Homebrew / Moonshine - Sink vodka appreciation

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M(e)ad Man said:
I want to experiment with adding some fruit to it, what do you people recommend?
Should the fruit be used whole (sliced) or would juice be better?
I have easy access to lemons, kiwis (heh) and apples.
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Orange (and optional "mulling spices" i.e. cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, allspice, vanilla) is classic, but lemon could be good. Just be careful of your pH or add the lemon after fermenting. The spices alone make "melomel." Apple is also a classic, this is called "cyser" and has a very long history of being made in Europe. Whole fruit added to the watered down honey mash, boiled if you plan to pitch yeast, or just soaked if you're going for a wild ferment. I like to remove the fruit before pitching yeast, especially with bitter pithy stuff like citrus, but some like to leave it in through racking to secondary.
 
Whatever you do, stay away from Lalvin D47 yeast. I wasted $100 of Breitsamer Tangy Forest Honey on it. I used it in my very first batches three years ago, and they had this insipid, sickly-sweet, almost yeasty flavor even after clearing. I thought it was just poor quality honey, but turns out it's the yeast, because this imported, extremely delicious honey now smells like ass, and I suspect the final flavor will be similar. I know it's a very popular strain, but I just don't enjoy its results. It isn't a clean fermenter.
 
Hantavirus said:
cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, allspice, vanilla
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Going to try this. Adding all this in secondary seems the safest option, especially cloves which I don't trust to not turn everything into ass. I reckon cinnamon would be fine in primary in limited quantities and maybe add more in secondary if need be, what do you think?
I did some estimations on how much spices to add based on what I read online, if you tried this recipe, how much of each spice did you add?
 
M(e)ad Man said:
Going to try this. Adding all this in secondary seems the safest option, especially cloves which I don't trust to not turn everything into ass. I reckon cinnamon would be fine in primary in limited quantities and maybe add more in secondary if need be, what do you think?
I did some estimations on how much spices to add based on what I read online, if you tried this recipe, how much of each spice did you add?
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So I checked my brewing logbook and I misremembered: spiced mead is "metheglin" and "melomel" has fruit other than apple, traditionally blackberry or similar. As for spice amounts, it depends how strong you want it, really. In a gallon of melomel I used one cinnamon stick, 1/2 tsp whole allspice berries and nutmeg, crushed by hand, and 3 cloves. I boiled them with the honey and water before primary and strained them out when racking to secondary. You don't want to leave them in secondary as they may leech tannins and other stuff that could make your brew bitter.

A more traditional metheglin in the Welsh tradition uses rosemary, thyme, sage, allspice, and ginger. This recipe looks pretty good, though I would use a lot less clove, maybe just one or two.
 
I received many bushels of pawpaw fruit last year from a friend and with the aid of garbage cans i fermented them and distilled a respectable amount of PawPaw Brandy, i didn't like the distillate even after i proofed it down but i attributed that to the infamous "pawpaw funk" and figured that aging and time would smooth it out for me
after a year of sitting on oak, i have discovered that i do not like pawpaw brandy at all and thought the entire project for naught, but the 13 people who have tried it enjoy it
of the 16 bottles i started with last weekend, Ive 6 bottles left, and i will be enjoying none of them
Tears in the rain
 
Dfackt0 said:
of the 16 bottles i started with last weekend, Ive 6 bottles left, and i will be enjoying none of them
Tears in the rain
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Sharing is one of the best parts of this hobby, but you should save a bottle or two imo. Throw them in the basement or other temperature-stable spot and forget about them for a few years or so. I bottle age most of my meads; even aging in glass can have miraculous results.
 
Hantavirus said:
Sharing is one of the best parts of this hobby, but you should save a bottle or two imo. Throw them in the basement or other temperature-stable spot and forget about them for a few years or so. I bottle age most of my meads; even aging in glass can have miraculous results.
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Unless you have a barrel of at least 10-12 gallons, aging in glass is the only option. Smaller barrels have too much surface area in contact with the liquid, so it's similar to just letting it sit on an oak spiral because you just get rapid leeching of overwhelming woody flavor instead of the micro-oxygenation, flavor concentration, and the slow transfer of tannins/vanillins/esters/aldehydes that you want. Those tiny barrels are just decorative novelties.
 
My mother was a serial wine brewer, and although she preferred using fresh fruit to brew with, each year she made a creditable wine from simple cartons of fruit juice from the supermarket.

I don’t have a recipe, so if anyone knows of one, can you share? I remember her mixing juice and prodigious amounts of sugar in huge plastic bins, but I’ve no idea what else is involved. Demijohns and blooping airlocks, of course, but the actual ingredients and a method would be great.
 
UselessRubberKeyboard said:
My mother was a serial wine brewer, and although she preferred using fresh fruit to brew with, each year she made a creditable wine from simple cartons of fruit juice from the supermarket.

I don’t have a recipe, so if anyone knows of one, can you share? I remember her mixing juice and prodigious amounts of sugar in huge plastic bins, but I’ve no idea what else is involved. Demijohns and blooping airlocks, of course, but the actual ingredients and a method would be great.
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Pretty sure you would just need the juice, some sugar, and some yeast and let the yeast do its thing. Theres several YouTube videos showing the process.
 
