Recent content by evilhomer

I want to make mead, never have before. I have my own beehives in Michigan, due to problems getting jars this year I ended up with a bunch of honey left in a bucket that has solidified. Instead of dealing with that mess I thought, why not just make mead with it? So I've got plenty of honey...

I've been looking over a bunch of the old posts and various internet recipes. Here in Michigan we have the dark purple berries and they are very sweet and watery, almost too sweet. Wondering if anyone has recommendations on how to adjust for that? We've been picking them and putting them in the...

How many pounds should I put it the boil? I made a pumpkin ale last year and my notes said I did 5lbs in a 5 gallon batch. This sounded a little on the high side and I'm wondering if I got my notes right.

What about with the method I've seen on some recipes where there's only a 2 week fermentation? If I wanted it to be in the 5-6% alcohol range, could I use one of those methods? Ferment for 2 weeks, bottle with or without more cider and then pasteurize the bottles to stop fermentation in the bottle?

Hey Yooper can you point me towards a thread with the steps for making a simple cider. That is what I'd like to do. There's an orchard near me that will fill your fermenter or carboy for $4/gallon. My plan is leave them an ale pale and then just add yeast.

Well it looks like it's been two weeks now and I just left them in the basement this entire time. I opened one up tonight, total gusher, probably 80-90% on my counter top. Is this salvageable? Pasteurize, refrigerate and maybe freeze a little the night I want to drink some so it doesn't shoot out?

Yeah I added a fresh 1/2 gallon to my bottling bucket. Figured I could both back sweeten and use it as the priming sugar. I'll just let it ride and see what happens, it is delicious so far, just didn't carb up. The carbing doesn't really bother me much but I read so much about needing...

Well cider is full of sugar so I figured that would do it.

Bear with me, I haven't kept good records. I started with 2 gallons of local cider and an entire vile of cider yeast and that's it. I don't remember the gravity numbers but I checked the gravity after about 3 weeks and beer smith said 6.8% alcohol. I assumed fermentation was done at this point...

I'm working on my first wine. I didn't measure the OG when I mixed everything. I just followed the recipe which gave me a whopping 1.114. I transferred to a 5 gallon carboy yesterday and it measured at 1.004. Beersmith is telling me that's 14.7%, so not terribly high but higher than what people...

I used Vitners Harvest MA33 and I did not use a nutrient. It smelled pretty delicious before I added the yeast. I'm afraid to smell it now, I made that mistake once with fermenting beer and got face full of CO2. I just took a gravity sample 1.1. I smelled the sample and it's delicious. The...

Well this is where I'm at at this point. A lot of the peaches were pretty tasty already. As I cleaned and sliced them to make the wine my kids were devouring my slices. Some were still too hard and green so I ended up with about half for the wine and half for the compost. I decided to go...

Yeah, still a ton more left. I initially didn't plan on making any wine. My plan was to can and eat what's on the tree. The wine was more of a what the hell can I do with all of these other peaches?

I've been letting the soften on my counter. The ones that have at least some color taste decent, not the best I've had but okay. The little green ones are edible but not very sweet. I'm guessing that good peaches would make good wine so I think I'm gonna pick through for the best ones and...

My peaches were in the process of ripening when the weight brought down two branches. I picked them and ended up with 5 grocery bags of peaches. From what I've read they won't actually ripen any further, just soften up some. Can I make wine with this or should they go to the compost pile?