/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>206972
Oh my pleasure. Just glad I could help! :D

>>206952
The mead should go clear and fermentation should completely stop before you bottle. Any remaining gas production should be manageable. If you're really paranoid, you can bottle using wine bottles and tea corks, which are water-tight and air-tight but will pop out before the bottle breaks.

>>206926
Personally, I'm a fan of bread yeast. It can get up to 13-14% no problem. I think 2 pounds for bread yeast will still be fine, though all the sugar may not go to full completion. It'll still be plenty dry, but there will be a few undigested sugars.

Oh also remember your yeast nutrient. Mead is very nutrient-poor, so the yeast need a little help. Surprisingly, dead yeast makes a wonderful nutrient. Just boil a couple of packets and dump those in with your living yeast.

>>206918
Let's see...the JAOM recipe calls for 3.5 pounds of honey per gallon, which is sweet enough to counteract the bitterness of the pulp and still end up quite sweet.

I would start with about 2 pounds per gallon, I think, with a beast of a yeast that can hit 16-18% abv. That should give you a very dry mead with full sugar conversion and one hell of a proof. From there, you can decide if you'd like to backsweeten or add flavors or whatnot.

>>206845
And now we've successfully isolated the most efficient strains of brewing yeast. They can be picked up at any store for under a buck. Any yeast that lives on or in the human body is not brewer's yeast, and actually has an astounding chance to make you extremely sick. Why would you even bother?

>>206840
Yeah, that should work fine. Go easy on the honey if you want to err on the side of dryness.

>>206670
Assuming you could pick up and isolate a wild yeast strand from the sea of nasty bacteria living on you, there's no way to tell what kind of yeast strain it is. It would most likely be a strain of wild yeast that would produce strange and unsatisfactory results, assuming it could ferment the sugars present at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candida_albicans
^the most common strain of yeast found on or in humans. Not known for its alcohol-fermenting properties.

>>206707
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharomyces_cerevisiae
tl;dr it's thought this species of yeast accumulated on the skins of grapes, not the skins of feet.

Furthermore:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeast#Beer
Mindfuck. Baking yeast is a perfectly valid yeast choice under many circumstances.

>>206525
Keep in mind that distilling is illegal in America. The heads and tails are the beginning and end products as the solution is distilled. The first X millimeters will be methanol, the next Y will be ethanol, and the end Z will be fusels.

Also stills have a habit of exploding from time to time. So be cautious about that.

ONLY DISTILL IF YOU KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU'RE DOING. If you bjork it up, you'll go blind, get caught in an explosion, or get arrested. A still is somewhat expensive, even a DIY version that's actually safe and effective.

>>206202
Oh hell yes. If you don't dump a fair amount of extra sugar in there, the finished product will be very dry and very tart, and the yeast likely won't reach the maximum %abv.

>>205767
Y'know, I've read plenty of stories about great meads made from bread yeast, and I think it gets railed on unnecessarily much of the time. It produces a respectable %abv of around 13-14% on average, doesn't rape the flavors (and IF there are off-tastes, they can be aged out in a few months, which you should be doing anyway), and it can metabolize nearly any kind of sugar you throw at it. Is it perfect or ideal? No. But is that any reason to immediately throw out any batch containing it or to automatically discredit any mead made with it? Of course not. Good booze is good booze, and bread yeast doesn't immediately turn the best of recipes into manure.

I've decided to backsweeten my maple mead with a fuckton of brown sugar. :3 This will truly be a dessert mead to remember.

>>205377
Whoops, sorry, missed that bit of information. Please don't ban me for being an accomplice to...whatever crime that is.

>>205222
Bad idea. Napkins are porous and any moisture on them can be a breeding ground for bacteria that will vent into your brew. At the very least, get a balloon and poke a hole or two in it. Hell, a freaking condom will do the trick, and you can get them free from nearly anywhere these days.

>>205361
It would probably take a bit more sugar to counteract the sour from the lemons, but you could make a lovely lemonaid-flavored mead. Go forth and experiment, my good sir! And be sure to peel the lemons. You can zest off all the yellow stuff and squeeze in the juice, but try to avoid the white pith. It's very bitter and takes some time to age out.

