/diy/ - Do It Yourself

My brother came into about 10 pounds of gala apples, we plan on making a cider, then taking that and making a cyser when all of my carboys and such are free to use after my current batch.

The recipe we found calls for a 71B-1122 Champagne yeast, but we don't like our meads too dry.

Would I be able to use a Safale US 05 I currently have on hand? Recipe also calls for aeration and SNA which I plan to follow.

There're a lot of edible varieties of mushroom that grow around where I live. They're pretty alright in pasta or just as padding for the bachelor-chow slop I subsist off of for the most part as a grad student, and I've yet to accidentally kill myself thanks to the availability of various identification guides on loan from my university library.

I've heard it's fairly simple to clone mushrooms from tissue samples in agar and then grow them at home; kinda like a vegetable garden, but moist, dark, and unsettling. What're some good beginner resources on that stuff?

Are there any adhesives that wouldn't fuck the leather up? I want to make a leather handle on the bow that I'm working on, but I don't know shit about leatherwork.

Question. I'm making hard cider, and I think it's almost ready to rack--the bubbles are getting further apart, and I'm planning on racking it when they're about a minute or two from one another. But I don't have another vessel of this size, so I was planning on putting it back into the (now thoroughly sterilized) containers in which the apple juice originally came for secondary fermentation.

My question is this; will the gas released in secondary be sufficient that I should worry about affixing airlocks to them, like a balloon or somesuch? Could I get away with just loosening the caps to let trapped gas out occasionally? Should I be concerned about it at all? How long should I keep it in secondary? A month? Two?