UselessRubberKeyboard said:
My mother was a serial wine brewer, and although she preferred using fresh fruit to brew with, each year she made a creditable wine from simple cartons of fruit juice from the supermarket.

I don’t have a recipe, so if anyone knows of one, can you share? I remember her mixing juice and prodigious amounts of sugar in huge plastic bins, but I’ve no idea what else is involved. Demijohns and blooping airlocks, of course, but the actual ingredients and a method would be great.
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My first brews were just this, I'd go shopping and check the juice section for any that didn't have any stabilizers, from there I'd add enough sugar to bring the potential apv to 13%ish, add some tannin and yeast nutrient, I haven't had to add any acid as the juices so far have been pretty acidic. Usually I'd end up with an(in my opinion) alright wine. You're not going to be making any amazing wines doing this but you can't beat making a gallon of drinkable wine for like 5 bucks. While I'm still a novice making hobo swill toilet wine I'd recommend anyone trying out the hobby to try some juice wines. They're cheap, easy to make , and great practice for the basics so if you screw up and a batch gets contaminated or just turns out nasty you're only out of a few bucks, less than an hour of labor and however long you let the wine age.
 
Honored guest said:
My first brews were just this, I'd go shopping and check the juice section for any that didn't have any stabilizers, from there I'd add enough sugar to bring the potential apv to 13%ish, add some tannin and yeast nutrient, I haven't had to add any acid as the juices so far have been pretty acidic. Usually I'd end up with an(in my opinion) alright wine. You're not going to be making any amazing wines doing this but you can't beat making a gallon of drinkable wine for like 5 bucks. While I'm still a novice making hobo swill toilet wine I'd recommend anyone trying out the hobby to try some juice wines. They're cheap, easy to make , and great practice for the basics so if you screw up and a batch gets contaminated or just turns out nasty you're only out of a few bucks, less than an hour of labor and however long you let the wine age.
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I do this with bulk amounts of cheap apple juice and brown sugar, i also add a modest amount of chai tea and 2-4 liters of apple cherry or apple cranberry juice for depth, its good to make 10-30 gallons of, bottle and then bring in crates or just put it in a dispensor for big meets or family gatherings, try this, put your own spin on it,
Hantavirus said:
Sharing is one of the best parts of this hobby, but you should save a bottle or two imo. Throw them in the basement or other temperature-stable spot and forget about them for a few years or so. I bottle age most of my meads; even aging in glass can have miraculous results.
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i usually keep 1 or 2 specimans from each batch of everything that i havent made a hundred times or more, the PawPaw Brandy will sit in my chest next to its retarded brother: cherry brandy made from large amounts of cherry pie filling
 
Dfackt0 said:
I do this with bulk amounts of cheap apple juice and brown sugar, i also add a modest amount of chai tea and 2-4 liters of apple cherry or apple cranberry juice for depth, its good to make 10-30 gallons of, bottle and then bring in crates or just put it in a dispensor for big meets or family gatherings, try this, put your own spin on it,
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Sounds interesting. I dont have the equipment for large batches yet, what would a small 1 gallon batch look like recipe wise?
 
Honored guest said:
Sounds interesting. I dont have the equipment for large batches yet, what would a small 1 gallon batch look like recipe wise?
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Try something like 3 litres of Apple juice (check label for Potassium sorbate)
I dissolve the brown sugar in the chai tea and add that solution, check the gravity, adjust and then add nutrients and yeast once its at pitching temperature
You can't go overboard on chai tea especially blends heavy in cinnamon it'll stress your yeast, so limit the total amount to something like 8-12oz per gallon (a cup or so), I usually use two bags per cup
I've also done it With Tumeric, Chamomile and White teas, they're all pretty good
 
My coffee mead is just throwing me for loops.
Now after just forgetting about it it actually tastes really nice. There’s rich dark coffee, and the chocolaty and fruity undertones from the coffee have more prominence but it’s all balanced out by the honey.
Anyways, my next project will probably be a gingerbread mead. I love gingerbread, I grew up eating lebkuchen during the holidays, so I think a nice lebkuchen mead would go over well.
 
Its apple cider season, and I'm swimming in gallons of pasteurized cider, does anyone have any proven recipes they'd like to share?
 
Honored guest said:
Its apple cider season, and I'm swimming in gallons of pasteurized cider, does anyone have any proven recipes they'd like to share?
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This is one I came up with based on my conversation with the brewmaster of Schramm's Mead in Detroit (his father in-law Ken Schramm is considered America's greatest meadmaker). The primary finished last week, and once I get home from my vacation, I'll be racking it off. It's going to be excellent, assuming enough acidity and tannin were extracted from the apples.

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Use it as you wish. I can come up with any recipe you need.
 
Troonos said:
This is one I came up with based on my conversation with the brewmaster of Schramm's Mead in Detroit (his father in-law Ken Schramm is considered America's greatest meadmaker). The primary finished last week, and once I get home from my vacation, I'll be racking it off. It's going to be excellent, assuming enough acidity and tannin were extracted from the apples.

View attachment 8144267

Use it as you wish. I can come up with any recipe you need.
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Your cranberry mead was a banger so it looks like I'm in the market for a large carboy, going to have to check out the local brew supply stores.
Have you ever worked with elderberry? I was able to get about 5lb from my garden So I imagine its enough for a gallon.
 
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