Covid 19 isolation brewing

[G_B]

Hello everyone and hope your keeping well in these unprecedented times.
Anyway, I’m a returning brewer having brewed some good stuff mainly from this site. I have all the gear still so dusting them down as we speak.
Luckily having lost out to work and unable to keep brewing I’ve found a couple of yeasts.
Lalvin EC-118and Lalvin K1-V116

Obviously as I’m self-isolating here in sunny Northern Ireland I’m limited to resources.
Any suggestions on what to do with them??
Stay safe, stay home

 

[Michael L Collins]

Hello from the state of Ohio.

Not only am I not self-isolating, I'm going to random strangers home and bring them food. I work for a delivery company delivering food.

I would suggest checking on the expiration dates on the yeast. Nothing lives forever. Much like myself, I keep my winemaking simple. I keep several containers of concentrated fruit juice in my freezer when I have more time than wine.

I would suggest if you are just getting back into the hobby, maybe keep it simple. I'm making an Apple wine with cinnamon and ginger.

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi G_B and welcome. I agree with Michael and his suggestion to keep it simple but I would add that you can make a good country wine with many of the fruits and vegetables you are likely to have on hand and if you have access to dried flowers such as heather or elderflowers these too can make delicious wines as can ginger. I just pitched some slurry from a batch of mead I racked today (mixed berry) and the must I pitched the slurry into comprised of orange zest that I had been collecting (and freezing) for a few months. But there is another possible approach - and that is mead. Of course another genre of wines you might consider is using grains to flavor the wines - whether rice or wheat or barley (so you are not fermenting the grains themselves but using the grains as the flavor characteristics.
One last suggestion given what Michael mentioned with regard to the shelf-life of the yeast: you might try to cultivate some indigenous yeast (from fruit) OR if you bake bread you CAN (but it's not the best yeast to use a) because it has not been bred to drop out of suspension like lab cultured wine yeast and b) because it has not been bred to capture flavors in fruit or other substrates or to provide a character of its own to your wine.. but given the circumstances we find ourselves in beggars can't be choosers.

 

[Seamonkey84]

You can also try and made a small starter using a whole pack of expired yeast, like just a half gallon of juice. As long as it has some viable cells, it should start growing. Once it’s going strong in a smaller volume, the colony will expand to the batch you pitch it into.