Recent content by Schark

I agree with this. While leaving it sit for months on end will help too, if you're impatient or lacking in empty bottles, I highly recommend pouring a little juice into every glass before you add your cider.

Been a couple weeks so I thought I would bump this. If I don't hear anything, well then, I'm going to just give this a shot and I'll report back :)

Just to wrap this up a bit, I did in fact put the watermelon in after one week. I let the whole batch sit another couple weeks before bottling. After a couple months, I can say that you don't really taste the watermelon flavour we all know. It tastes much more like a grapefruit. Bitter. I didn't...

I've made a couple batches of cider now and have always let it fully ferment, then cold crash and then bottle and leave still. Worked well so far, but now I'd like to try my hand at carbing and sweetening. My plan is to make a 5 gallon batch and let it completely ferment out. I won't cold...

I'll second what SixFooter said. I've seen hefes ready in a very short amount of time and be tasty and drinkable.

"It is the major outgassing of CO2 during fermentation that scrubs the flavors and aromas from the fruit." Thanks PoB. That explanation makes sense. I'm going with adding the fruit now.

I was under the impression though that adding fruit (this will be whole fruit and not juice) to your primary was a bad idea since a lot of the flavour will be fermented out. You want to add that juice in secondary to help maintain the falvours.

Normally I like to leave my wort in primary for 2 weeks. However, I plan on adding a watermelon to this batch (recipe below) and I don't think the watermelon will stay fresh another week and the batch has been in primary only 1 week already. My question then is: 1) Is there any compelling...

Ooohh. I was under the impression that carbing them at room temp and serving them at room temp was a good way to detect all the subtle flavours. Thanks Revvy, this is good to know!

Long story short, I bottled my lager three weeks ago and opened one last night to see how it was. It shot out of the bottle. Not far, only a few inches, but shot out none the same. Not being overly familiar with lagers, this might be normal, but my first thought was to put all the bottles...