Recent content by bernardsmith

I have a question. occasionally bottle carb my mead and wine. Usually , I simply add a half teaspoon or a full teaspoon of sugar to 12 oz or Grolsch bottles. just bought a pack of carbonation drops (Brewer's Best) and the pack states that there are approx. 54 drops inside at a weight of 256 g...

When I make mead and I often add hops to boiling water for 20 minutes and then at "flameout" and then for 3 to 4 days just before bottling. Just made a mead with added malted chocolate barley that I hopped with Galaxy hops and is undergoing bottle carbonation right now. All that said, dunno...

This is so useful to me. I make hard cheese and that needs to be aged either in cheese wax or vacuum sealed,

Thanks. I guess my concern is that given the fact that the volume (of liquid - from the juiced fruit) has increased by 50% my concern was whether the 1.080 reading was based on the fermentable sugars OR on the sugars AND the chopped up fruit. When I took the OG, the whole fruit was not adding to...

I am making a gallon of strawberry wine. I added enough water to 2 lbs of sugar to make 1 US gallon. That should give me an SG of 1.090. I poured this syrup over 5 pounds of strawberries and allowed the fruit to macerate on the syrup with some pectic enzyme. I then blended everything and the...

Looks like you are trying to reincarnate a long-time dead thread. Most wines use 1 package of wine yeast for 1 -5 gallons, where the wine is not more than about 12% ABV, and then you might use 2 packs for more than about 3 gallons if you are trying to make an unbalanced wine at much more than...

If anyone has a concern about the availability of suitable tannins for pickles, you might try growing horseradish in large pots. (Horse radish tap roots can be enormous and you can hear the roots laugh when you imagine that you have dug up the plant. The leaves are a great source of tannins for...

Kit makers suggest you add Bentonite as you pitch the yeast because the action of bentonite during fermentation forces the clay to continually rise and fall. When one adds the clay after fermentation has ended, there is no CO2 being produced that will help force the clay to rise once it has...

For really effective extraction - and I use this method when I make liqueurs and extracts such as vanilla - I simply macerate the fruit in vodka but I seal the container and place it in a water bath at about 160 F for two hours with a sous vide precision cooker. The alcohol cannot boil off...

I assume that Vikings Blood and Dragons Blood mead are all but clones. I make mine with hibiscus and ginger.

Two or three quick thoughts: what ABV are you aiming for? There is plenty of fermentable sugar in most commercial soft ciders (apple juice) to ferment dry to about 5-7% ABV THAT is what I would expect of a cider. In my opinion, one of the better yeasts for fermenting apple juice is 71B. It has...

For the future, another possible solution might be to hydrate some champagne yeast and treat the problem batch as if it was a stalled batch. In other words, you begin by doubling the volume of the hydrated yeast, and when that begins to show real activity, you again double the doubled volume and...

I think the original recipe may have called for 3.5 lbs of honey dissolved in water to make 1 US gallon, that would have had a starting gravity of about 1. 112, with the expectation that the bread yeast would have quit before all the sugars would have been fermented, so leaving the mead sweet...

I would certainly do some reading on making mead. Two books I would recommend are Ken Schramm's The Compleat Meadmaker, and Steve Piatz The Complete Guide to Mead Making. That aside, you can certainly use your cousin's honey. It's likely to be wildflower (that is a wide range of random flowering...

Interesting question. I wonder if what I am about to say comes too late to help but here goes. Almost all table fruit has similar amounts of sugar - around about 1 lb of sugar in every gallon of expelled juice, so a starting gravity of around 1.045 - 1.055 . That means if your don't add any...