What are you brewing? March 2025
Hey folks, time for the monthly post again. What's everyone been up to?
I've not been that active in my cleaning with a side effect of beer-making hobby lately, I am sad to report. But planning perhaps a California lager.
I've been too busy to brew in the past month, but I think I'm now through most of what was taking up all my energy, so it's planning time!
I did make a second batch of sahti using natural baker's yeast instead of brewer's yeast, and I've saved a bottle of the brewer's yeast version so that I can compare the two. I just haven't sat down to try them side by side yet. I'm quite looking forward to comparing them
Please write a post about the comparison! As well as any differences apart from taste you had in using baker's yeast.
I'm new to this and one of the things I've been wondering about is if I can just use baker's yeast.
I will do! But as a very brief summary: it worked fine using the same process as normal, tastes different but still good, and stopped fermenting at a pretty low abv (about 2%)
Through a long line of silly situations I ended up with 5lbs of sugar with glass in it. I turned it into syrup to get the glass out of it, then mixed it with wild berries and applesauce for a wild Berry cider.
Finally hit the perfect recipe for a characterful lemon and ginger infused ale. Now trying to keep some of the keg for guests coming over this weekend...
Care to share the recipe? Thanks!
Absolutely! According to my notes:
Mashing with 19 L water, for 60 minutes, strike temp 71 °C, manual turning every 15 minutes:
3500 g Simpsons Maris Otter Pale Ale
2000 g Viking Malt Munich Light
500 g Simpsons Premium English Caramalt
1 L additional water at 68 °C for rinsing the malt bag, i.e. having the malt bag in a stainless steel bucket with holes in the bottom, pouring on the water and letting it run through.
Infusion with 3 L boiled water, for 70+ minutes:
4 Large lemons sliced thin
1 Large ginger root sliced thin (unfortunately I don't have the weight for this... palm sized :)
45 g Saaz hops
45 g Amarillo hops
I boil the water, take it off the hob, add infusables in the kettle in a filter bag and let it sit with a lid on top.
Boiling the wort for 50 minutes and adding hops:
60 g 45 min Challenger
30 g 45 min Saaz
The 3 L infusion is added to the boil when there's 10 minutes of boil left and flame turned to max to bring it all back to boil for the remaining few minutes.
Yeast starter with 1 L water, 1 dL dark syrup and a pinch of yeast nutrient. Yeast used was the traditional Sahti style fresh yeast. I just can't let it go :)
I don't have anything in primary right now as I've been way too busy for way too long BUT, I just planted a bunch of wine grape vines. I know it'll probably be a while before I get anything out of them but I'm really looking forward to eventually harvesting! We've got 3x zinfandel, 4x merlot, and 4x chardonnay.
I'll probably end up making a pyment or two before trying straight wine - I haven't done a straight wine before and I'm more comfortable trying to sort out some adjuncts with a mead, so I think I can flesh out the flavor profile a bit if the first harvest or two doesn't yield enough for a reasonably sized batch of "traditional" wine.
I'm currently in my Primary with a loquat mead. Looking to rack into secondary next week.
Peach lambic, 5 gallons! Saved up supplies for so long, thanks Trub Club
It will still be some time before I brew. But I start to think about GMO yeast that can produce some fluorescent color. It would be cool to have some hazy beer under blue light...
Certainly not legal in EU but I think that it can be done pretty easily.
while not exactly what you're asking for, I did some rice wine with red yeast rice once and it had some fluorescence. Normally clear red, there was a nice green shade to it in direct sunlight.
I was re-watching few of the Thought Emporium videos and got the urge to do it. He made GMO yeast for making bread ("golden bread"). And as one genecist told in interview I listened to long time ago - Most of the GMO techniques are so simple that you can do them in kitchen.
So picking strain of yeast that doesn't drop out easily from the beer, commercially available DNA marker and mush them together.
Maybe you could incorporate quinine somehow? It's fluorescent enough for a G&T to glow noticeably under the right lighting
I've caught a few new wild yeast cultures that I need to try out in some beer, one from juniper berries my wife brought back from her trip to a wilderness area near LaCrosse, WI and the other from the honey, wax and bees from my bee hive (which had been kinda limping along and not doing much but doing enough to keep me from giving up, it recently fully sprang to life). So I need to plan some sort of brew to try them out in. I'd like to maybe split a 5 gallon batch between them both, which means I need to empty out my 3 gallon carboys that are all currently filled with various wines so that may prove to be a bit of a challenge. The beer will be a saison, of course.
I also pulled the ~40lbs/18kgs of blackberries I harvested last August out of the freezer and made wine with them, it's been chugging along for about a week now and I need to press it soon, hopefully today or tomorrow if I can carve out some time, I'd prefer to not wait until the weekend if possible.
I'm drinking a citra IPA that I made the weekend before last. I used a high temperature yeast and it had finished in 4 days, so I was drinking it within a week.