beer ASK WHEEBZ

mead is easy peasy
 
so
 
take a one gallon jug, add two pounds of honey, 10 raisins, a slice of an orange, and a bit of yeast nutrients 
 
fill it up with water and leave some room for headspace
 
I would heat it up to 180 degrees in a pot of water, basically stick your jug in a pot of water and bring it up to 180
 
let it cool to room temp with the lid on the jug but slightly cracked so you dont create a vacuum
 
once it is room temp, dump in half a packet of champagne yeast, toss an airlock on that bad boy, and wait for it to stop bubbling
 
once its done, transfer it off the yeast and fruit to a second jug, let that jug sit for a month, and boom, done
 
wheebz said:
mead is easy peasy
 
so
 
take a one gallon jug, add two pounds of honey, 10 raisins, a slice of an orange, and a bit of yeast nutrients 
 
fill it up with water and leave some room for headspace
 
I would heat it up to 180 degrees in a pot of water, basically stick your jug in a pot of water and bring it up to 180
 
let it cool to room temp with the lid on the jug but slightly cracked so you dont create a vacuum
 
once it is room temp, dump in half a packet of champagne yeast, toss an airlock on that bad boy, and wait for it to stop bubbling
 
once its done, transfer it off the yeast and fruit to a second jug, let that jug sit for a month, and boom, done
Click to expand...
 
That's the recipe I was looking at.
 
Just got back from the beer store.  She talked me out of the raisins but I might still add orange.  I also got some yeast killer for the honey.  Thanks
 
raisins add tannins which add body to your mead
 
use raisins

and i literally made that recipe up as I was typing it, so if you saw it somewhere thats pretty cool
 
ASK WHEEBZ -
 
There's a product based on a mash pH of 5.2, and lots of beginner books mention aiming for it ...
 
But every real chart shows that the number for the most conversion of the majority of the grist items is a window bridging 5.6 ...
 
Is 5.2 just some remnant of brew lore, or WTF? ...
 
I've been ensuring my light colored beers are under ~6, and that my dark beers are under like 7-7.5 before considering any additions and not using the pH52 of late, personally ...
 
I see lots of social media pics of brewmasters out in the Pacific North-West smelling hops ...
 
Harvest time, I guess, so folks are out there seeing what's good etc, I take it? ...
 
Looks like the Citra is going to get to some medium-size production breweries this year - they must have increased the square acreage for it since last year ...
 
I'm kind of dying to brew something w/ the Galaxy / Citra / Faconer hops, but am conflicted because I really want to put stouts in my freezers ...
 
I guess I'll use those for the room-temp saison stuff - where I think they'll fit nicely, as well ...
 
There's a traditional Jewish dessert item from Passover time of year that's chocolate covered candied orange peels ...
 
I wonder if I can take a stab at something along those lines using a recipe similar to the Darkness Everybody and get some orange action in there from zest and maybe by using EKG's or Magnum's for the bittering add, but using Citra's or another citrus-y one for the aroma/flavor additions ...
 
Didn't read last 2 Paragraphs. Drunk. Citra is nice. Hard to find. You can get it easily at homebrew shops. Galaxy is best. More hard to find. Don't try to make your brewery home or otherwise a random hop place.
 
wheebz said:
Didn't read last 2 Paragraphs. Drunk. Citra is nice. Hard to find. You can get it easily at homebrew shops. Galaxy is best. More hard to find. Don't try to make your brewery home or otherwise a random hop place.
Click to expand...
 
I tried to pick-up most all of the citrus-y one's and the high-AA one's for bittering without imparting to much vegetal flavors ...
 
I've been thinking about buying some light beer and infusing glasses of it w/ hops in the whipping siphon to learn a bit about how they taste ...
 
Yes, I'm not trying to wield them in dark beer ... no worries ...

We're backtracking a bit, to before I'd found light-colored beers, I like, and when I would say "I don't like hoppy beer" ...

Now I'm more of a "I don't tend to like bitter beer, and I do tend to like a malty backbone and/or citrus-y hops, if they're the front-man" ...

