Homebrew update

I have decided to write a blog to update a few of the brews I have going at the minute. I currently have a batch of cider, elderberry wine, blackberry wine and my batch of porter I wrote a blog about a few days ago.

Homemade demijohn

First off is the cider I started brewing in late October. Once the fermentation had run its course, which took about a week I moved the cider from the fermenters into demijohns. I have a few demijohns which my dad had from his wine making days. I needed more for this batch of cider though so I used some 5 litre water bottles to make my own demijohns.

The cider went into these under airlock to allow them to ferment out without the dead yeast cells and general sludge left after the first fermentation, affecting the flavour. I stored the bottles beside a radiator to allow them to ferment out all the sugars so I could then store them without fear of the bottles exploding.

Cider transfered into the demijohns

Lined up beside the radiator

Once the bubbles had stopped coming through the airlocks I knew fermentation was finished. I then waited for the cider to clear. For this they need somewhere cool. I moved them away from the radiator and they cleared in about 2 weeks.

Cleared cider

Once clear I moved them to the attic. They will be kept cool there and they will age for a few months. I had a sneaky taste and it was very bitter. This may lessen with aging. If it doesn't mellow by the spring I will sweeten the cider using an unfermentable sugar. I had expected the cider to be quite bitter as I used mostly cooking apples so I am not too worried about that.


Next up are the blackberry and elderberry wines which I started in early October. After 4 days both wines were strained and transfered into demijohns to finish fermenting without the fruit and pulp. They both bubbled away for a few days in the demijohns. I'm not sure quite how long as I left them to ferment and clear for about a month. When I came back to check them I had two very different results.

The blackberry wine had stopped fermenting before all the sugars had turned to alcohol. This left me with a "wine" with about 7% alcohol and it was very sweet. This is a problem with some brews known as a stuck fermentation. It has a few fixes like shaking up the brew, adding yeast nutrient and moving to a warm place. I tried all these and it had little or no effect. Sometimes fermentation stops due the high level of alcohol killing off the yeast. I had a packet of Turbo Yeast. It says it can ferment up to 20% alcohol so I have added that to the wine to see if it can ferment out the last of the sugar and give me a 13% wine with no sugar left. It is quite expensive as yeast goes. I think it cost 6 euro or so.  Finger crossed it gets the job done.

The elderberry wine was much more successful. I tested a sample of the wine and it had zero sugar left in it. The percentage alcohol is about 12%. I had a sneaky taste (as I like to) and it was nice. A bit like a light red wine. Apparently elderberries have a lot of tannins in them which benefit from aging. So going by that reasoning the wine should improve with time in the bottle. That's if it lasts that long. I transfered it into wine bottles and put plastic stoppers into them. I was considering blending some of it with the blackberry wine so I haven't put proper corks in the bottles yet. Having tasted it I will definitely want to keep some unblended to age so I will be putting proper corks in some of these bottles.

That's most of the homebrew taken care of. Today I took a sample of the porter and it has pretty much fermented out and cleared so it will be ready to bottle soon. I also had a sneaky taste (have you noticed a pattern?) and it tasted lovely. Not just as a homebrew, it tasted like a good craft beer. So I am feeling optimistic about this batch. I will put up a post about bottling it when the time comes.

Until Then.

Porter Brewing

My brewing delivery

Nothing says Christmas like a nice pint of porter. So I have decided for the second year in a row to try and brew my own. (The less said about last year's batch the better) I bought a part grain brewing kit online and after my Pilsner success a few months ago decided to give it a go again this year.


The kit I bought involves steeping some grains in warm water for a while and then adding some malt extract to create the wort. This is somewhere between extract brewing, in which you add boiling water to a syrup and add yeast and away you go, and all grain brewing in which you use a large quantity of grain soaked in water to create the wort without any extract being used.


First things first I set my grains to steep in the water as in the instructions. I added a little more water to make sure the grains were covered. That just meant I would add a little less water later. I left this for about an hour and poured the mixture into my brewing pot.

