Mistakes in Brewing

I got around to bottling the cider today and was surprised by the specific gravity reading.

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Made mead today.  13 pounds of honey.  Got company so  no time to time it up, but the original gravity is 1.104.  Lots of sugar for those yeasts to eat!

Moved the cider to the secondary today.

It’s much lighter than I had expected.  Especially given the darkness of the original cider.  It’s just a light yellow now, slightly cloudy but I doubt that’ll ever settle out.

There’s also very little taste to the little I tried at the bottom of the fermenter.  It seems those yeasts did their job and ate all that sugar..

I guess that’s a traditional scrumpy.

I’ll let it sit for a week or so and then bottle with some brown sugar for carbonation.

It’s that time of year and while I’m not a huge fan of cider Ruth is.  So tomorrow I’m going to give it a shot.

Ruth found me a hard cider recipe so today after doing a tracking run with Freya we stopped off at the Dexter Cider Mill and grabbed 5 gallons of their pure unpasteurized apple cider (and half a dozen of their delicious donuts).

This is going to be pretty pure, just apple cider and some wine yeast.  I won’t add the brown sugar/honey this time because I want a feel for how it will taste without anything else.  I will add a little brown sugar for bottling, though.  I also intend to heat (pasteurize, I guess) all of the cider to make sure there aren’t any natural yeasts swimming around in there to change the flavor.

I’m also going to bottle Beer #7 today, it’s about time I got around to doing it.

Today I’m brewing up a Honey Kolsch from Northern Brewer.

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The gunk seems to have settled out, I started trying to strain it as I transferred it to the bucket so I could add the priming sugar and there was nothing to strain.

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I racked #6 into the carboy vacated by #5 yesterday.

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A wee bit darker than I’d expected but the mouthful I got while siphoning tasted pretty good.

Final gravity is 1.008 exactly what it was when I moved it to the secondary fermenter so still 2.9% ABV.

2 weeks and we’ll see how it tastes.

This morning I’m whipping up a Cream Ale that I picked up once again at Northern Brewer.

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Some suspended gunk still but hopefully that’ll settle out in the secondary.

The colour is a lot lighter than the other beers have been which is exactly what I expected.

Specific gravity now is 1.008 giving us about a 2.9% ABV.

Oh!  And no banana smell!