Brewing? Maybe, ramblings? Yes.

Concentration is a wonderful thing, I wish I had more of it or even a small amount of it. I can concentrate for awhile on something but then a few days or hours later I find it boring and move along, perhaps that is called dedication or something other than concentration, dedication even? Perhaps. I could be like most people that start a blog and forget about it or don’t want to post to it anymore, if most people are like that. Instead of today, I wait till tomorrow, instead of now, I am later.

Tonight that changes, I’ve left my cider and mead long enough. I’ll be plunging my Red Branch flip-top bottles in to the sink and scrubbing off the labels. 12 bottles, 6 liters, should be enough space to bottle two of the meads. Chilli and The Abomination

I’m hoping that this restart will get me motivated enough to build the brewing table I’ve wanted to do for a while. If I actually do it, I shall celebrate by brewing a weiss (a kit unfortunately but still a weiss! )

After a trip to London I’ve racked my set of ciders. The perry though…. it has fermented but the extra pulp has caused some issues. The first issue is there’s no yeast cake! The yeast is still suspended in the pear, attached to the pulp no doubt, eating away at it. I’m going to have to get a muslin cloth or cheesecloth and do some filtering! I’ll have to figure out something for other ideas I have, mango and peach, both will be equally as thick and a pain in the ass to seperate the yeast from the pulp.

The ciders have turned out well. The cherry cider does taste and smell like cherry but it’s quite sour as well, this might have something to do with the sweet cherry extract I used, it’s generally better to use sour cherries for brewing. This one is a bit darker then the rest. I thought it tasted quite close to red branch cherry cider! Without the extra carbonation or exploding.

The other two cloudies are basicly the same, a slight difference in sweetness but otherwise look and smell the same, the taste different is barely noticable, could be I only notice it because of the hydrometer measurement

The clear cider is the closest to an off the shelf cider I’ve tasted out of the lot. It’s sweet but not overly sweet, just about right so I don’t think I’ll be trying to carbonate this one or sweeten it for general consumption.

Overall young’s cider yeast turned out a decent batch of cider. If I had to pick which to do a large batch I’dgo for the clear apple juice for the sweetness. The cherry would be second if I can sweeten it for bottling.

A few recipies call for the use of tannins from tea bags or raisins, or from a cooking apple. I intend to try both out with some cloudy and clear juice in a few weeks time. Have to plan to get some mead out of the way first!

The cider is nearly ready to rack and in the mean time I’ve been looking at other alternative juices to ferment.

One of the new additions to the window of the local health food store is acai juice, small bottles of it at least with larger ones inside. I’ll be buying a small bottle for taste testing and seeing if it’s suitable for fermenting. I should be good for sweeting and flavouring once I figure out how much sugar is in it. It might make a decent priming agent instead of sugar.

The saying of plans and battles is true for me in most things. My plan of a bunch of cider using two different yeasts has changed a bit If I had examined the smack pack more I would have realised I needed a starter to get the yeast going before pitching…. :/ Mistake two was not having all my mead bottled as three of them where still too cloudy to bottle. I’ve racked them and will have to wait a few days  now which will more than likely be sometime next week.

I used the following instead:

1. Tesco cloudy
2. Lidl cloudy
3. Tesco cloudy with black cherry extract (80ml)
4. Tesco clear
5. Sunway pear

Everything is done in four litres since a demijohn can fit about four and a half litres. The Lidl and Tesco’s cloudy look more or less the same, there’s not much difference except price. Tesco’s cloudy cider used to be 99 cent, after the budget and VAT cut it’s €1.25! Lidl is still 99c though The pear juice was a bit more expensive, again from Tesco, coming in at around €2 a litre. They have peach and mango juice which I might look at in a few months.

The clear apple juice was the only juice that was from concentrate, the cloudy juices are all pure pressed apple juice and the pear is 50% pear with lots of pulp, even watered down the way it is, it’s fairly thick!  The pressed apple juice is quite nice, a bit more flavour off it then the clear stuff. Although bit of wood, a drum and a car jack are all you need to make an apple press if you have the apples to do it! Every thing has been in a demijohn brewing for the last two and a half days, due to thirst issues I’ve only been able to use 3 litres of pear, I’ll sort this tomorrow

Youngs cider yeast was used for this batch, aside from the apple juice this is all I’ve bothered to use as ingredients, the next large cider batch I make will have more in the as I’ll test ingredients that are used to generally provide tannin or add a bite to the cider that juice and yeast cannot do alone! The cherry might make a difference in that way but then that’s what this is all about, after brewing some drinking cider of course. The cherry did seem to make a difference though, the cloudy/cherry mix was the most foamy of the lot, two inches of foam built up over night and thankfully that was all. When I added the additional liter apple juice I’ve left out the last 20ml of cheery extract because of the foam, didn’t want more! I wasn’t sure if it was the cherry that caused it cut since it was the only extra ingredient but I’d rather not risk the floor/walls.

The pear juice is quite thick despite being 50% pear, they’ve used pear pulp instead of filtered juice so it should give the yeast plenty to eat and plenty to leave behind. I really was expecting either a big foam up from the pear, the most was a bit of swelling as pockets of air formed, trapped by the pulp that was floating around the top. I think this one will benefit from some extra stirring.

After pitching it didn’t take too long for airlock activity to start up, about 2 hours for the pear and 3 to 8 hours for the rest. I fully expected the pear to foam up and put of the airlock due to the extra pulp but hardly anything at all.

The Perry or pear cider will get split up in to two sets, one as plain Perry and the second will get a dose of cherry extract to make a cherry flavoured Perry. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the rest of the cider besides drinking it.

I’m sure I’ll find something intresting to do!

Low pressure water but still water.

Is there anything a kettle of boiling water can’t do? Thankfully the vavle outside the house was just frozen and it wasn’t a burst pipe under the drive way. Brew day is set for tomorrow, if I don’t fall asleep or get distracted by shiney things.

Damn water! Well damn the snow and cold weather we’ve been having. A pipe somewhere has frozen over, thankfully not in the house but somewhere. It’s either staying frozen for awhile or has cracked. Not only does that mean we have all the inconvience that you get with no running water for a few days it means I can’t start to brew anything without resorting to buying bottles of water. Not that cider needs much or any water added to it but the first step does, sanitation. I won’t be able to sanitise the demijohns that are carrying my mead until the water starts flowing again.

I might have to break down and buy a gallon of water and haul it back to the house, only having foot powered transport means any large amounts of liquid are a pain in the ass to move.