Homebrewing - Beer, Mead, Wine, Cider

First off: Sorry for the link, apparently I can't upload images at the moment.

This is my first ride with a wireless hydrometer, so maybe this is just me not being used to having access to gravity readings all the time, having become a bit obsessed with the numbers. Looking at Brewfather on the other hand though, my gravity really hasn't changed for like 36 hours now, before reaching its estimated final value. Now I'm afraid that my fermentation has stalled, and as the gravity was never really high to begin with, I fear being stuck with something not only low in low in alcohol but also tasting thin & weak. This is supposed to be a "Klosterbier" (not a real beer style, but closest described as some sort of brown ale), with which I'd have preferred to err on the stronger side rather than on the weaker.

The main reason for the low initial gravity I believe is too little boil off: While pre-boil gravity was OK (Brewfather predicted 1.039, refractometer gave me 1.037, might even be considered to be within measuring tolerance), the post boil reading should have been 1.051 but was only 1.041.

After boiling, I took around half a liter of wort, chilled it down in a mason jar and added dry yeast, agitating it every now and then. The next day, I pitched now very agile yeast into the main bucket and fermentation started out perfectly. The ups and downs in the graph may just be results of krausen and/or condensate dripping back onto the RAPT pill or creating ripples in the wort surface.
Now, I'm really asking myself what went wrong. I don't think I caught myself any infection, the bucket was properly sanitized as well as the collection vessel & I was very careful handling all of it. The yeast also very happily ripped through the major parts of the sugars, so I don't think it's a yeast issue either. My grain bill looks as follows:

• 2.25 kg (50%) — BESTMALZ BEST Munich — Grain — 15 EBC
• 2.21 kg (49.1%) — The Swaen Swaen Vienna — Grain — 10 EBC
• 40 g (0.9%) — Weyermann Carafa Special II — Grain — 1100 EBC

The performed mashing steps:

• Mash In — 38 °C
• Protein Rest — 50 °C — 40 min
• Beta Rest — 63 °C — 30 min
• Alpha Rest — 72 °C — 30 min
• Mash Out — 78 °C

I'm not sure what to do, or if I should do anything at all. I can live with the beer having 3.5% ABV like it has now probably. My storage is dark and reasonably hygienic, so I don't think I have to elongate the beer's shelf life that way. The alcohol might then even overpower the taste of the grains if I added table sugar or anything for another percent of alcohol.
What I'm slightly concerned with though is overwhelming hop aroma because there apparently is not that much dissolved sugar to counteract the bitterness.
Any suggestions?

I ordered a cheap chinese optical refractometer from Amazon to use for convenience instead of a traditional hydrometer. It seemed accurate enough after calibration, I don't expect magic or lab results. Ballpark is fine by me.

I got suspicious when my cider and wine have kept stopping at 1.020-1.025 and nothing I whatever I tried would only make them bubble for another few days and reduce a couple of degrees Oe. So I did a reading with my hydrometer to verify. Yep, the SG for the cider ~1.000 and with the wine in negatives.

Checking out the refractometer it says it is for beer.

Is there a difference for wine and beer refractometers? Is is this refractometer, cheap chinese ones in general or is it me?

Cheers

Edit: twas me

STL https://www.printables.com/model/866603-carboy-dryer-stackable

Description I wanted a carboy drainer that was 3d printable (because why not?). They're stackable, too.

References:

1. This model on Amazon was nice https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Carboy-Drainer-Pack-2/dp/B074KL8QD2
2. I liked the handle cutout on this model https://www.printables.com/en/model/734966-carboy-drainer
3. This model wasn't bulky enough and I didn't like the feet. https://www.printables.com/en/model/33122-carboy-drying-stand
4. This seemed clever, but too fragile. https://www.printables.com/model/841046-carboy-dryer-for-plastic-23-litre-carboy
5. This model was my main inspiration for size but wasn't bulky enough https://www.printables.com/model/305346-carboy-dryer

Licensing: Credit/attribution/link is my only requirement. Free to use, modify, or sell. Please share your work, I love to see it.

First cider. It's made from grocery store juice, so not complex, but delicious. 3/5*s. Apple-banana-strawberry juice. Mostly apple, hint of strawberry, no banana.

1 gal juice, safale s04, nutrient, erythritol.

So, I've got a weird question. Anyone had a club faction split? Our club is sponsored by a brewery owner. He's been super restrictive about what other breweries we work with, banning interaction with 99% of other breweries. Some of our members are discussing forming a splinter group just so we can do stuff without asking his permission.

What do y'all think about this?

Wow, what a project - and an opportunity to get a unique tick on Untappd or Beer Advocate (BA) though I'm not sure the beer style is listed. :) More importantly, I would love to have tried beer that our ancestors drank.