I've got 4x Big Mouth Bubblers or whatever they're called, and I brought in a bunch of Fermentis dry yeast and some GoFerm and I'm going to brew four gallon batches of your saison wort, boil for 100 mins, and then racking them onto pureed fruits and/or dry hopping to get some ideas of what direction these things can take a beer from a known base - your saison.

The hops are like $2-3/oz, which is less than the cost of buying beers to experience them, even after you include saison wort. The saison yeasts probably put it over, but WLP565 is probably the first yeast I'll try to ranch.

Looking forward to it, just need to keg more awesome beers first (or, at least, too) - because buying it's too costly.

Shit, 64 oz growler fills of 6-10% beers are like $35 w/ a tip, so ... not cheaper, and they're good for 12 hrs, ok for 12 more maybe ...

I need to drink faster and/or give more away is what I need to do, hence tomorrow being BeerGun bottling day here.

CHEERS!

What's going on with your brewing at this point? =)
 
ASK WHEEBZ -

What effect does use of 15% rice syrup have on a stout?

The "Caribbean" stout in the stout book is differentiated by that adjunct alone ...
I guess Caribbean means in this case that it's lighter bodied, is all. It says it's a close to flavorless fermentable used used to add alcohol and decrease body.
 
Well that's a shitty recipe. Carribeem stout or however you spell that garbage uses molasses. You can use cane sugar but no body to it thats all fermentable sugars. If you want a stout like that go for a dry Irish stout. Basically marris otter, plus flaked oats for head retention and then debittered black malt. That's it. Super dry like 149 mash temp.
 
I'm dragging over the dry yeast rehydration topic from Ozzy's thread: http://thehotpepper.com/topic/56562-ozzys-all-grain-on-deck/?p=1221012
 
So, apparently if you pitch dry yeast into wort, there's a best case of 30% cell death, and a worst case of 50% ...
 
In fact, there are extra cells in the packets assuming that people will pitch dry, so that the remaining cells meat the cell counts typical of normal to mid-gravity wort. This has been tested over and over, you can pretty much count on 50%, I guess, from what I read.
 
Modern dry yeast for brewing has been dried with a bunch of oxygen, and the yeast has been stuffed w/ trehalose and glycogen to protect and enable it to best deal w/ the first few seconds of hydration, when the liquid outside is allowed to pass through the membrane unimpeded.
 
When you rehydrate dry yeast, the clock starts ticking on those and other building blocks.
 
So, in pitching dry yeast into wort, we're getting a little bit of unwanted wort into the yeast at first, at the end of the day ...
 
Now ... on the other side of the coin, there's rehydrating ... lots of variables here, many of which are hard to control on small-batch homebrewing scale ...
 
Wrong temp ... killling ...
 
Warm dry yeast into cooler liquid leads to the production of petite mutants that never grow or ferment properly and make H2S ...
 
Mmm, rotten eggs! =)
 
Too high a quantity of water for the yeast leads to increased hydrostatic pressure that bursts the cells more efficiently than wort ...
 
Sanitation is interesting, too ... especially because yeast like to make chorophenols from chlorine and chloramines, and apparently from sanitizer solution as well.
 
Mmm, band-aids! =)
 
If you boil to remove the chlorine etc, you nuke the oxygen and precipitate out the baking soda and you have a similarly toxic yeast environment not dissimilar from distilled or RO water ...
 
The timeline for dry yeast rehydrated in water with GoFerm to help protect it is apparently like 15-30 minutes ... wait too long, killing yeast again, and worst it consumes it's contents pretty fucking quickly, I read ... and you have to balance this time w/ getting the wort and the rehydrated yeast slurry to within 5-15F of one another, too, or you can shock the yeast that way ...
 
One of the yeast scientist Dr dude's says the rehydrating solution should contain 0.5 - 1.0% yeast extract - and frankly, I'm not even sure what yeast extract is, or if it's available to homebrewers ...
 
A lot of water softening systems deionize, making them similarly bad to distilled/RO ...
 
If they don't deionize, I guess they swap calcium and magnesium ions for sodium and potassium ... I guess this affects the flavor or beer, especially AG beer ...
 
