Recent content by Gonzo_Don

Been using my BrewDemon 3 gallon conical for 2 years exclusively for hard cider and it's just now developed a pin hole drip in the seam at the bottom of the cone. It'll leak maybe one drop every few hours and as the trub settles, it self-seals and stops. After this batch finishes, I'll clean it...

I just found 6 bottles of this I kept from December 2014. At the time, my comment in my log was "Horrible - never again." Can't wait to open a bottle and see what 2-1/2 years has done to it. Mind you, it was kept in a cardboard box in a garage in Tennessee where our summers hit high 90's and...

I do cider and the reason I do is simple--you can't buy decent cider in the United States of America. It's all nothing more than sweetened apple juice with artificial carbonation. When you do your own, you get something closer to Irish or English cider - dry, fermented out, with natural...

I second BlackDog-Brewery's opinion. With some user modifications the thing is just "okay" for initial fermentation of wine, but that's it. If you see me using a Big Mouth Bubbler, call the FBI because somebody's got a gun to my head.

Absolutely okay - old plastic 2L soda bottles, 1L bottles, even the little 8oz. club soda bottles. Wash them out with a bit of dish soap, rinse well, and then use Starsan on them prior to bottling. Fill a bottle, give it a shake, pour into the next bottle with a funnel, give it a shake, etc...

1-No, there is no need to pasteurize the apple juice unless you want to ensure the yeast are dead and will not carbonate the beverage beyond the capacity of the bottle to hold it. When I used to store my hard carbonated cider in the garage or in the pantry, I always pasteurized it; since I've...

Anybody tried to make a cider from any of the hundreds of juice blends available at the grocery store? I normally make straight apple--5 gallons of juice, 2# of sugar, a packet of champagne yeast. Ferments out dry as a powderhouse and I add a can of thawed apple juice concentrate at bottling...

Best of luck to you, Steve. When I called them they pretty much laughed at me and told me I didn't know what I was doing. I wish there were some way to give folks a warning in this forum right up front and put these people out of business once and for all.

I was being a little facetious. The electrician's tape fixes the leaky lid problem, but it'll only hold for long enough to get a batch of cider through a 10-14 day ferment. I would never, in a million years, use this thing for a secondary ferment of wine because it leaks like a sieve. I've found...

After fighting with Big Mouth Bubbler and their incredibly shoddy customer service, return policies, quality control, and inability to design a functional plastic carboy, I have solved the problem of the non-sealing cap. 1. Drill a 1" hole in the thing about 1" from the bottom. 2. Get yourself...

They should send out a replacement lid FREE OF CHARGE to everybody who got ripped off buying a plastic BMB in the first place. That piece of junk cost me 10 gallons of good fruit juice before I shelved in forever.

Only changes I made were using Red Star Champagne yeast, adding a tablespoon of yeast nutrient, a tablespoon of pectic enzyme, 2 pounds of sugar (I wanted about 7%+ ABV), and the one stroke of genius: I added a can of frozen apple juice concentrate instead of the fresh apple juice at bottling...

I topped mine off with Carlo Rossi Paisano. It improved the taste tremendously, but I have to admit--I made 5 gallons and racked it off into a 6 gallon carboy that I thought was 5 gallons, so I had to add the entire 4 liter jug of Carlo Rossi to top it off. But that's the only way I'll make it...

Been a while since I was on here, sorry. I knew I was getting no seal because my fermentation lock quit bubbling on a 2-day old ferment. I would take it apart, reseal, and it would start bubbling immediately and bubble like mad for 2-days. Then it'd quit again. I'd do this every 2 days for 2...

I thought the Stella Cidre was great. Only thing I didn't like was the low alcohol percentage (4.5%). I make mine around 6%. Anything less seems like a waste of apple juice. Does anybody have a recipe where I can hit the 8% to 9% mark and not get that "rocket fuel" taste right out of the...