They took this project to be authentic as possible - down to utensils, #barrels, equipment, and open fire to brew. Way beyond what we do with our homebrewing. I checkled thinking of the bag brewing some of us do today, with the process, steps, and all the equipment they used - but how fundamentally the process is very similar.

https://foodcult.eu/exhibition/brewing-historical-beer/

In September 2021, after several years of preparation, the FoodCult team recreated a beer last brewed in the sixteenth century. In Ireland and across early modern Europe, beer was integral to social life and a vital source of nutrition. But up to now we have had little sense of what that beer was like, how strong it really was, and how much energy it provided. By reconstructing the recipes, equipment, and techniques used at Dublin Castle four hundred years ago, FoodCult set out to answer these important questions.

This virtual exhibition will lead you through the project, from the rationale to the reconstruction to the results. It is organized in five chapters, which you can follow sequentially or by clicking on the individual links below.

xposted to /beer & /homebrewing

Being a total newbie in kegging, I recently bought some used soda kegs for cheap. Not knowing what to look for, these kegs later turned out to be of the CC variety. While this is not a bad thing per se, most accessories like the cheap Kegland spunding valves etc. only come with NC fittings, leaving me with the question of whether I should convert my kegs to Jolly kegs (from what I've read, that's basically a CC keg retrofitted with NC style gas & liquid posts).

Apparently, you can't just buy the cheap posts from Ali Express, as they have slightly different threads and/or shaft lengths, so I have to go with more expensive ones. These particular ones were recommended in a forum elsewhere and are reported to work. I'm willing to pay that price if need be, even though the cost for the modification is now about 50% of what I payed for the kegs.

One thing still bothers me though: On a CC keg, the PRV is integrated into the gas post, so it doesn't have one in the lid. Do I have to buy new lids (with PRVs) now as well? That would make the whole conversion completely uneconomical. Also, I'm rather unwilling to test my luck by pressurizing one of the kegs so much that the PRV should be triggered.

Happy to hear if anybody ever did something similar.

In the past, I only ever did top fermenting styles. I had to depressurise my bottles sometimes even more than once (using swing top bottles, luckily, this is not too awful). Now I made a Vienna Lager and even though I can‘t even really cold crash the bottles (I have them sit outside at maybe 10°C instead due to a lack in fridge space), my secondary fermentation is way slower than I’m used to. Is that to be expected?

With ales, I opened the bottles the day after starting secondary, and it sometimes was a deafening bang already. Now, I waited maybe even two days and haven‘t got more than a shy little pop.

I used powdered sugar (mixed with sterile water 1:1) to feed the yeast in secondary fermentation because I didn‘t have anything else in the house when I found the time to bottle. Is that maybe an issue?

I have an aluminum kettle I used for a home-built electric brewing system. The water heater element I used required a 1.25" hole.

Fast forward a few years and I bought an Anvil Foundry and want to convert my old kettle back to one I can use for occasional propane BIAB batches.

I've searched online and don't see any off-the-shelf options for Bulkhead hole plugs for a 1.25" diameter holes.

Anyone know of a place that sells these or how I can build something myself using items from the hardware stores?

Thanks.

It's true that our 16th-century ancestors drank much more than Irish people do today. But why they did so and what their beer was like are questions shrouded in myth. The authors were part of a team who set out to find some answers.

As part of a major study of food and drink in early modern Ireland, funded by the European Research Council, we recreated and analyzed a beer last brewed at Dublin Castle in 1574. Combining craft, microbiology, brewing science, archaeology, as well as history, this was the most comprehensive interdisciplinary study of historical beer ever undertaken. Here are five things that we discovered.

A friend of mine dumped me a bag of malts he had lying around for like five years. It’s a kit for a Klosterbier which was stored in a plastic bag sealed with a clip, sitting on a shelf in a typical household storage room, so neither totally dark nor in bright sunlight, and slightly below average room temperature.

I’m hesitant now to heat up water and waste energy, time, hop and maybe yeast on these malts because I’m skeptic about how many enzymes are left in there. Have you ever used grains that old? Maybe I should mix them with fresh stuff?

To save money and flavour, I got myself a grain mill. I thought this would be simple, but setting the grind/crush size seems to be even more difficult than in the world of coffee 🙈

So far I’ve learned that AIOs like my Brewzilla (Gen 4) like the crush a little coarser because the grain basket and overall construction restrict the flow of the wort already. Can anyone here confirm or refute that? Does anybody have that exact same system and care to share their preferred setting (or settings/tendencies, as different malts can be milled to different sizes)?

