I feel like I haven’t posted here in a while… basically I decided to take a break from drinking and thus home brewing for a bit. I want to get back into meme spirits, and I also want to make a 0 oxygen beer from ferment to filter to serving, but for now I made a berry wine for the girlfriend from some Aldi frozen fruit. This has been sitting in the fermenter on the fruit for a good 3 months (started it just before my break from alcohol) and then I moved it into a keg, no cold crashing or anything. I then ran it through a 5 micron filter and then a 1 micron filter just to see how it went, I gotta say, it turned out great. I was expecting the filter to clog but it went through like a champ. I also then wanted to try pasteurizing it in the keg using my mash and boil to see if I get some delicious glue and rubber in my mashing vessel but I didn’t! I back sweetened the wine and haven’t had any re-fermentation happen after a few weeks, so project fuck around and find out was a success. I might end up retrying a milk wine again (last one had a few tiny cheese curds floating in it that turned off most people from it) and I definitely want to try making a spicy imperial stout, but for now, I’ve gotta buy wine bottles or give out samples of this wine until my keg is empty.

Happy days! My new beer is done. This is a battle-tested recipe with lemons and ginger. This time I also had 10 g of fresh lemon balm in the seasoning infusion. This guy:

Works really great as a beer component, sharing to spotlight this herb with you all! There's a Wikipedia page that describes the many aromatic compounds it imparts. It's perennial (pic is from my garden), grows in a slightly invasive manner so you only need to plant very little to get enough for many brews. This was a warning :)

Another new twist was a helping of Weyermann spelt wheat malt. I expected the nutty spelt flavour from it, but the taste profile ended up so multi-faceted that I'll need more tastings to pinpoint it :D All in all, a distinctive flavour to this beer. Fermented to bone dry very smoothly.

It’s been 4 or 5 years since I’ve actively been brewing, but recently I caught the bug again. So I started up a batch and omg it’s alive! I’d forgotten how much fun this hobby can be!

So I managed to find 80% food grade alcohol (it was harder than you might thought) and started the all season maceration.

Basically every fruit that I will get or pick I just put few pieces there and let it sit, the tasting will be at Christmas or sometime in December. First layer is red currant, I already used it for some maceration so I know it starts good.

An other mead aberration, for science!

I've been planning to brew a beer with spruce tips and did some research to decide how to go about doing it. The gold standard in spruce tip syrup making is half a glass jar of tightly packed fresh spruce tips with the top half of the jar full of white sugar. This goes on a south-facing window and the sun supposedly melts the sugar and as it runs down, it captures the taste and healthiness from the spruce tips better than any other method.

Looked up the melting temperature of pure white sugar: 160 °C. Got a bit doubtful of the aforementioned method (wife has also tried and failed). So my plan would be to pack the tips and sugar on top in a tall kettle and melt the sugar in the oven. Tips go in a mesh insert, so after the sugar has melted, I could pour hot water into the kettle, dissolve the sugar in the water and lift out the mesh insert with the tips.

Today was the time to act it out. Spruce tips from the back yard, 1 kg of sugar. In the oven set at 160 °C, and yes indeed, sugar melts and the aroma from the spruce tips is amazing and appetising!

The beer has 4,75 kg of Viking Sahti malt mix, 1 kg Viking wheat malt, 1 kg Viking Munich Light and 250 g Simpsons Premium English Caramalt in a 19 liter mash. For hops I used Challenger from the start of the boil and some Simcoe for the last 20 minutes. It all came together to make a lovely pale brew.

The spruce component ended up as 2 litres of surprisingly dark green-brown liquid. I made sure all sugar was dissolved and dunked it into the fermenter first, followed by the wort. Both were filtered with reusable coffee filters.

My last doubt was that the spruce tips might contain stuff that would kill the yeast, so I made a starter with some of the spruce-sugar liquid. Sure enough, it got on bubbling like a champ!

Second hand fridge with an inkbird thermostat.

I don't have a heater in there, but from my brews before the fridge the problem was keeping it cool, not warm. Does anybody with more experience than me have thoughts on why I might need a heater?

Looking forward to trying this out in a few weeks.

The one on the left is my first batch, the right my second (just bottled).

I'm very happy with the colour improvement and the sample tastes were better too. Fingers crossed I'll have a much less bitter batch.

My changes to the first run were blocking any outdoor lights (newspaper over window -my wife loved it) and keeping it in a water bath to regulate temperature until sampling time.

In the next batch, or the one after, I should have an under counter fridge to keep it in so this'll help even more.

I have these bottles which I've already used once.

My question is if the lids/caps should be refused with beer? I'm concerned that the seal may not be strong enough without the anti-tampering loop attached (as they break when opened).

Thanks for any help!

It's that time again. What's everyone brewing? It's May so depending on where you live there might be some interesting herbs available right about now.

I've been chasing more maltiness with this recipe and it's now getting to be in the ballpark of a couple of favourites - Plevna Dry Stout and Sinebrychoff Porter. This 21 l run had 6,7 kg of malt of which 500 g was 1300 EBC Black Malt and 1 kg was 400 EBC Chocolate Light from Viking Malt. The chocolate in particular is a great find with strong and unique taste.

