/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>1775359
I found on the right for 50 bucks on facebook marketplace. Gave it a 1 day vinegar bath, stronk wire brush cleaning and use cheap industrial spray paint on the outside with some metallic gold and a fine brush for the lettering. It turned out awesome. It's only 8 quarts so if I'm doing a 5 gallon batch it takes a while. I'm prepping to do a cider here in the near future so I'll take some more pics

>>1775210
you don't even know. I generally am not thrilled with ciders but this one was fuckin LIT

Alright boys. I went to a beer fest recently and tried the Jalapeno Cider from Sabo (sp?).

I have tried ALOT of pepper beers, spicy beers, jalapeno beers, ghost pepper beers - every one of them is shit. Just shit. but this Jalapeno cider was fucking CLUTCH. And i think it was because traditional beer is usually hoppy or malty, and there just aren't many spicy flavors that blend well with it. It's like chocolate milk and pickles - just doesn't work. I believe the cider worked with Jalapeno for same reason that you can make Jezebel sauce, or jalapeno strawberry jelly, or put black pepper in a mead- the spicy and sweet just work together.

I can't wait until fucking fall when i can get my hands on some more apples. the creative possibilities are flowing like fucking crazy senpai.

>>1764402
Lots of elderberries and chokecherries too. Great idea. I need to try my hand at wine.

>>1764228
That's fucking cool. I live in a pretty northern climate so I'm used to lots of things growing that are more harsh in flavor. The apples that grow here are tart, tart cherries, spruce tips, etc - things that have more of "rough" taste grow better up here. Hence why I want to make a nice spruce brown beer.

>>1764019
I'm all about using obscure, especially local ingredients.

Are they grown locally? what's different than a coconut for flavor?

>>1763906
what the fuck am I looking at

>>1761195
holy fuck lol

I mean I'm pretty sure there's preservatives in there but fuck I have such a huge boner for novel things I want to try this

>>1760898
for starters:

1 lb/gal honey. This will make a weak mead, but it will be ready to drink much sooner than normal.

buy a 1 gal carboy. pasteurize by bringing the honey water mixture up to 160 F and keep it there for at least 10 minutes. Sanitize the vessel, cap & airlock using an acid sanitizer (NOT bleach). people will freak out about you pasteurizing "because you don't need to" - don't listen to them. it's not necessary to be perfect when you're beginning and this is erring on the side of caution. It's worth it for your first time.

you will need some yeast nutrient (MAP or DAP - mono or di ammonium phosphate). Maybe a few grams. Throw this in after pasteurizing as it's cooling down.

throw in a packet of champagne, cider or mead yeast. You can use ale yeast but you'll get better results with those yeast types.

Once it's done fermenting (at least 4-5 days AFTER that last bubbles you see coming up through the liquid), transfer the mead to a separate, sanitized 1 gallon jug with a complete air stop (no airlock, just a sanitized cap). Let it sit somewhere cool (50-65 F) for a month or two. Ensure you don't get any of the sediment when you transfer (you will lose some mead though not much)

Once it's finished, you can backsweet with some sugar to your liking, then refridgerate. Don't add sugar and let it sit or it will ferment and explode your bottles.

That's the hyper-simplified version.

>>1757324
depends on the concentration, fermentation time, temperature, yeast used, any stress the yeast went through etc.

>>1756110
fusel alcohols usually smell like gasoline or extreme solvents. Lots of times especially in dark liquors the primary component is amyl alcohol and it smells very hydrocarbon-y

>>1756745
i haven't tried anything yet but I want to make a hibiscus mead pretty badly. Wife got a hibiscus plant that was doing extraordinarily well, so I need to learn how to harvest dem der pedals so I can make something out of them lol

>>1746680
its' unique. but also it's a very nice "blank slate" so to speak, that you can add some pretty wild flavor combinations that you normally don't. Most people (not all) would hear a combination like hibiscus, orange & cloves, or black pepper and pineapple and think "what the FUCK are you doing putting that in beer" but in a mead it's not only perfectly acceptable, but a strikingly good combo

For some people who don't like wine it's a nice compromise too. I personally like wine, but I get the appeal.

>>1756041
how many soaks/air rests have you done? Everything i've read suggests 3x repeat. Do you think that's going to cause some chits to be too developed and others not enough?

>>1755895
i mean theoretically if you know you consumed all sugars, there were no C5's and no other considerable organics present (aka it's just EtOH and water) you CAN determine the EtOH% just on density.

But in beer making those are some hefty assumptions and not really accurate.

>>1755935
bruh i have such a nerd boner for trying to malt my own grains.

I've been making plans to snag some stainless steel mesh from work, buy a few humidifiers, and portable heater and build my own malting and drying vessel with some arduino microcontrollers. I should probably try to do the ol' bucket & oven method first I suppose.

Are you just soaking in a bucket? hows the air rest going? "

My dad grows malting grade barley for anheiser busch on contract so I can buy bulk at seriously like $0.10/lb, so malting my own barley would be wicked awesome.

>>1755258
mhm. If you utilize abouta 2:1 ratio of whole flour or bleached flour to spent grain ground up as flour, you almost can't notice it despite the huge uptick in protein in the baked good. I just made cranbery white chocolate chip cookies with a 1:1 ratio and I think I was pushing it too far, but it still turned out pretty good. not like "omfg these cookies are amazing" but like "hey thanks for the cookie" level of good.

got my spent grain from my chocolate stout ground to almost a flour fineness. gunna make some fuggin spent grain cookies today. shit's gunna be lit. The wife tried it the first time around and they turned out wicked awesome. they honestly didn't taste weird at all.

