brewing 2ne1
A log on homebrewing by a band of merry persons.
e.g. nettle ale recipe
White wine Le Paddocks Racked
Racked the white wine, Siphoning went a bit wrong on the second demijohn and some sediment got through, so I will have to re rack in a months time.
It is still pretty sharp at the moment. I am hoping that it will mellow over time. But It may need to be sweetend.
ElderBerry Wine Racked
Racked to remove the sediment. But there was not much in there this time.
It is coming along well it is still a bit dry and has a slight bitterness. However, the recipe says that it needs to be left for a year. So it should mellow out nicely.
Marcus
Bottled one demijohn of the nettle wine and was very pleased to have a glass of the wine spare to be sampled.
Reasonable nettle aroma. The flavour has mellowed out considerably since I last tasted it; smooth almost vanilla taste with buttery finish.
Or maybe the high alcohol content is affecting my judgement :)
Also moved the Christmas Ale down this evening from the airing cupboard to the cooler kitchen to settle.
dylski
Pumpkin (old Jack-o-Lantern) Wine
I wanted to use the pumpkins that we carved for Halloween for something. This is what I tried…
The kids carved the pumpkins a couple days before Halloween and we baked the seeds, they were great fun. A couple days after Halloween I chopped up the pumpkins into large pieces and scraped any undesirable dry or soft flesh away, revealing nice fresh pumpkin. Note we didn’t use real candles but the small battery powered tea lights so this probably helped preserve the pumpkin. It seems to be thick enough that it keeps well. Then I peeled it (not sure it was necessary but others seem to) and chopped it to small pieces less than an inch.
The following recipe was inspired by: http://www.winesathome.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=1442
Ingredients: 5 lbs chopped and peeled pumpkin (roughly 2 small jack-o-lanterns), 1 lb raisins, 4 lbs sugar, 1 crushed cinnamon stick, 1 inche sliced/chopped ginger root, 1/4 tsp tannin powder, yeast nutrient, citric acid, pectolase, winemaking yeast
Put pumpkin, raisins, cinnamon, ginger in large straining bag, and tie closed. Place in a large pan with enough water to cover and bring to a gentle simmer for about 20-30 min until pumpkin is soft. Cover and leave to cool below 40 deg C. Transfer contents of pan to the primary fermenter and with clean hands or potato masher work the bag gently to extract flavour into the water. Be careful as the cinnamon sticks might be sharp. Remove bag and discard contents. Add the sugar, stir until dissolved, and make up to a bit more than 1 gallon. Check SG, add more water or sugar to make 1.09. Add bentonite, pectolase, citric acid, yeast nutrient, tannin and yeast.
It smells fab-u-lous, like a mulled wine with the cinnamon and ginger being strong features. The colour at time of writing is a bit brown, I hope it turns more yellow as time goes by. I’m using a brew belt as the house has dropped below a temperature good for fermentation.
Christmas Ale
Ingredients
- 1 tsp ground nutmeg
- 1 tsp ground allspice
- 2 tsp ground cinnamon
- 1 vanilla pod, split
- 1 orange zest and juice
- 250g tropical rainforest honey (dark)
- 750g Sugar
- 1.8kg John Best Traditional English Ale tin
Put all ingredients except juice and malt into pot with a few litres of hot water, simmered for 30 mins. Put malt into pressure barrel, removed orange rind from hot water and added to barrel and stirred until dissolved. Topped up to 40 pints (23 litres) with cold water, added orange juice and yeast. SG 1034
dylski
Bought a mini-keg of Adnam’s finest ale this summer. It was worth buying just for the ale of course, but now the plan’s to see if I can reuse the keg for homebrew ale.
The mini-kegs you buy for homebrew appear to be high quality ones that can handle pressurisation and use a top tap with a CO2 cartridge to maintain pressure. (Another difference is that disposable ones are plastic lined and can go rusty where the plastic perishes or is missing.) This one is a disposable take-home vessel that can maintain the pressure of beer put into it but probably not a lot more. The beer is gravity fed via a bottom tap so you have to ventilate the top to allow it to drain out.
I removed the little red insert in the bung at the top and then tried removing the bung from the top by levering it with a blunt knife and tugging it with pliers. This was after heating it with hot water (some advice I read on some forum). Alas, the bung would not budge. It did though pop very easily into the barrel where it is not living. I tried for sometime to see if I could coax it out from in there but, again, to no avail. I assume the bung is pretty inert so its presence in the keg won’t affect any beer so it’s going to stay there now.
Next step will be to buy a new bung, put in some ale with a little priming sugar (general consensus suggests half the amount you would do for bottling as these things can’t take too much pressure) and stuff in the bung. If the mini-keg fails as a long-term pressurised store it should at least be a suitable vessel to fill from a pressure keg and dispense from.
Thought just occurred - before I try conditioning beer in this I’ll try 5 litres of cheap carbonated water to see if it can handle that pressure. Don’t want to waste 5 litres of beer finding out the tap can’t take the pressure!
Mini-keg related links:
http://www.beertech.net/e107_plugins/wrap/wrap.php?2 (build your own tap for a mini-keg (not easy))
http://www.weekendbrewer.com/minikegtips.htm (tip on using a mini-keg)
http://www.brew-winemaking.com/ProductPDF/4906.pdf (how to use a professional one)
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f35/heineken-mini-keg-60710/ (Heinekan ones can’t be reused apparently altough there appears to have been a video on youtube to the contrary)
dylski
Six months have passed so I thought I’d better rack the nettle wine. Should have done it 3 months ago. It has cleared a little more. The plan now is to leave it in the demijohns a couple of months to clear a little more and then I’ll bottle it.
Marcus’s Vine-o-meter measured 10% but I don’t believe it. I thought it tasted rather more alcoholic than that. The specific gravity is now 0.99 but that does not help much because, checking through this blog, I’ve discovered that I didn’t measure the S.G. of the nettle wine when I racked it first time around!
It tastes dry, quite strongly of nettle. Sort of like a strong still nettle ale. Which isn’t too surprising I suppose. There wasn’t much depth of flavour or viscosity to it. We’ll see if time improves it.
dylski
White wine Le Paddocks
After 7 Days in the Primary fermenter vessel. I syphoned into two demijohns. The wine tasted ok if not a bit dry. The Specific gravity is at 0.095
A lot of sediment came through and a couple of grape skins. So I think I will have to re rack in a couple of weeks. I will measure the alcohol content at that stage and decide whether I need to sweeten the wine a bit.
Cheers
ElderBerry Wine Racked.
Dylan and I tasted the wine and it tasted like a light dry red, with a slight bitter after taste. Alcohol Volume is 13%.
We had to temporarily but a plastic bag over the neck, while I buy another airlock! (Pink Penguin was Dylans Idea!)
Cheers
Marcus
Sour Cherry Wine Bottled.
I lost about half a bottle during the syphoning process. (I am not very good at syphoning.)
The recipe said that I had to rack it three more times, until 1 year old. But the wine is so clear and tastes really good. Like a rose but with a almond hint. (also I really needed the Demijohn for the white wine.
Dylan came over to taste all the wines I was racking today and we both thought that the sour cherry had turned out well. Dylan feels that it is worth leaving at least two bottles for the whole year.
The Alcohol volume is currently 12%
Tabatha helped me make up the labels. Very happy with the result.
Marcus
Just measured it again with the amazing Vino-o- metre. And this time it measured 8%.
I think it was because there was sediment in the wine I tested last time.
This wine is much clearer.
still not sure how accurate this Vino-o-metre is.
Marcus
