I wasn't easily able to find a command line study timer so I made one.

I'm not a great programmer so I was wondering if I could get some feedback. Cheers!

This is my first attempt at roasting malts.

Buying crushed malts from the homebrew store is too expensive so I bought big ass 25 kg bag of pale malt and a cheap mill (well I say cheap, hopefully I can make this work out in my favor). Which means I have everything I need for a very simple, all grain, pale ale. But one of my favorite beers is a dark ale, which needs more than just pale malt, water, and hops. So working from one of Palmers simple recipes for dark ale I need some pale and roasted malt. Which is where this post comes in.

I have based what I've done after this explanation of roasted malts and a combination of a post by brewcabin and Palmers guide to roasting malts.

I spread pale malt out over a baking tray, just enough so you could not see the tray (~250 g) and placed in a pre-heated oven at ~180 C (350 F) for 40 minutes. I plan to store the malt in a paper bag for two weeks before use. And I'll update on how the beer turned out in a number of months!

Sorry for the break everyone, it's been a hectic couple of months. Here we go, fermenting cider.

This is another easy one, I would be surprised if you don't already have everything you need around the house!

Ingredients / tools:

1. Preservative free juice
2. Yeast
3. A cup

One bottle preservative free apple juice (other juices can be used, like grape, pear, berries &c. but you want to stay away from stone fruit (possible but weird tasting) and anything too acidic like pineapple or orange juice). I'm using UHT which ensures there's no other microbes, fresh is great too, just keep in mind there's living guys in there so you may get some interesting flavors!

Yeast. (Bakers yeast is fine, it just wont flocculate as well. Have a look at Lars' Does bread yeast exist post on the subject. If you have access to a homebrew shop I'd recommend going for some cider / champagne or an ale yeast.

Method:

1. Open juice and pour yourself a cup. Drink cup of juice.
2. Shake the juice for about a minute, opening and closing a couple of times.
3. Add about one teaspoon of yeast.
4. Then place (DO NOT TIGHTEN) the cap on the bottle and leave for one week in an area that maintains a temp of around 18 C that you wont mind smelling like yeast and cider.

We're getting rid of some of the juice because the fermentation is going to get rowdy and we don't want it overflowing, and we also want to get some air in there.

The shaking is so there's some oxygen in the liquid, the yeast are going to want some oxygen so they can get settled and maybe have a family. Once the oxygen runs out they'll start producing alcohol, so after pitching we don't want any more oxygen coming in and muddling it up.

And finally, we're not tightening the cap because there's going to be a lot of carbon dioxide produced and it's going to want to go somewhere. Using an airlock is overrated, there's going to be positive pressure for the majority of the week; open brewing is very common among homebrewers.

Thoughts:

There we go, after a week you should have a drinkable cider. If you want some bubbles play around with tightening the cap after 5/6 days. Keep in mind, if it over carbonates you could end up with a mess, but it's plastic so you shouldn't get hurt.

Assuming your juice is about 100 g/L sugar you should end up with a mid strength cider (~3.3% AVB)

Make sure to refrigerate for at least three days before drinking, it will taste better.

Have fun and let me know how you did!

edit: 100 g/L, not 10 lol. Also note, we are over pitching the yeast to ensure an active fermentation.

Intro:

Not sure if anyone is interested, but I brewed a raw ale based on Terje's process (larsblog)

Well, I tried to. The main issues were that I don't have access to Terje's Hornindal kveik, so I used WL Opshaug kviek. I also don't have access to juniper branches (and I didn't add bitterness because I didn't want to boil a hop tea inside around my cats; one of whom is 21).

Method:

Pilsner (4 kg) was mashed BIAB at ~75 C for two hours with about 10 L strike and half a lemon for acidity ( I figure the juniper infusion decreases the pH a bit, not having a pH metre, the half lemon was a guess). 24 g of Cascade was added at the end of the mash, 60 C, as a microbe inhibitor (some flavor remained).

The wort was made up to 15 L and OG was approximately 1.058 (1.045 at 50 C). The kveik was pitched at ~30 C and unfortunately (as it's winter here) made it down to 20 C over the next day. It was left to ferment for 3 days (20 C, FG 1.035) and was top harvested at 48 hours. Bottles were left for a day to carbonate and then refrigerated.

Thoughts:

As you can imagine this beer is pretty yeast forward, being 100% base malt and dry hopped. The texture is good, fair bit of diacetyl, and it's quite sweet. You know there is hops in the beer, but it's definitely not one of the major flavors. All in all, not exactly what I was expecting (more of a clean, dry beer). But I'm interested in trying again at the appropriate temperature.

Has anyone else tried to follow Terje's process? I imagine having Hornindal and juniper branches would be a game changer.

UPDATE 0:

I did a little experimenting, I bottled half of the batch 3 / 4 days after pitching and the other half 6 / 7 days after pitching. Lars and other raw ale brewers recommend bottling after 3 days and refrigerating. After my little experiment I can definitely agree, the batch that fermented out was thin, had no diacetyl, and tasted of alcohol. Altogether not great.

Next batch I'm going to try to use potassium metabisulfate to prevent further fermentation as I do not have enough fridge space for a 14 L batch and it's too much effort to do a smaller batch. I will update with that info