>>1753717
I don't think there's anything goofy with pomegranite. the only hard thing will be getting and appreciable yield of sugar to ferment. Likely best option would actually be to make a really light beer and finish with pomegranite, or just make pomegranite wine by dumping a bunch of sugar in with pomegranite juice and fermenting up to 10-14 % EtOH. Just be aware this route will likely require 1-3 years of shelf aging depending on how healthy the yeast are and how well you control the temp of the ferm.

I could see a light wheat beer with pomegranite in the secondary being really good.

>>1753142
Lol sorry, that's just the specialty grain.

my "standard" is using 8-10 lbs of 2row pale malt. The one I brewed yesterday was:

9 lbs of 2 row
2 lbs of torrified wheat
1 lb of crystal

it hit an O.G. of 1.074 with no added fruit.

I tossed half a lb of cherries (pureed) in at the very last second of the boil, right before turning the wort chiller on. The rest I think I'm going to add just as you specified, after the bulk of the fermentation is done. I'll buy one more bag and rack it into secondary on that depending on how the cherry flavor is coming out.

started going to work today, almost went in the ditch so I told them I'm not coming in (middle of a blizzard)

stopped and got some american ale yeast, tart cherries, sweet cherries, 2lbs of malted wheat (low lovibond), 1 lb of crystal malt @ 35 L and a few oz of citra and hallertau.

Gunna brew me a 5gal batch of cherry winter wheat :)

Thoughts on cherry timing? boil, post boil, primary, secondary or staged

>>1691480
>>10 taps, only four are the breweries own beer
>>two of those are IPAs which differ ONLY in their grain bill (briess brewers malt/pilsen malt), and were ~20 IBUs short of their advertised bitterness.
>>capacity to brew once a week, brewery averaged twice a month
>>despite capital flow issues, owner/brewer only works 2-3 days a week and also hired a brewer because brewing was too physically stressful for her.
>>open grain bags stored with no no temp/humidity control
>>100% pellet hops
>>no new recipes since ~2015/16


oof

>>1691047
Interesting - So my food processor is basically just a shitty blender. It got an almost identical pulp as the blender but just at like 25% of the rate.

either way, sorry to confuse and happy it turned out great.

took 1.5 kg of the leftovers and making apple butter with it now and it's turning out aweeeesommmmeeee

>>1690928
>>1690436
>>1688029
>>1687478
>>1687479
>>1687777
>>1688029
>>1688044
>>1688070
>>1689343


Also, 50% apples were "Jonathan", other 50% were Regent. The regents were pretty juicy, but the Jonathan were pretty dry desu. I didn't test juice yields independently, though I should have.


Also, in case any one wants to see the press in action:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B3AfNtLgXgG/

>>1690436
not trying to be a cunt, but Im finding COMPLETELY opposite results from this

I ended up only getting half a bushel (~10,729 grams of raw apples) due to constraints

I got ~5,333 mL of juice at 1.0371 S.G.
or ~ 5531 grams of juice, for a juice yield of 51.55%
or 497.1 mL/kg,
or 0.060 Gal/lb
or 1.19 Gal/20lb

"Nominal" or the rule of thumb I'm basing this off of is generally assumed to be around 1.0 gal/20 lb or 43.8% - So i hit 20% over that.

Sugar yield & recovery:
1.84% yield
18.44% recovery

Nominal is
2.19% yield
21.89% recovery

Now again I'm basing this on "generic apples" so my working theory is that these apples I picked, which are MUCH more tart than sweet, have less total sugar than the baseline "10 grams sugar / 100 g apples".

No way to know for sure, but that's my assumption seeing as how i'm getting similar sugar yields.


I just washed, de-stemmed, then quartered the apples manually, and stuffed them into my Ninja 1000 Watt blender on the lowest setting (https://www.ninjakitchen.com/support/product-series/86/ninja-professional-blender/)) , and let it go until the blade began to clear all the chopped pieces and the load lifted off the motor. That got me to pictured.

And like I said, the juice yield was wildly good, a full 20% above the rule of thumb. Sugar yield was low which MAYBE could be partially attributed to lack of crushing, but more likely the tartness of said apples instead of sweetness (which I prefer for flavor any ways), or possibly people over-stating how easy it is to hit a 1.05 S.G. just by pressing apples.

Either way, collected a total of 1.41 gallons - pasteurized it all at 160 F for 5 minutes, kept 1.5 liters for drinking over the next week, pitched 1 gallon with brown sugar added to hit a 1.05 S.G. for some hard cider.

1.25 kg of the leftovers are in the crockpot right now making apple butter, and the wife is trying to figure out what to do with the rest of it lmao.

>>1690079
I'm a complete cider scrub, been making mostly ales and a handful of lagers, as well as kombucha.


I'm picking 4 bushels of apples today, and going to use my food processors as "crushers" (already tested and it seems to work ok, I got pretty good juice yield actually) and the old fruit press I just restored >>1687478 >>1686516 to squeeze em.


I'm planning on using a 5 gallon carboy, but I'm likely going to only fill it to 4.5 gal. I might also do a few diluted versions in 1 gallons on the side so I can make some low ABV ciders for my younger family members.

I have no idea how well the regular carboy is going to work. The first 1 lb of store bought apples (gala) only got me 1.0386 S.G. so I can't see the fermentation going very crazy.

>>1689343
th-thanks senpai

I'll get pictures of the harvest and video of quartering, chopping (with my undersized food processors), transfer to press and collection of juice