The soaking grains

The liquid added to the brew pot

I then added my 2 cans of extract into the brew pot and topped the pot up with cold water. The kit was to be made up to 25 litres but my pot can only hold about 20 litres without boiling over so it meant this batch will be smaller than it could have been. A new brewing pot/kettle is being planned but more about that when I have worked out what I am going to do.

Adding the malt extract

Topped up with water

Once topped up with water I then turned on the gas stove and waited for the mixture (wort) to come to the boil. I but a brewing thermometer into the mix to monitor the temperature to see how it was going. It wasn't rising very quickly so all I could do is wait, and wait . .

The waiting game

And wait . . .

After about 40 mins with had a rolling boil. This is another reason I want a new brew kettle as this takes way to long to come the boil.

Adding the hops

Once the boil started I set my timer for an hour and did a little more waiting. After 15 minutes I added the first batch of hops. I then waited until 45 minutes into the boil to add a whirfloc tablet. This tablet helps in the clearing of the final beer if I remember correctly. And then just as the boil comes to an end I then added the second batch of hops. The earlier hops add a bitterness to the beer and the later addition adds flavour and aroma to the beer.

After boiling it is important to cool the beer as quickly as possible so bacteria has less time to get in and spoil things. There is a special piece of equipment which is basically a coil of copper pipe which you run cold water through to cool it but since I don't have one of those I improvised a cold water bath to cool it. It worked reasonably well but I think I will have to stick a length of copper pipe and some fittings onto the shopping list along with the brew kettle if I am going to do this more often.

Improvised cold water bath with icepacks

Once the mixture had cooled I then siphoned off the mixture into my fermenter. You want to do this without getting the hops through the siphon. Again I improvised, with a sieve to stop the coming through. Proper equipment, shopping list, you know the story at this stage. I then added the yeast and let the brew ferment out.

About 5 days later once the vigourous brewing had finished I transfered the porter into my new glass carboy. This stage is to allow for the beer to settle and clear (sounds stupid for a dark beer but I cant think of another word for it). You don't want to do this in the original fermenter as the dead yeast cells can impart a bad flavour.

Fermenter and Carboy

I then put an airlock on the carboy and left it to clear in a cool place.

Once this has cleared I will bottle it and give it a 2 or 3 weeks in the bottle before tasting. Possibly at our family Christmas Eve get-together. I will post another blog here when I am doing the bottling.  **here is the update on bottling the porter**  I also have an update on the blackberry and elderberry wines and the cider to post but that will have to wait because I have to go to work. I should have the update blog up in the next few days.

Until then.

Homegrown vegetable stock mix

My 4 jars of vegetable stock mix

When making soups, stews, sauces etc. it is handy to be able to add a bit of stock to add more flavour. The stock cubes you buy in the shops are full of additives and preservatives, and it can be time consuming to make your own stock from scratch. This is where vegetable stock mix comes in. I first read about it in the "River Cottage Preserves Handbook." You use it pretty much the same way you would a stock cube, just add 2tsp of the mix to a pint of boiling water and you have a full flavoured vegetable stock.

Making the mix is very straightforward once you have a food processor or a blender. The ingredients for this mix are pretty flexible. I have chosen these because they are the vegetables we grew this year and I wanted to make it as homegrown as possible. You can use whatever vegetables are in season, on special in the supermarker or you have lying in the fridge. Just try to keep the veg to salt ratio about the same and you should be fine. The salt preserves the vegetables to stop them going off so if you increase the amount of veg increase the amount of salt proportionately. For my mix I used:

Some of my veg for the mix

250g of leek
200g of onion
200g of carrot
200g of turnip
100g of runner beans
A few sun dried tomatoes
A few cloves of garlic
A bunch of parsley, thyme and sage
250g of salt



The method for this recipe is simple. Roughly chop your selection of veg and put it into a food processor. Blend the veg until it is a grainy paste like consistency. I put in the veg in stages because it wouldn't all fit in at once.

