Recent content by Brett_Bellmore

Sorry about the delayed response, I'm kind of under the weather at the moment. But here's the recipe I typically use: Per gallon, in a fastferment conical. 2 lbs orange blossom honey 48oz organic cranberry juice. (Lakewood brand: It's pure cranberry juice, pasteurized, no preservatives.) Zest...

I make cranberry/orange mead every year, and I generally have to add considerable potassium carbonate before the yeast will do anything. Cranberries are amazingly acidic! Generally, if you use sodium carbonate to neutralize acid, it tends to make the brew salty, and calcium carbonate makes it...

I've seen this myself, when I make the straight orange blossom mead my wife likes. I can get it as clear as I like, stabilize, backsweeten with more orange blossom honey, and it's hazy again. It's something in the honey itself. I've found it does settle out after months in the bottle, though...

Oh, heck, I guess I'm going to have to try making something. Probably a bacon mead, in the secondary. I'll keep you guys posted. Be a while, it's going to start as a straight clover honey mead to begin with.

You'll generally only get pee hole sting if you're not good about washing your hands after handling the peppers; Capsaicin is barely soluble in water, (The alcohol will fix that.) it's more oil soluble. That means it will easily hang around in your intestines for the full ride, especially if not...

I find that recipe a bit scary, personally: It's been my experience that alcohol really amplifies capsasin.

Agree with Snuffy: You likely don't want the flavor of raw meat. *Maybe* rare, if it was bled out well. But I could see slicing off the nice caramelized surface of a steak or roast, and using that to flavor a mead. Can't beat the Maillard reaction! To maximize that effect, you want to rub the...

Had to look them up, they're a surfacant and anti-fungal. Yeast, of course, is a fungus. If it was a sorbate, you could just massively pitch yeast, and the yeast would absorb the sorbate, drop out of solution, and you'd be good to go. I've done that. But I can't find anything on how this stuff...

Nah, I'm not offended. In fact, I agree that 100th of a g resolution probably is overkill for brewing. But there are ingredients where you probably do want at least a 10th of a gram resolution, especially if you're making small batches. The thing is, 100th of a gram resolution is pretty cheap...

Well, sorbate is, what, 0.75 g per gallon? If I'm running a 1 gallon fermenter, I want to be closer than +/-2g. But, sure, +/-0.01 is overkill, a tenth of a gram would be fine. For heavier stuff I have a kitchen scale, I save the digital scale for the really small scale stuff. Meta K, sodium...

Probably good for most ingredients, but a little coarse for things like metasulphite or sorbate when you're stabilizing, which is what I use my digital scale for.

I've been very happy with this one, been using it for a couple years. Edit: I think I should mention that it does have a minor defect: If you add whatever you're measuring too slowly, it seems to assume calibration is drifting, and re-tarr. I haven't found that a problem since I first noticed...

I'm planning on long term storage in flip tops, but was thinking of dipping them in wax as a backup for the ones I pack away. So far my batches have been too small to leave enough to pack away like that, though. I've had no problem with them out to a year, and I guess the rubber should survive...

Loose airlock?

So, I'd been in a little bit of a hurry to bottle my batch of cranberry/blood orange mead. (Wanted to free up the fermenter for something else.) As a result, the bottles ended up with an unpleasant amount of debris in the bottom after sitting in my closet for a couple months. Well, my better...