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Holy Saccharomyces, Batman! Three and a half hours after my previous post, the 1-quart mason jar is full to overflowing. The starter is apparently flourishing, and has more than doubled in volume. I had to dump some of it out so it has room to continue growing, if that's what it's going to do...

So far so good. After capturing 1.25 cups of trub when I bottled my ale two days ago, I left it in the fridge overnight, in a 1-quart mason jar. This will be my starter the next time I bake bread. I left the lid loose to allow CO2 to escape. Yesterday I fed it one cup of flour plus 1/2 cup of...

I've used grocery-store apple juice to backsweeten cyser, and I was happy with the result. Much depends on your own taste... if you have the ability to split the cyser into two or three different vessels, you could try different things with each one and see what you like best. For the record...

Preliminary report: I bottled my brown ale today, and I saved about 1 1/4 cup of trub, which is now in a one-quart mason jar in my fridge. Evidently, from what I've read online, I need to treat this like a sourdough starter, which I think means a week or so of periodic feeding before it's ready...

I've made a few cysers that were around 12% ABV, bottled in 12-oz beer bottles with crown caps. For mine, 4 or 5 years seems to be the peak -- they slowly get more bland after that. Still OK and quite drinkable, but no longer at their best.

Thanks very much, that's the kind of detail I was hoping for. I realize that it could vary with different yeast strains, different baking techniques, and etc -- I was just looking for a ballpark estimate to use as a starting point. Also I wasn't sure if I should make a starter or not, but it...

Agreed, I think it's going to be a fun experiment -- that's all I'm really hoping for. I bake bread once or twice a week, and I'm pretty sure that I'll end up with something that's reasonably edible no matter what. Beyond that, who knows? Maybe I end up doing this every time I brew, or maybe...

My biggest question is about quantity of yeast to use... I've been checking some online recipes, and I've seen recommendations for anywhere from 1/2 cup to 1 cup of either trub, or sponge made from trub. Some people claim that the bread will rise very quickly if you're careful to maintain a good...

I brew beer and I bake bread. Lately I've become interested in medieval bread recipes, many of which call for "ale barm." I think that's what we might call krausen -- apparently they used to skim off some of the scummy foam that appears on top of fermenting ale, which evidently contains enough...

Try different recipes and decide what you like :-) I brew my traditional meads at about 12%; others prefer higher or lower values. Which is fine... one of the big reasons to homebrew in the first place is so you can make what *you* want, rather than depending on what some commercial brewer...

71B yeast, as @Dan said. And about the tannin -- I wouldn't say that it's bitter, but it does give the pyment an edge -- it adds a certain sharpness that wine has but grape juice does not, if that makes any sense. When I've used tannin, I've added it at the end. Depending on your bottling...

It's also a lot more work to start with fruit, but some of us find it interesting to see what you can do with simpler processes. I'm sure that my pyment couldn't compare to a $100 bottle of fine wine, but it was amazingly good considering that it was just a gallon of store-brand grape juice, a...

I made pyment a few years ago, using 1 gallon of grocery-store grape juice and 1 pound of honey. You're using 4 times as much honey as I did -- 2 pounds honey for a half gallon, not including the extra pound for backsweetening. Have you measured the OG? It's gotta be really high; you may not...

I did something similar a few years ago. I used honey and grape juice from the grocery store (one gallon of store-brand grape juice plus 1 pound of honey), 71B yeast, and added nutrient at 24 and 48 hours. OG was 1.086 and final gravity 0.997 (so ABV almost 12%), and the ambient temperature in...

From 1998 but has some good information and results of some experiments: Recreating Medieval English Ales

1.110 to 1.010 in 3 weeks isn't unreasonable, especially if you initially gave it only 1 teaspoon of nutrient for 5 gallons. My math says that works out to about 13% ABV. If the seal on your bucket isn't perfect, then some of the CO2 could be leaking out, hence less visible activity in the...

As a complete wild guess... you've mentioned temperature correction several times. How big of a correction do you generally make? At almost any reasonable fermentation temperature, the adjustment should be just a few points (i.e. 1.050 becomes 1.049 or 1.052 -- something small like that). If...

I'm curious about this as well. I've used straight tap water (from a municipal water supply, water comes from Lake Erie), filtered tap water (run the lake water through a common Brita water filter), and spring water from the grocery store, but I've never done a really solid comparison test. I'd...

In general I am full willing to use expired ingredients, but the bulging can is a very bad sign. Whatever has been going on inside that can, it's not good for you. There are bacterial spores that can survive boiling. Pitch it.

More power to ya! From one who can't stand waste, and is not finicky about expiration dates. I'd never brew crappy beer on purpose, but fer the cryin' out loud, I bet this batch will be better than most commercial beers were 30 years ago. Somehow people managed to get by in those bygone days...