Active malts in the mix are 1085 g leftovers of Simpsons Maris Otter Pale and Viking Sahti malt for the rest. 75 g Challenger and 15 g Citra hops for the duration of the boil. The recipe calls for 90 g of bitterness and of course I forgot to buy hops, so I had to fill in with the Citra.

Yeast was the Sahti standard fresh yeast, so I can call this a sahti-stout. Friendly, smooth mouthfeel as it always delivers. Next go at the recipe will need a new moniker though, as I want to try Alzymologist's malty lager critters :)

I'm so glad the fermentation succeeded the sample tastes like apple cider with a sour kiss. The smell is extremely sweet. The alcohol kicks 🤙

I used the traditional honey mead ratios and added dried dates with yeast. Proper cleaning is the most important part.

I've been brewing lemonade with a ginger bug and water kefir for quite a while. But whenever I try to incorporate lemon peel it seems to completely halt fermentation. I have tried normal and organic lemons without success. Currently I have a small batch of kefir with lemon juice going. Half of the batch is with lemon peel and that half shows no sign of fermentation after 30 hours (I have already bottled the other half because it was ready). Did any of you have similar experiences? I would really like to include peel for the taste 🙃

EDIT: Thanks for the many inputs! Summarizing the responses it seems like lemon peel doesn't inherently stop fermentation and the cause is more likely to be whatever pesticide the lemons were treated with. So I got myself a very expensive (supposedly) untreated lemon which I will use in my next brew (after washing it thoroughly) and continue from there.

Now that it’s no longer dreary winter I’m finally getting the motivation to do something that isn’t fly virtual aircraft every waking second of my day. I decided to make two wines, one that’s a mixed berry (blueberry, blackberry, strawberry, not sure what else it’s just the berry medley pack from aldi) and a strawberry banana. Sometimes no matter how good or experienced of a brewer you are you make dumb mistakes. Did I get annoyed when my strawberry banana starter foamed over and caused a small cleanup? Yes. Did I think to add a blowoff tube to the fermenter filled with it? No. Did I spend most of today mopping the ceiling? Yes. Originally I wanted to do a lemon brandy rather than strawberry banana, but lemons were stupidly expensive. The plan is for the mixed berry wine to be the girlfriend tax and the strawberry banana to be turned into a brandy for a camping trip I have going on next month.

This is a Rewarewa mead started over the long weekend

• 7.5kg honey
• made to 20 L
• fermaid at
• champagne style ec1118 yeast
• est to be a og of about 1.113

SOLVED: I was stupid. One litre less water in the kettle meant my temperature probe wasn't touching the water and strike temperature ended up being higher than intended, which obviously obliterated the enzymes and no sugar was produced.

First total failure of my homebrew journey, and I have no idea why... I was really looking forward to this brew, a pitch-black stout with smoked wheat, chocolate malt and black malt. For yeast, I was anticipating to try Alzymologist's speciality.

However, it's been four days in the fermenter and I've pitched three yeasts – first the Alzymologist (made a starter), then my usual fresh yeast without a starter and for the last desperate attempt some dry wine yeast – I can only come to the conclusion that my wort is poison. Not a sliver of CO2 has been produced. First yeast did produce heat in the wort for a day, but no CO2. Tried heating the wort, agitating and all, but it remains dead.

Some little changes in my process were made – 18 liters instead of 19 for mashing so that I could fit 900 grams extra malt in, and strike temperature up by one degree to 72 °C due to less water and more grain. Tomorrow evening I'm going to have to dump 20 litres of fine wort down the toilet and plan another brew day. Damn, this loss hits like having to bury a pet...

Hello Brewers!

I am still a noob to this, but I want to brew my wife something that she'd like.

I don't yet have the equipment to do an all grain, and I am reliant on extracts.

I was wondering if anyone has experimented with adding flavour ingredients, like cherry for example, to an extract? If so, when and what have you added? And is this going to be an expensive process of trial and error?

Hey everyone, time for the monthly post.

What's everyone been up to? Any special spring/easter/your local flavour of holiday brews?

Cheers!

The jar is filled with:

• 1/5th dark bastard sugar, stirred;
• 1/5th bread yeast and some sesame seeds;
• 1 date for aroma;
• clear water

Set for a month now 1 week left and it is bubbling on the surface so the reaction has set. Can I consume this to test the results or should it be refrigerated first? What kind of tools other than glass jars with valves should you have to make fermenting better?

I know a lot of members here are in Finland so I figured I'd share this event here (sorry for the FB link but that's all I've got). Mika Laitinen (of brewingnordic.com and author of Viking Age Brew) is giving a traditional sahti brewing demo/course on Saturday April 24

Here's what he wrote on FB about it:

I'm giving a course on brewing sahti and other ancient ales on Saturday, April 26. Bircalaiset organizes the course in Pirkkala and is also open to those who aren't members of this Iron Age society. It will be a practical one-day hands-on course where people brew their own sahti or ancient ale in small groups. Handling farmhouse yeast such as kveik is a special theme of this course. I have learned a lot of new things about these yeasts in 2024-2025, although I have used Norwegian and Lithuanian farmhouse yeasts since 2015. Of course, you'll also learn to brew a tasty high-gravity sahti and flavor it with juniper, hops, and other ancient beer herbs.