From this

To this

Then add the salt and herbs to the mix and blend again until all thoroughly mixed and blended together. Then put this mix into sterilised jars. This should keep for 6 months in a cool dry place. I normally keep a one jar in the fridge and store the others at the back of the press somewhere. When using the mix, do so before seasoning, then taste the soup or sauce after adding it because there is a lot of salt in the mix and you usually don't need to season it any further.

This recipe is very easy to do and you probably only need to do it twice or three times a year to keep yourself in homemade stock that isn't full of artificial flavours and preservatives.

Cidermaking

After getting my cider press built and up and running it was time to finally process my apples. I got my friend Tom up as photographer /glamorous assistant /slave labour. I had collected some of the apples back in September so there were a few gone black and unusable. The apples that were up to standard were first crushed so they are easier to extract the juice from. I have seen machines designed for this but we used a more rustic method involving a plastic box and a piece of 4x2. We broke up the first batch reasonably well, making sure each apple was broken. Later batches we broke up a lot more so the apples were in a rough pulp. This made it easier to extract juice and we got a better overall quantity of juice as well.

Crushing apples

Once we had our pulp we transfered it to the bucket, which we had lined with a filter bag. When I designed the press I had allowed for a very large bucket but the one I found was a little smaller. It will allow me to adjust the press if I need to process larger amounts of apples so it is a good thing really. But while using it this time I had to put extra bits of timber under the bucket to raise it up and put more timber than I would have liked under the jack to that it would push the plunger down onto the apples.

If the bucket was bigger we wouldn't need so many timbers.

This made the post in the middle much less stable. After the jack becoming airborne once or twice, I decided for health and safety reasons it was probably better to stabilise the centre post. To do this I added two pieces of 2x1 to stop the centre post moving off centre when pressure was applied. This made everything much more stable and once this was done we had no more "health and safety issues."

The angle on the centre post before the changes were made

The two "runners" added to keep the post from slipping

After we had everything stabilised it was a matter of getting down to pressing the apples. At first we tried using a hydraulic trolley jack but it was too big to use. We then used a scissors jack from a Nissan Micra which was a better size for the press. Once we got into our rhythm of crushing, filling, pressing and emptying we got through a good few sacks of apples.

The left over apples

 After we were finished we had that wheelbarrow over flowing with left over apple mush. It made me wish I had the pigs back this year, they would have made light work of that lot. I will have to wait until I have the pigs back next year to make use of left overs, this lot is destined for the compost heap. In the end we had 30 litres of juice. 10l was from apples I got from a friends' grandfather and the other 20l was from a mix of apples from friends, people from work and that kind of thing.

The 20l batch of juice

I decided to keep the two batches seperate to allow me a bit more control over the flavour by blending the two together to get my final product. I also have two sacks of crab apples and a few apples from the garden to make into seperate batches to allow me to blend them together. I chose to add sulphite to my cider. This was to kill of bacteria and wild yeasts in the juice which should prevent spoilage and allow me to add my own yeast which should be more reliable. Some people don't like to add sulphites but I didn't want to risk ending up with 60l of vinegar. I did this on Tuesday night after collecting all the juice and then left them until Wednesday morning so the sulphites could do their work.

Wednesday morning I put my two batches into the fermenters. I measured the pH levels of each juice and they were each 2.8. The ideal range for cider is 3.2 - 3.8. After struggling to remember about the pH scale and whether acidity is high or low I realised I needed to lower the acidity. The acidity can be higher depending on the amounts of cooking apples you use, and I did use mostly cooking apples so I kind of expect this to happen. To lower the acidity you can add precipitated chalk. It is a calcium based powder which I bought from a homebrew shop. I added a teaspoon per gallon which brought the pH level to about 3.1 which was close enough for me. I then activated my yeast in warm water with yeast nutrient. I also added pectolase to reduce the chance of haze in my cider due to the pectin in the apples. I then added the yeast to the juice and left it to do it's work.