>>205206
There reaches a point where the environment becomes so booze-rich that yeast can't survive anymore, no matter how much sugar you add.

If you want something sweet, you can dump your yeast in an environment that is sugar-rich and it will pig out as much as it can before shutting down, which will give you about the maximum %abv. Alternately, you can do something called backsweetening, where you dump the yeast in a sugar-neutral or sugar-poor environment, wait for them to ferment everything you gave them, strain/kill them off, then add sweetener to taste. This will produce a sweet but low-alcohol beverage.

>>205162
Costco. I just picked up 6 pounds for $14. As far as honey goes, that's insanely cheap.

>>205170
Oh god why...
It could be so much better with just a bit more effort. Sanitize to prevent your cider from turning to vinegar (especially in the long-term), add a few sticks of cinnamon, use brown sugar instead of white sugar, and a few grates of nutmeg.

>>205058
I keep a bottle of JAOM for cooking, which I started using the day I bottled it. For the drinking stuff, it really depends on the mead. If it's awesome right away, drink it as you please. If it's kind of questionable, wait 6 months or a year or two. I usually go for 6 months, minimum.

>>205100
I just use cheap-ass clover honey and flavor mainly with fruit, spices, and sometimes other sugars. If you want to get fancy (and somewhat more expensive), try your local farmer's market or search for a varietal honey shop. But yeah, processed honey works just fine for plenty of mead recipes.

>>204819
I'm just finishing up my maple mead. I dumped an absurd amount of honey and maple into it, and used bread yeast to boot (which tends to produce a lower %abv), so this stuff is just ungodly sweet. I'm calling it Maple Candysnap. It needs to age for a few months, but so far, not bad.

Just for the extra nausea factor, I think I'll backsweeten it a bit more. "Alcohol syrup" is what I really had in mind for this batch.

One thing to keep in mind is that yeast needs nutrients. It gets plenty from the natural ingredients in beer and most wines, but it needs some help with mead. A handful of raisins works okay-ish if you absolutely have to use them, but I would recommend boiling an extra packet of yeast as an alternative. Dead yeast makes for great yeast nutrient.

Also, please use a proper yeast strain if you can. Bread yeast honestly isn't too bad, especially if you age your brew for a while, but it's just worth it to pop 70 cents for the proper packet so all the pro brewers stop laughing at you.

If you want to get drunk as fuck and/or you have a recipe you know will turn out amazingly, make like 5 gallons at a time. If you want to experiment with tastes and recipes and if you want to try a new recipe, make 1 to 3 gallons. A single gallon will produce 4-5 standard wine bottles' worth. If it's beer, just make the big fuck-off bucket of the stuff. Carboys are cheap, and it may be worth it to pick up 5 1-gallons rather than a 5-gallon, just so you can make a tremendous variety for the same price, and especially if it's only for personal consumption.

Get caught cheating:
>Instant failing grade
>expulsion
>you're fucked

Fail test:
>fail test

But seriously, it's fucking algebra. PEMDAS and whatnot. Do to one side what you do to the other.

2x+7 (-7)= 8 (-7)
2x (/2)= 1 (/2)
x = 1/2

Isolate your variable. Problem solved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henna

>>201977
Aww, that's so sad... :(

http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7039537/Two_knotty_boys_collection_Updated

Also fuck it, here's the torrent to the Two Knotty Boys pack. Since it's all free on youtube, it's technically legal.

>>201953
Hunh, my troop must have been one of a kind. They were all really liberal and at least half were open atheists.

>>201882
That's actually where I learned so many knots from. I found a very liberal (and possibly sexually frustrated) troop that let me sit in on meetings and go to campouts sometimes. It was fun.

>>200730
Wait scratch that. A simple clothespin on the shaft holds it in place very nicely.

>>200701
Yep! I'm kind of having trouble getting them to stay put, though. I'm not really sure how to fix that >.< But they do feel pretty great if you have a hand free.

>>200039
Try your local BDSM group. Lots of places have them these days. You can locate kinky people in your area through sites such as fetlife (which is totally free!). So yeah, get involved in your local kink community and see if there's a chick there willing to top you.