Recent content by Frognostic

4 gallons. 844 + 4 = 848

Apple and blackberry cider, wild fermented. I made this last year (2016) and left it in secondary, with a lot of headspace, on the lees until about last week when I racked it into 2 litre bottles. Bad practice but it smells and tastes okay. It's dry but that's how I like it. I got about 14...

In the past I have added sloes and blackberries.

Nine gallons of cider made from windfall apples gathered from 4 or 5 different trees, wild yeast fermentation, some sugar added to bring the alcohol volume up by a few points. 498 + 9 = 507

Two gallons in a basket demijohn, added some sugar and nutrient but it started fermenting by itself so didn't need to add any packet yeast. 385 + 2 = 387

Green and red apples foraged for cider-making. I've already smashed the red ones into a pulp with a cured willow branch and i'm going to shred the green ones in a food-blender. They're crawling with small gnat-like flies which I don't think are fruit flies.

I made cider, and cyser, in September and October last year and pressed the juice from apples I foraged. Those apples were crawling with fruit flies which made me think there was a danger of it turning into vinegar. It's March now, I drank a bottle last night and it didn't taste like vinegar to...

My friend blamed a few dodgy home-brew batches on rubber bungs.

For what it's worth I used Lalvin Ec-1118 yeast for the cyser I made last September.

That sounds good to me. ^

That sounds pretty interesting. What kind of abv can your strain of wild yeast achieve because my worries on that front have been that the yeast would die of alcohol poisoning before it got to the desired final gravity. I would like to make a wild fermented mead and have considered using raw...

Plain mead with 4 litres of Springbrook Falls water, 1.36kg of Rowse honey and Safale S-33 Belgian ale yeast. Gravity was 1.076 but that would have increased somewhat due to the addition of a higher-gravity honey and water mixture used to top up the jug (due to the undesirable headspace in...

A variation of cyser, then. Thanks :). I looked up cyser in various online dictionaries but could find no etymological information.

If cyser refers to a honey cider or apple mead/melomel, what is the term used to describe a mead fermented with pear juice / perry fermented with honey? Is it just called a pear melomel or is there a more specific name for it? Although I can't get my hands on perry pears I can get my hands on...

I think with those W hand-corker things there's a knack to it and I just haven't got the knack of it yet. Do it too hard and the cork goes in too deep (and there's a greater chance of things slipping or breaking) and do it too gently and it goes in too shallow.