MuteDog

Yeah, I'm on Mastodon as @Mutedog@mastodon.social

I made a wit cider with coriander and orange peel that was excellent.

Elderflowers are also a nice add to cider, boil them briefly in a bit of the apple juice to help release the flavor.

I grow mugwort and alecost to use for making gruit. Mugwort gives a mild bitterness and has a sort of generic herbal flavor. Alecost (aka Costmary) has a really distinct aroma that's difficult to describe, maybe floral, minty and cinnamon? but not quite. It can also be quite bitter (at least when chewing it) so I've been a little gun shy on using it for a long time in the boil, but at FO/whirlpool it's quite nice.

My FIL often has efficiency issues with his AiO system and a friend of mine had similar issues to the point where he built himself a cooler mash tun to use with his. I don't know what the issue is, but you can pretty easily solve it by purchasing an extra pound of base malt for a few bucks. At the homebrew scale this isn't breaking the bank (like it would be a commercial brewery making 100s of bbls).

Wait, how do I get the $400 per month health insurance?

Take an actual gravity sample with degassed beer using a hydrometer. Your RAPT pill may have krausen crud stuck to it throwing off the reading. My conclusion for these sorts of devices is that they're useful for monitoring temp and letting you know when your fermentation is completed but the measurement of FG is probably inaccurate.

Hops grow better in northern latitudes (within reason), they generally need longer summer days in order to produce flowers. People have successfully grown hops in Scandinavian countries (and not just southern Denmark). You probably can't grow them in Svalbard tho.

You should leave your bottles to condition for two weeks, that loud pop you heard after one day carbing with ale yeast is all the CO2 pressure in the neck of the bottle escaping instead of slowly dissolving back into the beer had you given it time.