/diy/ - Do It Yourself

Didn't have time to follow the talk here in-depth, as far as I saw it, all questions got answered already, so I'll just leave this update here.
Can't make it to the German Championships, my gf has a surgery appointment that week and I can't leave her alone over the weekend. So I'll just enjoy the NEIPA for myself.
It turned out awesome, Equinox, Mosaic and Galaxy with a natural, bready, biscuit-y base. The exotic fruits, mango, papaya, orange and stone-fruits are excellent. The body is mouth filling and the after taste really pleasant.

>>2665085
Look at this insecurity

>>2661673
It totally depends on what flavor you want to create. Fermented fruit just doesn't taste like fresh fruit.
Blackberries are the extreme example, since they completely change their flavor into something else. It's still dark-berry-ish but it gains some earthy qualities and even a peppery character. Too dry and it becomes completely snappy and hot.
Cherries on the other hand become sweeter and depending on the type of cherry can even become a bit soapy. They loose their Aroma and flavor over a time span of about 12 months.
Of course fermenting fruit also extracts more pigment, so the brew will get a stronger color.

If you want a fresh fruit flavor without the fermentation character, you should add the fruit in secondary while giving your brew some rest.

If you want your brew to have the taste of fruit juice, then you have to press your fruit to get the juice and mix it with your brew when bottling.
When doing the latter, remember that introducing the sugar of the juice to your brew will reactivate the yeast and you'll have bottle bombs on your shelf. You'll need to sterile filter your brew beforehand, or pasteurize the filled bottles afterwards.

You should also consider reading some brewing literature. Gaining knowledge and being confronted with less confusion is always an advantage.

>>2658118
No, I'm using Brewersfriend.
FG was supposed to be 1.015, the highest FG allowed to be counted as a NEIPA under BJCP Style Guide. The Verdant yeast just attenuated a lot higher than expected, 84% to be exact.

>>2654393
Any update here?

My tournament NEIPA has finished fermentation after 4 days with FG 1.010.
The Lallemand Verdant IPA yeast is a fucking beast and I ended up with the bare minimum required for a NEIPA.
A colleague of mine wasn't so lucky, his Verdant yeast chewed through it down to 1.007....
It's now in dry hop and it smells just beautifully.
But I think I will add a touch of maltodextrin to the carbonation sugar when bottling.

>>2654639
Get a bottling wand like this >>2654636 but make sure you get one that is spring loaded, they work a thousand times better and don't make a mess when bumping the neck of the bottle.

>>2654393
30 points in less than 2 days can be plausible, depending on strain, temperature, oxygen and nutrients. What did you use to measure, Hydrometer or refractometer?
Also
>Stout
>No Flaked Barley
You should consider changing up the recipe a bit, flaked Barley is a must-have in a Stout.

>>2651167
Did you pitch the yeast and then let the beer sit for a week without any activity?
For beer, fermentation should start in less than 12 hours. My Championship NEIPA started bubbling after 2 hours.
Chances are high that your yeast was dead, did you make a starter?

>>2651987
Always wanted to try that but also had the fear of fermentation killing the psychoactives like this anon >>2652674 says. Backsweetening with mad honey sounds the most reasonable, but that would imply pasteurizing the mead afterwards which might kill the psychoactives as well.
Best bet would be to just make a regular mead and let it ferment dry. Then when serving, add a spoon of mad honey.

>>2653911
Don't really understand the concept you're chasing here. The boil kettle already has a heating element and what would you recirculate? The mash through the conical fermenter? The hot water through a HERMS Coil? Don't really get it.
Whatever it is what you're trying to accomplish, using the Unibräu conical fermenter for that must be the most expensive option on this planet.

>>2648423
Chuck it away and take it as a lessons learned. The moment you loosen up just a bit on your hygiene, you'll get fucked.
It's like computer guys claiming you don't need proper ESD safety to build a PC. That's a process that safely works until that one time it doesn't work.

>>2648773
Nothing to do with oxygen, that's an infection. If it's a kind of Lacto Bacillus, get rid of the entire bottle, except you want to make a bottle of Sour Beer in the future.
>they will consume the oxygen and leave carbon dioxide
Nothing will consume the oxygen, the oxygen remains in the headspace of the bottle. Any CO2 not solved into liquid will occupy the headspace and CO2 is more dense than air, thus layering the oxygen above the CO2.