Using these wrong waters, the guts get sucked out, and using wort, the wort gets sucked in ... which is why a dilute wort is best, as per Dr Cone.
 
Apparently, also, any amount less than 105F and most yeast are leaching their insides out ...
 
Dr Cone says to use a 0.9% saline solution to rehydrate the yeast, optimally.
 
GoFerm comes from the wine industry and is designed to provide dry yeast what it needs while rehydrating, I guess ... sterols and minerals.
 
Now, getting back to what water we would use ... apparently that's complicated, too ...
 
A Brita doesn't cut it, the filter has to be ACTIVATED carbon filter, and you need to run water through it as a VERY slow rate ...
 
For a dry yeast for use in wine, the time line is listed similarly, saying you must provide food within 30 minutes, or the yeast will begin to all at once starve, deteriorate, and lose viability ...
 
There's some other crap that suggests that 15 mins is the sweet spot for pitching, not 30 mins ...
 
 
 
 
Now, back to pitching into wort. 30-50% death, but the other parameters are all out ...
 
There's 20 billions cells/gram in the packs, with 11 grams or so, for a total of 220 billion cells ... a little more than double the cells of a liquid vial, and not by accident ...
 
I think I'll pitch dry and figure on 50% loss and avoid trying to keep dechlorinated-but-not-deionized water right at 105F, w/ a necessary hardness of 250-500 ppm, at roughly exactly 10x the weight of a very small amount of yeast, and without cooling such that cold water's drawn into the cell, or getting too far in temp from my wort to pitch into and shocking it otherwise ...
 
 
 
Dude, fuck all that.
 
I think I just substantiated why you've done well pitching US-05 directly.
 
:cheers:
 
:drunk:
 
* Lots of information gleamed from numerous sources, but a back & forth between Dan Listermann (Listermann Manufacturing and Listermann Brewing Company) and Dr Clayton Cone (Danstar, I think) is what most of those sources led back to.
 
Bingo

There is science behind it, but just pitch more than you need and say f**k it


within reason, and not too warm for too long, so it's not to rubbery/meaty from the autolysis, right? ...
 
You shouldn't get any autolysis from dead yeast even from your initial pitch. Not unless it's sitting on the dead yeast for like 3 weeks to a month. Seeing as how you should do a yeast burp at 24 hours and a dump at 6 days that should never happen.
 
wheebz said:
You shouldn't get any autolysis from dead yeast even from your initial pitch. Not unless it's sitting on the dead yeast for like 3 weeks to a month. Seeing as how you should do a yeast burp at 24 hours and a dump at 6 days that should never happen.
Click to expand...
 
I crashed them right in primary in the kegs w/ the airlocks left on 'em (vodka) ...
 
I planned to transfer them using CO2 in place, but because the spears weren't shortened on those keg-fermenters I decided to put down a layer of CO2 in the receiving kegs and just pour them as gently as possible from one to the other, and then flushed out the headspace w/ CO2 ...
 
There really wasn't any trub or hops material in the bottoms of the keg fermentors for these batches, so I guess my whirlpooling and move to the hop bag instead of dumping straight in the boiling wort made a big difference in terms of that garbage getting into the fermenter ...
 
The stout is really nice, already ... and I'll give the Charliewine another week before I check it next, but it's in the ballpark already, fo shizzle ...
 
In total, the last three beers are all quite good ... your saison and those two, so I'm really happy w/ the direction it's all going!
 
Thanks!
 
Need to figure out the BeerGun and send some bottles out this week.
 
wheebz said:
beer gun is super easy, you can figure it out
Click to expand...
 
i put all the flare fitting and connections together yesterday and got it ready, and then last night i found a comprehensive video late at night that made it simple:
i should be good ... and i need to just do it already, so i can free up some keg-slots - share some homebrew - and get back to brewing ... been 5-6 weeks, now ...
 
will be able to ferment 3x at a time now, and have the kegs, so should be doing 3x batches in the next month or so ...
 
honestly, i'm pretty pumped about it all right now ... especially because more people are joining in (did you see Rairdog's thread?) ...
 
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