It’s a great weekend to brew. It’s starting to get cool out and it’s a long weekend.
Yesterday we went thru the hop stocks we have in the garage. It’s time to use them up before the equipment move back downstairs for the winter.
We have quite a bit so Sounds like a strong ale to me.
12 lbs Maris Otter
1 lb crystal 60
1oz pilgrim hops @60
1/2oz citra @15
2oz cascade @15
1/2oz citra @ flameout
2oz cascade @ flameout
Nottingham yeast. Mashed at 151 2 hour boil
It is pretty looking tho.
Next up a mead. 2nd mead in a month. With maybe one more coming along.
So this one is ginger lime.
2 1/2 lbs wildflower honeyAbout 2 inches of ginger. This may be a bit much for a gallon. Lol.3 limes.
Mixed and stirred everything up with enough water to get 1 1/2 gallons of must and a 1/2 tsp of nutrient.
Oh.. forgot yeast for this guy. But luckily we brewed the strong ale yesterday, so I grabbed about a cup off the top. Should work great since the OG is 1.082.
Put everything into the party pig and it’s ready to rip!
Like everyone else these days, I have tomatoes getting ripe one after the other. So let’s make salsa!
But not just any salsa. Fermented salsa.
This makes about 1 quart jar,, which we will be fermenting in as well. I like this size because I only usually have one or two tomato plants and get 5-6 or so tomatoes ripe at a time. Tomorrow I’ll probably have another 5-6 ready…
This quart is:
5-6 medium tomatoes
1/2 small onion
3-4-5 garlic cloves
Cilatro depending your taste
Hot pepper depending on you again
Kosher or your kraut salt
Chop everything up into Salsa sized bits
Now the fermenting part. You need to use between 3-5% salt. So just weigh what you just chopped up. (It easier in grams.)
This batch I had 750g and I want 3% salt so.. 750x.03=22.5. So I mix in 22.5g of my salt. (23g really just round up)
If you let it sit a few minutes it will start to pull water out of the tomatoes. That’s good! Then just fill your jar up to the neck. The either use your weights or a hunk of onion or pepper to wedge in there to keep everything under the liquid.
Then just loosely put lid on and leave sit out on the cupboard for a few days to ferment.
You will start to see bubbles like this. And a bit more liquid. It’s probably good after 3 days of this. But better after a week! Refrigerate when it’s where you want it.
Now, mead is not one of my favorite things for some reason. I mean, I should like them, right? Who don’t like honey?
Oh I have had a few that were phenomenal, and also some that were the worst homebrewed things I ever had. (one was so bad it turned me off of an entire genre of beers)
I have made a couple of meads in the past. They ranged from ok, to maybe not. Mostly because of ingredient choices. Somethings just aint cut out for mead.
But I’m not a quitter. I’m going to find a combination that I like sooner or later. And this past version may be just that. Cranberry mead.
Now I put a little thought into it this time, I was looking at a 3 gallon batch. Lower alcohol so it can be drinkable relatively sooner than normal. A sweeter version. And,, well… cheap. Meads can quickly deplete the wallet quickly.
So what I came up with is: Cranberry Mead 5lbs Costco Wildflower Honey 3 lbs can Vinters Harvest Cranberry Puree 3.25 gallons filtered water Nutrient Nottingham Yeast
Using honey and puree is just a matter of dumping and stirring. And while yes I did figure on a bit of displacement, I didn’t figure on quite as much as we got. After getting everything mixed in as measured, it appears we have about 4-4.5 gallons of must. Am going to assume we will lose atleast a .25 gallon on first rack then maybe another .25 between the next rack and bottling.
The last wine was the same volume and we just racked to my 3 gallon carboy and a separate 1 gallon fermenter. (its nice to have odd ball sizes of jugs laying around) But in the future I will have to adjust for this.
We had an OG at pitch of 1.052,, and I would expect the Notty to stop around 1.010. That would be around 5.5%, and perfect for what I’m looking for.
Will be doing staggered nutrient additions, which for mead, especially cranberry, is really needed because the honey has nearly nothing. So I’m going to put in ½ teaspoon today. Stirring every day for 5 days but adding nutrient only every other day. This helps the yeast by releasing some C02 and getting that nutrient in.
This right now is some tasty stuff. Would be a good mixer for some vodka. I hope it holds some of this character when its finished. I guess we will see.
