Out of Pod Experience

Honey Mead isn't as bad you think to ferment out it just takes forever. The trick is to never boil the honey (it preserves the aromatics and flavor) just infuse it in 160 degree F water. The trick to keep it from getting stuck is make sure you add lots of nutrients and dont be afraid to aerate the hell out of it (even while its fermenting, mead doesnt oxidize like wine). I base all my mead recipes off of 3 lbs of mead (a kilo i think) to 1 gallon of water (4 liters?). that seems to be a good starting point. from there you can have all kinds of fun. My wife did a blueberry wine/ honey mead blend, Blood orange mead, cycsers (made with unpasteurized apple cider instead of water and 3 pounds of honey per gallon). The thing with true mead is you like i said it takes time to ferment out and also age (at least a year of aging)

I can tell you this if you are a wine maker and haven't tried making a blueberry wine I highly suggest it. We make a lot of wine and beer and that blueberry is some of the best wine I have ever had.

yea i have Sacred herbal Healing Beers, in fact it is setting on my desk right now :D I have a pretty good beer book selection from time to, I own a home brew supply shop :)





"feculent" [/quote]

EWWWWW horse poo in the wine. I also find it funny that they worry about the krausin forming on the top. I have though done a few spontaneous fermentations it can be some ugly stuff from time to time, I had one batch where the krauisin on top actually looked like leather laying across the top of the beer. I picked up that wild strain from a batch of birch sap I let sit out to long. I cultivated and made a couple batches of beer from it, the flavor was defiantly wild, it had a flavor profile of a belgium strain with brettamyces mixed in. The big problem with it was it had crappy attenuation come in about 50% or so.

CCP Sledgehammered

Do I taste(or smell) little to no national pride for one's own country beer here?

Or is it because it's limited to the blue collar class and everyone here drinks beer made from virgin casks and brewed by virgins?

OK pitched the yeast 2 hours ago where's mah bubbles?

Referring to my choices on the opening post of this thread?

If those are to your taste try and get hold of a 15 or 21 Mortlach. I was very surprised.

However, being Aussie I will leave this here. Even more surprising! I thought I was mad the first time I tried it and loved it:

m.smh.com.au/executive-style/top-drop/tassie-whisky-named-worlds-best-single-malt-20140321-357lc.html

Wyeast Irish Ale Yeast - takes time to wake up. I get it in the packet of activator, the kind that has the yeast in a sealed packet inside the packet of "food". So you smack it and let it sit for a few hours and the packet inflates.


Once I got the bubbles, boy did I get bubbles. I'm having to up the fermentation temp a few degrees to ensure it's stable though - and end up having to choose between stronger beer with less body or more body but.. having foam coming out in the secondary after the racking which means I have to extend aging or have "gushers".


Temp control is probably the most difficult problem in home brewing. If you live in a place where the house gets cold at night and hot in the daytime, this can ruin the beer. I've also had large amounts of wine get ruined because of that.

So I learned the hard way why brewing and cellars are associated.


Tips for blowoff (for you non brewers who wandered in here):


Put it in your hair or give it to your girlfriend to put in their hair. You see people putting off-the-shelf crap beer in their hair and wondering why it does not work? Because the concept comes from the days when most beer was brewed at home and it was mainly women doing the brewing. Real vitamin B rich beer works wonders. Also, the traub from the primary fermenter - that stinkly smelly goo - is the best. No the smell of it does not stay in the hair.


I find that there could be up to 1 gallon of blowoff. The first half smells good and the second smells bad. You use the second for your hair but the first half that smells good, use it for cooking.


Wolfhammer's Brutalicious Meat Soak or BBQ sauce made from Beer Blowoff:

Any copious amount of beer blowoff, the first wave of which that smells good.
Mustard.
Tomato Paste or Ketchup.
Small amount of soy sauce (properly fermented organic type, not the other crap that gives you man boobs - man boobs are not brutal, just weird) or even better the liquid amino replacement for soy - large amount.
Paprika
Sea salt
Sage
Molasses
Some olive oil
Balsamic vinegar
The juice from a can of black olives
The tears of your enemies (preferably extracted with weapons - it's brutal)

Put all ingredients together and stir it with the butt of a military rifle.

The ratio of mustard and tomato paste are to taste and for consistency. You want this stuff loose for a marinade but you can cook with this as a BBQ sauce for ribs if you make it thick enough. It's also an option to soak your meat in it as a meat soak, and then after removing the meat, boils the soak down and add more tomato paste and ketchup and molasses to convert it to sauce.

And if anybody does not like it, use a tomahawk on them.

I should not have posted that meat soak recipe. Now I'm starving and my GF stopped feeding me months ago.

My very fave was the old Boddingtons bitter from the Strangeways brewery before Whitbreads bought it out, was a magnificent slurp but like the Guinness it was never a good traveler. If we could have a roll-back to the early `90's and I was a wealthy man I would buy the company just so as to preserve something that was really rather special.

Nowadays, with good actual Ales getting more difficult to find locally I tend mostly to lose myself in the odd gallon of Marston's Pedigree, a quite famous brew in the UK and one that doesn't need any plugging.

If I am out and about, say fishing (I travel all over the country in search of that perfect river swim) the King of Ale's taste wise that I know of now has to be Herefordshire's very own Wye Valley Pale Ale. In no way can it be considered an overly strong beer (yet it is a 4%-ish Pale Ale) but light crisp and refreshing, absolutely perfect for that hot or cold day when neither the Salmon nor the Barbel are playing and you need to keep your wits about you for fishing later on through the night.
Connoisseurs of the genuine finer slurps in life could do a lot worse if they ever find themselves around the Symonds Yat/Hunstmans Bridge area and nip into the "Saracens Head" public house. Truly spectacular!