>>2649171
I don't really understand this case, don't you have the possibility to simply ship it privately?

>>2647918
Friend of mine had exactly the same problem and to be honest, it's quite normal, but you can still reduce the amount that is produced by vigorously shaking in oxygen when starting the fermentation. The oxygen will suppress the creation of H2S and thus drastically reduce the flatulence aroma.
The rest fully depends on your process.

>>2645944
The Malt will be fine and as long as it's not a Hop-Aroma intense beer and the Hops is only for Bittering, that'll be fine as well.
Only the yeast should be replaced in case you don't want to make a 4-5 days yeast starter.

>>2645375
I always take the fruit out first. I take a second fermenter, put a large funnel in it and a large muslin bag into the funnel.
Then I pour the brew into the second fermenter. Don't forget to press out the fruit, since most of the yeast will sit in there.

Preparations for the German Brewing Contest from the Störtebeker Brewery have begun, topic is 21B New England IPA

Also on a related note, my Kentucky Common was rated 4 out of 5 stars by a beer sommelier, claiming it was better than many commercial beers he had. Pic related.

Last thread: >>2615584

Here's the rest of the general:
General calculators:
https://fermcalc.com/FermCalcJS.html (the best one)
https://thebrewhut.com/resources-recipes/brewing-calculators/
https://www.the-home-brew-shop.co.uk/home-brewing-tools-calculators

Others: https://www.brewersfriend.com/abv-calculator/
https://www.brewersfriend.com/hydrometer-temp/
https://www.brewersfriend.com/stats/

List of wine defects with description of symptoms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_fault
Cider faults: https://www.bjcp.org/education-training/education-resources/cider-faults/

MLF primer (any fruit wine/mead) - https://pricklycider.com/2020/11/07/hard-cider-tip-28-malolactic-fermentation/

Sur-lie aging (wine/mead) - https://morewinemaking.com/articles/Sur-lie_aging

Beginner FAQ with some questions from last thread: https://pastebin.com/Q3712A61

Some helpful do’s and don’ts for mead making (from mead anon): https://pastebin.com/6NJ3wkSU

>>2643437
>>2643451
It wasn't meant in terms of health-risk, it was meant in regards to flavor.
If you drink a whole bottle of cider or that exact bottle of cider concentrated to apple jack, doesn't change the amount of methanol and fusel alcohols you took in, but it impacts flavor significantly.

It only starts impacting health if you concentrate several bottles, fill all concentrates into one bottle and drink that one bottle in one go, but the increase in alcohol will most likely prevent you from finishing the bottle in the first place.

>>2642984
>It supposedly works better and can be easily repeated for days until there’s no more ice
Just remember that freeze distilling doesn't only concentrate the ethanol present in the brew but also the methanol and fusel alcohols.

>>2642271
>what other things are fun to make with brewing equipment?
Depends on what you define to be brewing. Explicitly with beer brewing equipment, aka brew kettle, wort cooler, etc. you can't really do much besides all varieties of beer.
But with your fermenting equipment, you can basically do everything.
I like to research historically and culturally relevant alcoholic beverages from all around the world. For example, I'd like to make an Eritrean/Ethiopian Tej, which is a kind of low-ABV mead with African tree bark.
Just search online for something interesting and take a break from beer. Maybe that'll rekindle the beer-brewing-side in a few weeks.

>>2633986
>>2636570
Kentucky Common is finished and it attenuated higher than expected.

>Expected FG: 1.015
>Real FG: 1.013
>ABV: 6.15%

Aroma and flavor are astonishing, the Cluster hops really bring a complex, earthy and herbaceous fruitiness into the sweet maltiness that I personally never experienced.

I'm so stoked how it will be when the beer has been carbonated in the bottles.

>>2636873
This anon >>2636884 perfectly summed up the matter.

Also fermentation is not always the conversion of sugars to ethanol. In cider you can create a malolactic fermentation after main fermentation is over in which even acids will be transformed. There is no way to create that effect only by adding X to alcohol.

Ginger beer is created by fermentation by yeasts and bacteria which live in a symbiotic relationship, that is called a SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast)

>>2636592
>Mash schedule: 45 min @ 63C, 30 min @ 70C, 15 min @ 76C
Were the mash timings in a recipe, or did you decide over them? What was the reasoning behind a 1.5h mash?

