Brewing? Maybe, ramblings? Yes.

A new year and a new brew! It’s been longer than two days which I said last time….

I’ll be running four cider experiments, first being cloudy juice vs clear (from concentrate), second being cloudy and clear ciders flavoured with black cherry concentrate, third being a cider yeast vs an Ale yeast (Wyeast 1056) just with cloudy cider and the fourth will be a perry in the cider vs ale yeast. Hopefully all will turn out nice and tasty

Youngs Cider yeast:

1. Cloudy cider
2. Clear cider
3. Cloudy black cherry cider (flavoured with cherry concentrate)
4. Clear black cherry cider (flavoured with cherry concentrate)
5. Perry (pear juice)

American Ale 1056

1. Cloudy cider
2. Perry (pear juice)
3. Forst flowers mead
4. Red or white grape juice

As you can see I have a few different types to get through. I’m making small batches, 1 gallon demijohn each, so I can see what works out best. I’m fairly confident about the cloudy ciders, the mead and the grape batches. The others are juices are from concentrate, while they’ll have plenty of sugar I’m intrested to see if they keep their flavours or if the added absorbic acid contributes to any off flavours. Another off the shelf juice is available to me but is twice the price! Although it contains alot more pulp from pear, I think with that I’d get a large yeast cake at the bottom of the demijohn or at the very least a very cloudy perry.

I’ve chosen the american ale 1056 as the Basic Brewing guys used it for mead with great results, they got a sweetish mead out of it. I want to give it a go with ciders to see what results I get from it.

I had a look at the cider again today and couldn’t help but check the fruit mead. Wow, I can see through it! Some of the fruit has floated to the top and some of it stayed on the bottle but most of whatever was floating around in the mead has settled on the bottom in an inch thick layer. The others have shown no attempt at clearing.

Work still has me in it’s grasp and I’ve basicly given up the idea of racking the mead until early september. I might get a chance in Auguest but other work I do goes in to over drive. I do noise control for a festival in Tullamore called Castlepalooza at Charleville Castle. It doesn’t stop me from coming up with ideas though!

A mint/lime flavouring is on the list now, sounds intresting but could be more of a summer drink but at least it will have time to age a bit The mead lager experiment I was going to try might be on hold until after winter, I’ve an idea it’ll get too cold in the castle during those months to keep fermentation going even for a lager yeast. I really don’t want it to freeze, I’ll leave that until next year if the Ice Wine process can be applyed to mead or it’s just for grapes Ice wine is a really sweet wine made in Canada where they leave the graps on the vine until the freezing weather comes in and freezes them, they extract the juice from the frozen grapes which contains much more sugar than they normally would. It can be fairly expensive but it’s great if you have a sweet tooth.

The site recently moved hosting package and I managed to delete the previous posts I’ll find a way to get them back in time.

Mead update: A taste!

A good stir of the mead and a then a dip of a cup to taste, it seem strong from the super wine compound yeast, smells of honey and tastes dry, dry as in chewing on a teabag dry. I can see adding some honey to this wouldn’t be a bad idea.