Homebrew / Moonshine - Sink vodka appreciation

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That dessert mead that I tried to make earlier this year failed. Bung popped off the demijohn, rebunged it, bottled, bottle corks popped off, became filled with dead insects, tipped one, filtered the other, tasted sickly sweet, tipped away. I'll look at a different source for mead recipes, I saw someone's review of the recipe book say that some of the recipes need modernizing (but it's mostly good).

I started another recipe for Strawberry wine. I'm at the stage where I leave it alone for a while before bottling. The last part of the recipe says to use 2 saacharin tablets per bottle when bottling. Will any sweetener work? Also, does it matter what type of yeast you use? A lot of the recipes ask for specific types of yeasts rather than general wine yeast like Bordeux, Sherry, G.P, Sauternes, Burgundy, etc.

There's a Homebrewing association called the National Association of Wine and Beermaking in the UK and there's a recipes section on their site. Also there's a forum dedicated to homebrewing called HomeBrewingUK.
 
Honored guest said:
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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I can scale down the recipe if you can't make that large a batch, or you can scale it down. Let me know.
 
Honored guest said:
It shouldn't be to hard for me to scale down your recipe, thank you for the offer though.
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Oh, one other thing. I would buy a Little Big Mouth Bubbler from Northern Brewer. I think they're still like $20-30. You don't want to brew with solid fruit in a carboy, because the narrow mouth will force the fruit upward and then block the exit of CO2, so you'll end up with a huge fruitsplosion. And with the volume of fruit you'll have in this batch, you'll have a high loss rate when you rack off, so you'll want to start by scaling it to 1.5 gallons so that you can completely fill a 1-gallon carboy when you rack it off the fruit.
 
Troonos said:
Oh, one other thing. I would buy a Little Big Mouth Bubbler from Northern Brewer. I think they're still like $20-30. You don't want to brew with solid fruit in a carboy, because the narrow mouth will force the fruit upward and then block the exit of CO2, so you'll end up with a huge fruitsplosion. And with the volume of fruit you'll have in this batch, you'll have a high loss rate when you rack off, so you'll want to start by scaling it to 1.5 gallons so that you can completely fill a 1-gallon carboy when you rack it off the fruit.
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Yep still got it from the cranberry mead:biggrin:
 
GratsTheat783 said:
That dessert mead that I tried to make earlier this year failed. Bung popped off the demijohn, rebunged it, bottled, bottle corks popped off, became filled with dead insects, tipped one, filtered the other, tasted sickly sweet, tipped away.
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Assuming you set up the airlock correctly and had the right size corks, it sounds like you had too much sugar and you bottled well before it was done fermenting. You want the yeast to be completely inactive (for a still brew) or mostly inactive (for a bottle-conditioned carbonated brew) before you bottle it. Depending on what you're making and how "professional" you want the finished product to look, that usually involves racking into a carboy multiple times. This is called "secondary fermentation," and it's what separates prison hooch from good homebrew.
GratsTheat783 said:
The last part of the recipe says to use 2 saacharin tablets per bottle when bottling. Will any sweetener work? Also, does it matter what type of yeast you use?
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Wouldn't catch me adding sweeteners to my brews. If you want it sweeter but you don't want any bottle conditioning, then just kill the yeast with a campden tablet and let it sit for a day or two to air out, then add sugar and bottle. Many purists swear by specific strains of yeast, but IMO when you're starting out you don't need to go crazy. Red Star is fine for most grape wines and fruit-based wines and mead (cuvée yeast).
 
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I'm sad there's not many of y'all working on moonshine, gin, or whiskey, but the sheer number of mead makers more than makes up for it!

My bees surprised me with 2.5 gallons this year so I've been toying with some short mead recipes this past month. If you're not aware, a short mead is a light, fizzy, low alcohol mead not meant to be aged. It's the mead version of a table beer, which is the old way to make spring water palatable. At least as far as I understand it.

I did 5 1qt batches and used mason jars with the mason brand fermenting lids and this one off brand from a fermenting kit. These are usually for making things like sauerkraut or garlic fermented in honey, or kimchi. They work excellent for making mead too, at least your first ferment. Since they're for wide-mouth jars you can scale up easily to the largest mason jars available, which is great for microbrewing and that's the stage I'm at. As for yeast, I normally use wild yeast or my sourdough culture, but this time I used some wine making yeast my friend gave me. 41B it says on the package.

Batches are as follows:
1. "Apicola" - water, yeast, honey
2. Garden Herb - sage, oregano, thyme
3. Spiced Apple - apples, cinnamon, cloves
4. Mint Berry - strawberries, blue berries, raspberries, blackberries, and mint
5. Mixed Berry - the above but instead of mint, cinnamon and cloves

For all 5 I ended up using about 4 cups of honey, 2 apples, one cup of every berry mentioned, one tablespoon of every herb, 6 cloves, and 2 cinnamon sticks. I made a tea for each, smashing the fruit and then simmering in 2 cups of water, then straining out the solids to start the ferment.

