GreenEnvy22
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Sep 17, 2015
- Messages
- 172
- Reaction score
- 155
Hi all,
I'm from the Niagara region, on the Canadian side, in Ontario.
I'm new to brewing. I'm currently doing both wine and beer.
A few years ago my wife bought me a 1-gallon kit, it was all grains, no extract. It turned out incredibly well, but all that work for 6 bottles of beer didn't seem worth it.
I never got around to making more, even though I wanted too.
In 2012 we bought a house with a lot of muscat grape vines in the back yard. That year we picked the grapes and had a friend make them into wine for us. We got about 30 bottles which we split 50/50 with him. The wine was good, and I decided to make my own next time.
2013 and 2014 weren't good. We had very low yields and I didn't get the netting up in time so the little grapes there were got eaten by the robins.
For 2015 we had a great crop. We harvested on Sept 11th (I wanted to wait a lot longer to get more sugar but wasps were eating them like crazy). We got way more juice this time. From 280lbs of grapes we got 85L of juice. I didn't have near enough equipment for that so I went on to Kijiji (like a Canadian craigs list) and found someone selling 11 5-gallon carboys, a couple larger demijohns, and about 15 one-gallon carboys, plus stoppers, airlocks, etc.
So got that wine all going and I turned my attention to beer. I had picked up a couple kit cans of extract, one coopers and one another brand I can't remember.
The coopers was the real ale, but I didn't feel like doing just the basic kit. So I used the can of coopers, 1.5 KG of some amber liquid malt extract, 250g of dextrose. I also steeped 100g of crystal malt for 30 minutes, and then 10g of cascade hops for 10 minutes.
Put it all together in a fermenting pail and I ended up with slightly too much, 24L instead of 23L. Temp after mixing was good though at 27C.
I just have the lid on loosely and it's down in my cellar with the wine. In a few days once fermentation dies down I'll drill a hole in the lid for an airlock, seal the lid and then install an airlock.
I'm hoping I didn't screw anything up with sort of hodge-podging the numbers a bit. I sort of followed some other peoples recipes I found online but improvised a bit. my OG was at 1042 which looked right so I'm hoping to end up with a little over 5% alcohol. Hopefully the extra flavour I added with make up for the extra 1L of water.
My cellars air temp is about 22C fairly steadily.
If anyone has any thoughts, I'm happy to listen.
I hope to become a regular on here and learn a lot.
I'm from the Niagara region, on the Canadian side, in Ontario.
I'm new to brewing. I'm currently doing both wine and beer.
A few years ago my wife bought me a 1-gallon kit, it was all grains, no extract. It turned out incredibly well, but all that work for 6 bottles of beer didn't seem worth it.
I never got around to making more, even though I wanted too.
In 2012 we bought a house with a lot of muscat grape vines in the back yard. That year we picked the grapes and had a friend make them into wine for us. We got about 30 bottles which we split 50/50 with him. The wine was good, and I decided to make my own next time.
2013 and 2014 weren't good. We had very low yields and I didn't get the netting up in time so the little grapes there were got eaten by the robins.
For 2015 we had a great crop. We harvested on Sept 11th (I wanted to wait a lot longer to get more sugar but wasps were eating them like crazy). We got way more juice this time. From 280lbs of grapes we got 85L of juice. I didn't have near enough equipment for that so I went on to Kijiji (like a Canadian craigs list) and found someone selling 11 5-gallon carboys, a couple larger demijohns, and about 15 one-gallon carboys, plus stoppers, airlocks, etc.
So got that wine all going and I turned my attention to beer. I had picked up a couple kit cans of extract, one coopers and one another brand I can't remember.
The coopers was the real ale, but I didn't feel like doing just the basic kit. So I used the can of coopers, 1.5 KG of some amber liquid malt extract, 250g of dextrose. I also steeped 100g of crystal malt for 30 minutes, and then 10g of cascade hops for 10 minutes.
Put it all together in a fermenting pail and I ended up with slightly too much, 24L instead of 23L. Temp after mixing was good though at 27C.
I just have the lid on loosely and it's down in my cellar with the wine. In a few days once fermentation dies down I'll drill a hole in the lid for an airlock, seal the lid and then install an airlock.
I'm hoping I didn't screw anything up with sort of hodge-podging the numbers a bit. I sort of followed some other peoples recipes I found online but improvised a bit. my OG was at 1042 which looked right so I'm hoping to end up with a little over 5% alcohol. Hopefully the extra flavour I added with make up for the extra 1L of water.
My cellars air temp is about 22C fairly steadily.
If anyone has any thoughts, I'm happy to listen.
I hope to become a regular on here and learn a lot.
