HBT. Recipe Here It should ferment out in a couple days, and because it's a heffeweizen, to hell with clarity! Now I need to devise a way to transport a cold corny keg 3+ hours away, and then keep it cold & afloat on the river. I've already got This on order, so I'm good on keeping it pressurized. I'm wondering if something like This would work. The river water should be able to keep it pretty cold, and i could always throw some ice into it to cool it more. I'm just not sure the keg would fit.
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Jul 26, 2012 20:36
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BerkerkLurk posted:The one time I used baker's yeast it was super fast and not at all flocculant so I wouldn't be surprised if it's just finished already. My first batch of mead was the Joe's Ancient Orange recipe mentioned above which specifically calls for baker's yeast. I found that it cleared up quite well after a month and the other two batches I made with 1116 and 1118 never cleared up. I'm planning to make up a number of 1 gallon batches of plain mead with different yeast varieties soon. I can document and post results if there's any interest.
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Jul 26, 2012 22:11
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I ended up putting a pinch of generic brewer's yeast in the gruel jars and I guess I'll check back tomorrow to see if they've bubbled up. Also, it's bottling day for my IPA! I think until I have more money to spend and better equipment, I'm going to use miniature recipes for all-grain brews. Maybe do some batches that I can ferment in a growler and then tweak them for full-size when I have better temperature control. With an electric range, no A/C, and no fancy chiller gear, temperature is an obstacle at every step right now. CalvinDooglas fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Jul 27, 2012 |
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Jul 27, 2012 00:12
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To Calvin's comment above about mini recipes, are there any good sites out there that delve into the challenges and experiences regarding actual microbrewing? Like, downsizing recipes to account for, say, 20 ounces of end product? That concept to me is very intriguing but I don't know of anyone who's done this sort of thing and actually decided to write about it. I don't even necessarily want to do it, but as big breweries use 15-gallon batches as their pilot sizes I wonder how effective it would be for a hobbyist homebrewer to dial in a recipe by going through a bunch of ultra-small pilot batches with hop/yeast/specialty grain tweaks being the only variables and upscaling from what comes out best from those results.
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Jul 27, 2012 00:53
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wattershed posted:To Calvin's comment above about mini recipes, are there any good sites out there that delve into the challenges and experiences regarding actual microbrewing? Like, downsizing recipes to account for, say, 20 ounces of end product? That concept to me is very intriguing but I don't know of anyone who's done this sort of thing and actually decided to write about it.
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Jul 27, 2012 02:03
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I remember reading a blog linked from this thread by a guy that did all 1 gallon batches. It was mostly touting the convenience and ability to experiment. Of course I can't find it now.
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Jul 27, 2012 02:04
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I'm still confused about why the keg salesman *always* seem to recommend 5 feet of beverage line. I've seen guys from kegconnection, MoreBeer, etc. all recommend 5 feet as a rule with a bunch of science apparently behind it but I to a rule always get better results and less foam (if a slower pour) with 10 feet of line.
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Jul 27, 2012 02:39
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While it may not be relevant, at my current job we have a drat decent keg system that is housed a full 2 floors below the bar - I have never in two years had a problem with foamy beer, no matter whether the keg has just blown, or the lines have just been cleaned. Maybe that's because of the line length.
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Jul 27, 2012 02:47
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zedprime posted:There's not a lot of time to be saved unless doing parallel yeast runs or secondary additions since it takes as long at the front end to prepare 24 ounces as 55 barrels. There's not a lot of money to be saved because it isn't much harder to find someone to drink 5 gallons of really lovely beer as downing 24 ounces yourself. It's not nearly as wasteful though if you crank out 20oz of garbage instead of 5g. Plus, it takes a lot less time to bring a smaller amount of water to a boil so the duration argument can be debated too. If you have, say, 50lb of 2-row and you want to use most of it in a recipe that you know you'll like, you can use 10lb of it in testing supermicro batches, figure out what works from those pilots, then crank out a bunch of big batches with what's left...as opposed to making, say, 5 batches and not being really happy with the results until the 5th batch.
