Homebrewing - Beer, Mead, Wine, Cider

So it begins, this year about month earlier. Tomorrow I will get it juiced and expect ~100 l of juice. It was little bit unexpected to do it today but somehow I managed to do it, in 4 weeks I should have something finished if I won't drink it partially fermented.

@homebrewing #cider #homebrewing

First cleanup - I just don't think that the pinned posts are necessary, they are linked in sidebar. But it has some problems with federation (it wants to open them in browser). So I wanted to ask for your opinion on this.

And suggestions:

• is there audience for general discussion thread once in ~3 months or something like that?
• should I add some thumbnail picture?
• what else?

Just to be clear I don't think that this community needs more engagement - quality over quantity. Since my hobby became my job I didn't homebrew for about year, so I don't have much to post here (but I try to be active in comments).

So I want to hear your opinions on this and some suggestions.

Edit: mentioning @SpiderShoeCult@sopuli.xyz

Hi!

I noticed that I don't get anywhere close to the gravity Brewfather estimates for a given recipe. Latest example is a SMASH IPA with a good 5 kg of pilsner malt that, which on my BrewZilla Gen 4 should have landed me somewhere around 1.054 pre boil. Everything went according to the recipe: 71 °C strike water, 64 °C mash for one hour (even a tad longer than that due to being interrupted by having kids), nice recirculation all along, no visible dough nests. What I got though was a pre boil gravity of 1.037 (forgot to test for starch being still present with iodine though).

This is only my fourth brew on the system, the first I forgot to measure and two were rather experimental, but I am still noticing a pattern here in that my efficiency is rather consistently sub par. I now wonder where to find room for improvement. For me, there's no need to squeeze every last bit of sugar out of my grains, yet at a mash efficiency of only 54% where in theory I might even get 80% does not only strike me as unnecessary wasteful, this way I don't know if I could even make anything bigger than an IPA at all without stretching the limits of my system.

My grain milling is one of the things that I suspect might contribute. So much so that I already wish I hadn't bought a three roller mill but one that I can adjust with simple advice from the internet, it seems everything in this field is geared towards two roller mills.
Also I started thinking about pH. Until now I never tampered with it, does it really have the potential to make such a huge difference?

All other suggestions are welcome as well. Cheers!

Chocolate hazelnut porter, first tasting. Good porter. Medium chocolate flavor. No hazelnut. Sigh. Needs more nut extract. Not much head or carb.

Ran across this. Brewing with tea?

Has anyone tried this? Any good? What about over extraction? I've made plenty of over brewed tea.

I've been interested in making a ginger bug. Seems easy enough and can carbonate soda. Went to buy some this weekend and it was $4/lb. That seems like a lot! For reference, I usually buy fruits for the family or fermentation when they're $1/lb and never go above $2/lb.

I plan on growing my own, prelim researching says it's easy enough, but until then, where do you get yours and how much is it?

As my latest batch is already quite the experiment, I decided to even go a little further and not use a traditional bubbler to vent off CO2 from my bucket this time, but opt for a keg to do that.

The rubber seal in the hole of the bucket‘s lid takes a 9.5 mm hose snugly, which connects to the gas intake of a keg filled with a good 5 litres of disinfectant. The keg’s liquid out has a line attached to go into the depicted 5 litre can.
This way, at the end of fermentation, I’ll have a sanitised keg & can, and the keg is already full of CO2. Also, should I experience suckback from changing temperatures (mind you, my setup lives in my garage), there is a buffer of CO2 in the keg for that, and the line into the can is the one I use to package from the bucket, so it’s nice that it gets sanitised along the way too.

What do you think? So far, my only concern is how much pressure buildup is required to displace the disinfectant from the keg and if the bucket's lid with the attached hosing is tight enough for that.

I bought several of these beer shanks back in 2015. I took it apart recently to clean.

Since the description says it's stainless steel I figured I could clean the rust off of the barb insert. Looks like it wasn't made of stainless steel.

Should I just reuse this thing or get a new one? If so I need the specs on this part so I will know what I need to buy.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

EDIT #1: Would this be a suitable replacement?

LitKiwi 2PCS Keg Coupler Barb Connector,Stainless Steel 304 Beer Kegerator Sankey Couplers,Hex Nut 5/8"G Thread x 1/4" Barb Beer Line Tailpiece Nipple Fitting with Sealing Gasket Washer https://a.co/d/g6HhP2c

EDIT #2: I emailed the customer support at MoreBeer and I got this response. They have great customer service.

Hi Casey,

Thanks for reaching out. This looks like a standard shank tailpiece. Here is a straight version, along with a curved version, in case it makes things easier.

Feel free to send me the invoice number after you order. I'm happy to refund the shipping cost for the inconvenience. Thanks!

Cheers! Zack

Zachary Marin Customer Service Representative | MoreFlavor! Inc. | 1-800-600-0033 Hours: Mon - Wed, Fri | 7:00 am PST - 4:00 pm P Visit Our Sites MoreBeer.com, MoreBeerPro.com MoreWine.com, MoreWinePro.com BrewmasterWholesale.com

Also, my mug works as a grain scoop nicely. https://files.catbox.moe/sdesos.jpg

So I recently visited brewery with 100yo technology and what struck me most was how little has changed.

Now you basically have only differences in driving the brewery - electromotors instead of steam engines and transmissions.

Basic technology like 2 tanks - one for boiling and mashing, other for sparge and leaving decoction parts (with perforated bottom) - is same to this day.

Other thing that's different is cooling, you now have coolers for quickly cooling wort and cooled tanks. Instead of shallow baths where the wort is pooled to cool and putting ice to cellars.

So did you checked some historical brewerys with copper tanks and stuff like this? Did it make you change or adjust your brewing setup? Did you learn anything?

Someone did this before so I am going to try it. I used a hibiscus 🌺 tea and left it unattended for most of the year. So I wonder if it will taste any good.

Based on this https://www.morebeer.com/products/chocolate-hazelnut-porter-jamil-zainasheff-grain-kit.html but scaled down to 3 gallons. Came closer to 2 tho. Lost more than expected to boil, I guess.

I started it in early march with the idea that I wanted a dry but fresh and somewhat complex wine for summer. I infused some oak chips with rum, but only had them in for a week something early on with the hope that the harshness would dissipate with gases and what is left behind becomes subtly integrated in the wine. I was going for notes and slight tannins as opposed to the super dry that was my autumn wine.

While fermenting it was about 19-21°C in the room with a cold draft by the floor that probably made it more like 16-18°C down there. I didn't think of picking a yeast ahead so I went with the generic one that came in the box.

It's been a very interesting ride in this relatively short period of time. The fermentation was very slow, as expected by the temperature and draft. It stopped bubbling but had plenty of sugar left in it so I racked it to oxygenate, added yeast nutrients and kept swirling it gently daily until I got it going again.

Last taste was a month ago and it was not good, hoping it would mature after bottling and otherwise make it a learning experience. Today, much to my surprise, it is young but damn delicious already. Great taste, great mouthfeel. Tannins but not overly so, hints of vanilla, oak and rum. Easy to drink and yet some interesting flavours to explore. It's all I was hoping for.

But now I have a new problem. While bottling it, I accidentally overfilled some bottles that I balanced into a glass, and then clumsy me spilled the last splash from the vessel into the glass too.

Now I'm sitting outside on a lovely warm and sunny Sunday afternoon, glass in hand, the wine is oxidized and can not be returned to the batch. I'm not sure what to do about it. Please advice.

I, uh, fit right in that main grouping, lol.

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.