This is the state of fermentation stuff so far. We wild; all wild. Right to left bottom to top:

• lemon juice, squeezed - 1/2 food processor apple added after it went off, added a little bit of salt but not enough to do much. It will probably fail, but I'm curious where it goes. It is quite active already.
• lemon slices in a 2% salt brine with rainwater and the other half of the apple in a mason jar.
• new blueberries with a 3% salt brine and a bunch of raw sugar and rainwater just to see where it goes.
• top of 3 is grapes and watermelon, mid is cantaloup, and bottom is pineapple from a mix fruit platter. All are in rainwater and ~3% salt brine.
• I previously did 3× of these small containers with whole lemon slices, 4 garlic cloves, and an equivalent amount of ginger. Processed this, dried it, and added some salt and smoked paprika. That is in the small grinder. The juice that was left over is a super zesty spicy lemon flavor. That is what is in the lone red/white cap container.
• bottle with the ripped label is half of the sauce I made with the last batch of blueberries (600mL juice), and the remaining (1000mL) stock after a 5lb chuck roast that was smoked for 4 hours and dutch oven for 6 more with chicken stock and a beer. Those were reduced down to ~600mL, filtered, and bottled.
• the mason jar in the back is a large bed of 3 onions that was cooked with chicken over it. The onions were run through a food processor along with some cherries and 3% brine that fermented for 3 weeks, along with half the sauce from the previously mentioned blueberry run. It's pretty good for a first intuitive concoction. It has a savory sweet-and-sour flavor. It would be even better with more back of the tongue full sourness. I might need to try something with a tomato to pull out that kind of flavor. I'm already playing with unique stuff though. I've never had anything quite like this sauce.

I brewed this melomel last July and noticed this thin film... Is this an issue? Or is it expected like the sediment at the bottom?

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NizzYE2Ia24

Martin brews a short and shoddy stout without measuring anything. Just rough guess.

Matches my experience. You don't have to be extremely accurate. It'll all work out in the end.

What other sources are there for yeast without purchasing specific supplies of any kind?

I've done several lactose fermentation experiments and am currently playing with figurative fire by washing and running fruits through a food processor, letting them go active in a (burped) container and then adding them to other fruit juices. Currently I have a small apple for yeast that I added to pealed lemons and some lemon juice. I have no expectations for the results, and intend on buying nothing.

I ran out space in my fermenter so I used orange juice containers. The picture was taken after one day of fermentation iirc. I released the pressure when I saw it. Lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe8zFdYyr1k

Off-flavors in beer can be caused by so many different things. That’s why we created Beer Off-Flavor Jelly Beans - The Fun Way to Learn about Beer Off-Flavors! 🍻

lol lol

Sorry for the newbie question. I'm just trying to figure out if there's some sort of catch here. I don't think the StellarSan stuff is diluted, so I've been trying to figure out how it's so much cheaper than starsan.

Last time I brewed at home, I had my fermentation bucket in my flat, where the heating pretty much took care about all thermal regulation I needed back then. As I now have kids, I don't feel comfortable doing that anymore for various reasons.

I have freed up some space in my garage now for brewing & fermenting, but I have no heating there. I'm OK though to go with the seasons, brewing beer styles where the yeast's preferred temperature roughly matches the weather. But now, my mind is occupied with the question of how to keep the temperature as constant as possible for fermentation: While a weather forecast of e.g. 15°C doesn't sound too bad for lager beers, it may easily get as cold as 5° at night, giving the yeast probably a rather bad time. As I also don't want to spend a fortune on a temperature regulated fermenter, I'd like to even out those mins & maxes passively.
My thoughts so far circle around insulation (obviously) and thermal mass. Insulating the bucket itself seems like a nobrainer. But I think it also might work to build some cheap wooden enclosure, insulate that with Styrofoam, make everything somewhat airtight and add water bottles, rocks & bricks to fill up as much space as possible. That will of course do little should the weather change drastically, but so far, I think I'd stay way below max and above min temperature in there at all times. This way, I believe I could get a decent fermentation when the average outside temperature of night & day is right for a couple of days.

Is anybody here doing something like that or has experiences worth sharing otherwise?

P.S.: Addressing the elephant in the room: For now, fermenting under pressure is no road I want to go down. Buying a new fermenter, kegs, valves, fittings, hoses, CO2 bottles and either a counter pressure bottling system or even switching to drafting entirely is just too much right now.

Home brewing in the 18th century americas.

Nit pick - the end recipe is not a beer, no grains. Fermented molasses is rumbullion per https://www.thebrewsite.com/rumbullion-and-other-fermented-beverages/ (rum, no bullion, is the distilled version).

To play devils advocate, I think there should be a name for any fermented beverage that's undistilled and under 10%

These days I'm experimenting with tibicos as an (almost) non-alcoholic, low carb yet still festive alternative to beer with a very fast turn around. I usually tend to brew quite strong beers in the Belgian tradition (8-12%) because these are my favorite styles, so not getting smashed while still enjoying a tasty drink is always nice.

I was wondering if any of you have ever tried brewing beer with it. The composition of tibicos grains is suspiciously similar to a lot of sour beer cultures (mostly various strains of S. Cervisae, lactobacillus and acetobacter). I was thinking something along the lines of a Berliner Weisse or some light gueuze/lambic.

How much difference does different yeast strains really make? Is it perceptible like what kind of apples you used or is it delicate nuances when doing a blind tasting?