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Jul 27, 2012 03:32
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wattershed posted:It's not nearly as wasteful though if you crank out 20oz of garbage instead of 5g. Plus, it takes a lot less time to bring a smaller amount of water to a boil so the duration argument can be debated too. If you have, say, 50lb of 2-row and you want to use most of it in a recipe that you know you'll like, you can use 10lb of it in testing supermicro batches, figure out what works from those pilots, then crank out a bunch of big batches with what's left...as opposed to making, say, 5 batches and not being really happy with the results until the 5th batch. This is a pretty silly argument because you can't even get a good idea of what a recipe would yield with that small of a batch. With 2 beers worth of finished product what if you open one before it's fully carbed? What if you ate some spicy food before you tasted one and it threw off your palate? Not to mention how expensive it would be per beer since there's no easy way to break down a pack of yeast into such small increments. Also most breweries that have a pilot system have at least a 1-3 barrel system (31-93 gallons) for a reason. It's just not worth it to make a really small batch relative to your normal batch size.
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Jul 27, 2012 03:43
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The dude who won the Ninkasi award at the National Homebrew Competition this year brewed a lot of his batches as 1.5 gallons in order to enter enough beers to have a chance while not also ending up with 9 billion gallons leftover to deal with. He entered 66 beers total, IIRC  That seems like a reasonable compromise between "I can't brew/don't want 5 gallons" and "if I do a bad job sanitizing my one bottle I just wasted a month of effort".
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Jul 27, 2012 03:51
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Docjowles posted:He entered 66 beers total, IIRC Holy poo poo. Also I would assume anyone doing mini-batches to test flavor would try to account for priming failure with multiple small bottles, and wouldn't be silly enough to sabotage their tasting attempts with spicy food or w/e.
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Jul 27, 2012 05:21
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Josh Wow posted:This is a pretty silly argument because you can't even get a good idea of what a recipe would yield with that small of a batch. With 2 beers worth of finished product what if you open one before it's fully carbed? What if you ate some spicy food before you tasted one and it threw off your palate? Well, I wouldn't be overzealous in wanting to crack them open too early, so that seems like something to be eliminated, and like any time I'm tasting a beer I've made I wouldn't want to spaz up my palate beforehand. Plus, if we can scale recipes down to 1g, I don't see why it can't be done further. As for yeast? If I make a 2l starter for a 5g beer, I know we always tell people who are doing 2-3g batches to scale a 5g recipe for everything except the yeast, but surely you can pitch a fraction of a starter into a pint- or quart-sized batch to meter the starter out a bit over a few brews. Again, not saying I'm looking to do this tomorrow, I just have trouble picturing it being the hurdle some of you are saying it would be. There's probably some nerd on HBF who does this on the regular, but that means I'd have to read HBF to find out.
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Jul 27, 2012 05:50
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In my case the miniature batches are to save money, since I can't presently afford to buy a gas brewing stove and install temperature controls in my apartment (plus I enjoy the sea breeze/shucked lobster smell). I'm really not concerned with scaling them up to professional brewery size. Batches of 1-3 gallons would be awesome because the small size hedges against the loss in the event of a brewing error. If I spend $20 on 1 gal of beer and it sucks, it's no big loss; if it's good, I can always scale it up to a 5+ gal batch later on. Right now I feel like I've got a handle on the basic process, and I'm looking forward to concocting a small recipe for my girlfriend's brother, hopefully ready before September. I guess I'll see how the IPA turns out. I tasted the wort and it was decent, though I was hoping the hop aroma would more prevalent. But I guess that's what you get with a box recipe. Any sources for a good all-grain imperial stout recipe I can scale down?
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Jul 27, 2012 06:07
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wattershed posted:Well, I wouldn't be overzealous in wanting to crack them open too early, so that seems like something to be eliminated, and like any time I'm tasting a beer I've made I wouldn't want to spaz up my palate beforehand. Plus, if we can scale recipes down to 1g, I don't see why it can't be done The point I was trying to make is that with such a small batch size there is absolutely no room for error. You might wait 3 weeks for your beer to be fully carbed before trying it, but if it didn't fully carb then you only have one more beer to try. Plus beers change over the course of just a few weeks, sometimes dramatically so. I've had beers I didn't think were great at first but after a couple weeks were good enough that I brewed them again. Again you could split yeast from a pack but my point was there's no easy and cost effective way to do it. Unless you only want to use one yeast strain for a ton of batches you're just going to be dumping a ton of yeast down the drain and having a $7 expense per 2 beer batch.
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Jul 27, 2012 10:22
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