>Final gravity read 1025 but I didn't divide by the refractometer factor, I think it actually fermented all the way through to around 1010
in combination with
>Bottled into 500ml bottles with 2g of regular table sugar
in combination with
>My beer had a more malty and slightly yeasty flavor
makes me believe that your beer didn't finish fermentation when your refractometer read 1.025. Was carbonation plenty? 4g/l of sugar is pretty low, so when carbonation was plenty, that means your beer finished fermentation in the bottle, which explains the yeasty and non-pils flavor.

>First batch I used W34-70 and second one SafAle S-04
W34-70 is a bottom fermenting lager yeast which takes longer to ferment than ale yeast, which is another argument for the beer not having finished fermentation. You should ferment W34-70 on the cold side around 13°C and you should definitely do a diacetyl-rest when lagering the beer. It will taste weirdly like those butter-baking aromas or like Scottish butter cookies without. When fermenting W34-70 on the cold, there won't be much diacetyl but since your temperatures changed a lot and in the end was kept at 20°C, there might be diacetyl and other off-flavors.

All of this is not bad, as the beer seems drinkable and as long as you like it, everything is fine.
All of the above should only be guidance for your next brews, in case you want to improve on your brewing skills and knowledge.

Definitely keep us posted about your next brews, I'm especially interested in the Black Smokey IPA.

>>2633986
No real update for the Kentucky Common, day 10 and it's still happily bubbling away, quite long for an ale yeast at 23°C but still all in the norm.

>>2636326
>So, my first two batches of a Pils turned into something more resembling a Kellerbier / Festbier (?)
Kellerbier and Festbier are two very different styles so maybe it'll be more helpful if you describe your Pils in terms of aroma and flavor and in what you would think should be different.
Could be many reasons as to why it turned out that way, from flavor mistakes, wrong malt combinations or even wrong resting temperatures.

Would you mind posting your brew setup?

Moving into my new house is finally finished and last Sunday I had my first brew day on my terrace.

Brewed a Kentucky Common:

>Brewhouse efficiency: 70%
>OG: 1.059
>IBU: 22
>SRM: 20
>Projected FG: 1.015
>Projected ABV: 5.8%

Recipe can be found here:
>https://www.brewersfriend.com/homebrew/recipe/view/1346942/murky-woods-kentucky-common

>>2630605
Irish moss 10 minutes before flame-out and cold cashing removes about 95% of all haze of the beer.

>>2631102
You can make a straight cherry wine out of them but you can't store cherry wine for long. While a lot of wines profit from storing, cherry wine loses a lot of aroma and flavor over the months.
You can also add them to the fermentation stage of a mead for a nice, complex flavor, or to secondary for a more classic Viking Blood flavor.

>>2631363
I'm using TO-bottles for liqueur and self-made sauces. Never failed on me.

>>2628157
The rule of thumb is
>Ethanol [g/l] = Sugar [g/l] / 2
But that is the theoretical yield under perfect conditions and ignoring the fact that yeasts metabolize some sugars to energy for reproduction and culture growth. The reality is that Saccharomyces mostly convert to about 45% compared to sugar input, so 200g/l sugar will yield about 90g/l ethanol.
But that means that the 8% ABV that I claimed are closer to 9% ABV.

>>2627690
Grafschafter Goldsaft (Or Peckeleck how we call it) or Rübensaft has got 66g of sugar per 100g of Goldsaft.
So for 200g/l as this anon suggested >>2627746 you should use 300g of Rübensaft per liter, which will give around 8% ABV. I'd suggest 300g/l of sugar, so 450g of Rübensaft per liter for slightly more than 12% ABV. Rübensaft can use the additional ABV, it makes the wine a bit heavier and fuller in the mouth.
But as a strong advice, also use Goldsaft for backsweetening instead of normal sugar, else it will taste really bland.

>>2627872
I make Kvass regularly in summer, also tried Life of Boris' recipe, which was really nice.
But you should know that Kvass is not really comparable to beer. Not in the sense of ABV but in the sense that you're drinking a still fermenting drink with 100% active yeast inside.
Kvass is not really crushable, you might get severe stomach aches and diarrhea on overconsumption, depending on how you're used to drinking still fermenting drinks.

>>2628088
When distilling Kvass (which I honestly never heard of) you should wait until the Kvass is completely fermented. Heating up active yeast for distillation gives your spirit a kind of warm/old milk aroma.