After 5 days, so long as it was bubbling, I bottled a sample of 2-5, the apicola wasn't ready yet, added 1/4 teaspoon of honey, and then let the bottles and jars sit sealed for another 3 days and moved them to the fridge to halt the fermentation.
Day 9 the Apicola mix finally started to bubble.

Of all of them, the Mixed Berry and Garden Herb have turned out the best. Both have a light fizz and a refreshing crisp taste. The Herb is drier, while the Berry held onto some sweetness, but nothing close to a soda or good ol fashioned southern sweet tea. The most disappointing was the Spiced Apple. I thought it was going to be amazing, but instead its just bland and heavy, like a mulled cider without the sweetness. The Mint Berry wasn't really bad or good. Perfectly unremarkable enough I'll never tackle it again.
I'll finally be bottling the Apicola for it's second ferment tomorrow, but I don't have high hopes. Once I catch up on what I have I'm going to try to time it out to keep a fresh quart coming ready to drink on once I finish up what I have. Might try and tackle the spiced apple, but I don't think the spices I'm using lend themselves to a short mead.

Next year, when I get more than 5 gallons of honey (assuming my bees do well) I'm going to put some more time into this, buy up some proper bottling equipment, and gear up to do at least two gallon batches of some proper mead.
 
I’m running an experiment now after watching a video about sourdough bread.
I’m making a starter, and after a few days of starting it I added a little bit of barm from a pear mead my dad is making.
This was common in history, the baker went to the brewer for yeast and barm to make breads with. So far so good, hopefully my bread making capabilities aren’t too bad.
 
VeteranOfTheRetardWars said:
I’m making a starter, and after a few days of starting it I added a little bit of barm from a pear mead my dad is making.
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I built my sourdough starter starting with kefir whey, and in my experience it helped get the starter well established within days instead of weeks. If the same holds true for your experiment you should see your starter get a lot more active, and thankfully sourdough is less picky about the specific yeast used than a long-term booze ferment, though the balance can change how difficult it is to get a good rise.
Good luck!
 
I mean I'm just saying said:
I built my sourdough starter starting with kefir whey, and in my experience it helped get the starter well established within days instead of weeks. If the same holds true for your experiment you should see your starter get a lot more active, and thankfully sourdough is less picky about the specific yeast used than a long-term booze ferment, though the balance can change how difficult it is to get a good rise.
Good luck!
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Worst-case scenario, I’m out some flour and barm I wasn’t going to use anyway.
But if it works, delicious bread.
 
Dfackt0 said:
I distill about as much Moonshine and Bourbon Whiskey as one man can make with enthusiast grade hardware and I have a decent gin recipe that I like if you wish me to share
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Yeah! I also wouldn't mind some pointers about what enthusiast grade hardware to get and where to get it from. That's been the biggest hurdle so far.
 
WanderingFarmer said:
Yeah! I also wouldn't mind some pointers about what enthusiast grade hardware to get and where to get it from. That's been the biggest hurdle so far.
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If you're just looking to make A decent whiskey or moonshine from corn, I'd get a T500 with an alembic dome and do double pot distillations, theyre super easy to assemble, they have a tap and you have the option to turn it into a reflux still later on
If you're looking to make gin I'd strongly suggest getting an air still or an air still pro, the air still pro has the added benefit of being able to do reflux, so you'll be able to take your lo-wines from the big still and reflux distill them to 90% abv very smoothly I'd do this if you're looking to do macerations with your shine or if you're making a base vodka for gin
Speaking of gin
Per 1 liter of 40% abv vodka (whatever you like, Id just use a sugar head, you can use everclear just proof it down to 40%)
30g of Juniper
10g of Coriander seeds (crush these in a mortar and pestile to get more flavor)
1g of Angelica Root
30g of lemon peel (get at much zest and as little pith as you can, pith causes bitter flavors to be extracted by the alcohol)
Toss all these into the air still, put the lid on, let it macerate for a day or so and then begin distillation
And when using botanicals in a still, its wise to take a little off the top even with a spirit you've already made cuts on, there are always some weird volatile compounds created and you don't want that in the final product
 
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I used the starter made with barm for some sourdough focaccia. I fucked up and mistakenly used whole wheat flour rather than bread flour, so it’s denser but still delicious with the sourdough flavor I wanted. Just not a true focaccia, but the whole wheat adds some nice flavors and textures so it’s still nice bread.
Moral of the story, if you’re a baker just add a little barm into your starter. It worked really well for me.
 
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If you're handy and have a miter saw, just make a bokakob still (I posted the schematics upthread). Capacity blows the air still out of the water and it's much more customizable. A 3-4" pipe will allow you to do a reflux batch of 50 gallons in the time it takes to do a pot run of 10 in a smaller still.
 
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