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I am fermenting a mead right now, started on 3/5/13. It was supposed to be a "3 week mead" recipe I got from LHBS and modified a little bit. 15Lbs clover honey 2lbs buckwheat honey 3 tsp tannin 1 tsp fermax 1 packet EC-1118 OG: 1.140 3 weeks later (3/27), gravity should have been down...

I made a "cider" last month. Really it was made from apple juice and not apple cider. After I made and tasted apfelwein, I wanted something stronger, with more to it. I mixed the juice with honey, maple syrup, et.al. plus spices cinnamon and nutmeg. Apparently I put too much in, as now its...

...And everything seems fine. Actually better than fine; I had super active fermentation within an hour. It was a brain fart, not done intentionally. But I've pitched the yeast too hot before also and nothing bad happened. This was ec-1118 in a cider. At the LHBS demos I've been to, it's been...

I made some blueberry wine last week from 15lbs of frozen blueberries. I pureed the blueberries in a food processor. Now all the blueberry solids are up at the top. A guy at LHBS said I might need to regularly push the solids down with a sanitized stick or something. Is this good advice? Should...

Which do you all prefer? I like to save as much money as possible, and I also like to be as involved in the process as possible. Kits sort of feel like "cheating" to me. I'm not sure if that's logical or not, but I don't really care. To me, opening up a box and dumping the contents into a...

When I say sangria, I mean "from the bottle" sangria. Not wine in a punch bowl with a bunch of fruit tossed at it. When I google "sangria recipes" all I get are instructables on how to add fruit to a punch bowl. I hope I don't make any savants go cross-eyed my mentioning such a déclassé name...

My pantry is filling up with bubbling carboys and the wife is starting to fuss about it. I don't really have any other place to put them where they can be in a dark, climate controlled environment with minimal collateral damage should one spill its contents for some reason. The only other...

I have 23lbs of frozen blueberries, and I want to do something with them in the morning. I also have 6 gallons of apple juice (not from concentrate) that I was going to use for apfelwein, and 5lbs of honey left over from today's batch of mead. I was wondering if some combination of these...

I just started a 5gal batch of mead today. 2Lbs of buckwheat, 15lbs of clover, EC-1118 yeast. I have some cinnamon sticks and vanilla beans I was going to throw in there, but I'm not sure if I should put them in now, or wait until I rack to secondary. What say you?

I'm looking for an answer on a layman's level. I'm having trouble working out in my mind the relationship between calories before and after fermentation. My initial thought was that they are the same, because the volume of the fluid remains the same, and because calories are a measure of energy...

I haven't been brewing that long, so bear with me. I couldn't help but notice that among the pundits of brewing, there is a strict unspoken insistence upon using the German words for some thing and not for others; things seemingly chosen at random. For example: Krausen - I see no reason this...

I'm sure this has been answered more than once in the last 1076 pages of the epic Apfelwine thread, but I don't I'm not feeling up to reading all of it. Also I made my own thread because I don't want my question to be quickly buried 8 pages deep with no answer. Anyway, How long does this...

I was just looking at these mead recipes and saw this: Is there something special about mead that makes it incompatible with a food grade plastic bucket fermenter?

EDIT: Crap! Can't fix a spelling error in the title. I want to do something experimental. I was in the asian market today and they have all kinds of exotic fruits there, most of which I have tasted in the past and some are very sweet. As I was walking by them, viewing them for the first time...

I was always a cheap light beer kind of guy. Bud light, whatever, as long as I could drink it in volume without breaking the bank. The more expensive/exotic beers like dark beers, craft beers, etc. didn't appeal to my wallet OR my palette. I got into homebrewing to make swill even cheaper than I...

I was just reading this thread about yeast pitching rates in cider. It was recommended by one person to not under-pitch, as this would give unwanted wild yeasts or other fiends the opportunity to get a foothold before the intended yeast can do it's job, and that this can result in sulphur...

I had a "bright" idea a few weeks ago. I split half my batch of pale ale, and in one half I mixed in 2lbs of molten nestle semisweet chocolate morsels and half a tub of Jif creamy peanut butter. Total waste of time. Tastes like death. literally made me puke in my mouth a little. That's...

I was searching the forum to see if the orange Homer buckets are safe to ferment in. There was a lot of discussion back in 2009. Someone was saying that a chemist had verified that they are food grade, then someone else said that they sold an injection mold to a guy who makes the orange buckets...

I started out with a 1 gallon mead recipe. A "kit" from my LHBS; I think it had ~2.5lbs of honey. About 2 weeks into fermentation, I thought it would be a good idea to add some cherries, so I added a 49 oz can of "sweet" cherry puree. The cherries didn't taste very sweet so I added 2lbs of brown...

Why is a carboy the preferred fermentation container? I've done beer in plastic buckets before, and seen a lot of other people do it too. Is there something different about wine that necessitates a carboy?