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@fatbloke; yeah, battery acid would be a better descriptor. It felt "prickly" on my tongue. With beer I can taste out of the primary how the beer will turn out, with the exception of the subtle/complex flavors which develop in the bottle. I thought I could do the same with mead, but I guess...

Sweet, thanks for the votes of confidence. Just making sure my brew didn't go horribly wrong right off the bat. I'm guessing soured milk/yogurt is just what yeast tastes like. I added a lot of different things into the batches (I split it into 5, 1-gallon secondaries), and some are taking...

Here is a little background: I made ~5 gallons of mead with the following recipe... 12 lbs Minnesota Clover Honey 2 Limes 1 cup strong tea Wyeast #4184 (Sweet Mead) Priming Sugar (for yeast cultivator) Yeast Nutrient I left it in a 7-gallon primary and after two weeks I racked it into...

@phoenixs4r haha, sounds like my dogs. Picky eaters considering they roll in deer poo every morning. I'll give it a try though, maybe they'll eat them if I give them a little of the beer first... Is there any way to make human food though, or are all of the sugars and good tastiness gone by...

I'm sure this is already a thread, but I scoured the interwebs and found nothing on this. What do people do with their used grains? I usually just compost them, but I feel like there must be something more useful to do with them. Maybe bread-making? Any ideas?

I did not think of that. Extracting I'm sure will work very well with the spices, but I'm not sure about the berries. Have you tried making an extract with berries before? 4 down, 1 to go...

Meads 2, 4, and 5 should be easy. I'm thinking for the citrus melomel I'm going to just pour the juice in, for the Cocoa Metheglin pour the cocoa and cinnamon in, and for the chipotle capsicumel throw some chiles in the 1-gallon jug. That leaves meads 1 and 3. The actual old-style mead recipe...

I always strain and sparge my grains, but now I think I won't add the chocolate at all. I got the chocolate thinking that it would balance out the high alcoholic content with a very wheaty flavor. I was thinking that the darker the grain, the more undigestable starches it has-->more wheaty...

Hey all, I am trying to figure out how to make 5 1-gallon batches of different types of mead by starting with the same 5-gallon must. I want to keep the mead together for as long as possible, so I am going to ferment all 5 gallons for a few weeks, and then separate into 5 1-gallon containers...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that starting with an OG 1.120 to a FG of 1.010 would be the same amount of honey and alcohol than starting with OG 1.110 and backsweetening the FG to 1.010 What's the difference?

What I am getting here is that 14% yeast reduces OG 0.11 to FG (with some scaling involved). Are there any other properties of the yeast beside alcohol tolerance that will affect this? I am using WYeast Sweet Mead, so I'm guessing there are. Also I am adding flavors to different batches of the...

I was thinking of preparing the Chocolate Wheat much like coffee, and adding it as late as possible to the mix (maybe even adding it to the carboy right before pitching the yeast). Why do you think I should cold-steep the Chocolate Wheat?

@tweake What sort of OG readings correspond to mead types? (i.e. what OG would a dry mead have? a sweet mead? etc...)

I just went dumpster-diving for 1.75L bottles to age my mead in. I live in collegetown, so I pretty much just went to the neighbors. 5 gallons of liquor bottles in <1hr, score! In the middle of sanitizing them right now. Gotta love the smell of B-Brite in the evening...

Yeah, I guess there is no danger if I boil the raisins. I just don't want the little yeasties to starve in there. I think I'm also going to try freezing the raisins beforehand, apparently that breaks cell walls and releases sugars.

I am relatively new to brewing (i.e. I don't know much of the science behind it), but pretty much joined this site to learn about all of the ins and outs of brewing. Please do tell me what is going on with this diastatic power business. So, I bought my grains from MidwestSupplies, and in their...

Thas weird, it's working perfectly now. I tried adding a little less chocolate malt (8oz), and now it looks like a balanced recipe. Beersmith: OG: 1.076 IBU: 22.8 Color: 25 ABV: 8.1 Thank you for the help!

Hey all, Oddly enough my father is the one who introduced me to brewing, but I am glad he did. Beer-brewing might just be the greatest (not to mention oldest) hobby known to man; it's fun to make, even better to drink, and I love building recipes. I started brewing just to make alcohol...

I have been reading up on what makes a Weizenbock and made myself up a recipe, and it seems solid based on the other recipes I have seen. I downloaded Beersmith to double-check it and it has an incredibly low estimated OG & ABV, and unsurprisingly high Color. Here is what Beersmith says: Est...

What do you (or anyone else) think of keeping the raisins in the mead? I hear that the yeast needs proteins so they can continue to grow, but I am already putting in yeast nutrients.