40l of cider, blackberry wine, elderberry wine, 20l of cider

Now I have to wait until the fermentation begins, it has been about 10 hours since I added the yeast and there might be a few small bubbles starting to form. Hopefully by the morning I will have full fermentation. I will post when I am taking on the next step with the cider which will be racking the cider, siphoning it off the dead yeast and sludge at the bottom of the fermenter and moving it to finish the fermentation in another container.

EDIT: Here is an update on the cider

Until Then.

Building my cider press

So I finally got around to finishing the cider press. I didn't have a design as such, more a few pictures of what someone else did and from that I put together a design. I got my ideas from this post. He shows pictures and the parts to his cider press and I used these pictures to make my own.

I had spotted a piece of 6x2 that had been stored under the decking for the last couple of years. It was fairly dirty and was covered in grime. So once I cut it into the 6 pieces I wanted, I gave it a planing and sanding to get clean it up.

6x2 before

 

6x2 after

When the 6x2s were tidied up I then bolted them front and back to the 4x2 uprights.

I then added supports to allow the frame to stand up. I used 4x2 for this also.

It was around this point I realised I may have been a little over ambitious with the size of the design. It is 8ft tall and 2ft wide. Well at least if I decide to start up a cider making business I have the cider press for it. The next step was to add the rails for the bucket to sit on. For this I chiseled out a notch in the 6x2 and in the rail itself to make them fit together. I think this is the first time I have used a chisel since woodwork in school but I still have all the skills.

The notches to be cut from the rail

I don't seem to have a picture of the rails in place. It has nothing whatsoever with the quality of the joint, it all fit perfectly, I swear . . . .

Next it was onto the tray that sits on the rails. I made it from 18mm ply and 3x2 sides. It was made to fit snugly between the uprights and to be sturdy enough to take the weight when pressing the apples.

The plywood and 3x2s for the sides

The tray assembled and resting on the rails

Inside the tray I wanted a way for the juice to run out of the bucket and all run to one side of the tray and out a hole and into a bucket underneath. For this I built a frame out of 2x1 to allow the juice to flow through. This is hard to explain in words but the pictures should make it easier to understand.

One layer of 2x1s (see that they are not full length)

The second layer screwed onto the first layer

This is removable to make it easier to wipe inside the tray.

This 2x1 framing allows juice to flow into the tray by raising the bucket off the plywood base. The frame doesn't go all the way to the end of the tray so the juice can escape out the hole. You can see what I mean below

The hole to allow the cider out

The tray with hole and frame

The 2x1s are left a little short to allow the juice out

I found an old homebrew bucket in the attic to use to hold the apple pulp while pressing. It was a little battered but was perfect for the job. I then measured the diameter at the bottom of the bucket and cut out a circle(ish) of plywood to use as the pressing plate. I then drilled holes into the base and sides of the bucket with a hole saw. I didn't want them too close incase they weakened the bucket.

My "circular" pressing plate

The bucket had slightly tapered sides so the plate is a little loose at the top but I don't think that should matter too much. The pressure will still be applied to most of the pulp and we can move it around a bit if needs be. I attached the plate to another 4x2 that runs through the middle of the press and transfers the pressure onto the apples.

Quite a good fit

The holes in the bottom of the bucket

I added holes to the side of the bucket to allow the juice to flow out more easily. I also added a plate to the top of the center post. This is where the hydraulic jack will sit and push against the top of the frame. This should apply pressure onto the apples and get the juice flowing into a bucket underneath.

The plate on top for the hydraulic jack

So that's my cider press. I haven't tested it out yet, I have poured water into the tray and it flows out the hole as I would like and it seems pretty water tight along all the other joints. So tomorrow I should get to test it out properly with some apples and hopefully plenty of juice. Hopefully I should have that blog up tomorrow evening, or if not, the next day.

Until Then