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Posted by tgl on 2008-01-07 03:24:41 +0000

2007JAN06 Checked specific gravity today, still over 1.030. Wicked sweet. P:itched my last packet of Lalvin K1-V1116. Fingers crossed.

Posted by tgl on 2008-01-13 23:23:00 +0000

2008JAN13 Down the drain.

Posted by G lib on 2008-01-14 15:11:46 +0000

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Posted by tgl on 2008-01-14 15:30:02 +0000

Laugh at my pain and suffering. Sure. No coffee stout for you!

Posted by dyedon8 on 2008-01-14 16:41:14 +0000

Sorry to hear it.

Posted by pchippy on 2008-01-14 17:06:54 +0000

What went wrong? Surely one of your three yeast doses should have done the trick. Was it potassium sorbate that got you? My cider is still burbling under the kitchen counter, though it's starting to lose its oomph. It's also become quite clear. Hope it stays that way.

Posted by G lib on 2008-01-14 18:53:02 +0000

I'll have you know I was laughing at your statement, not your brewing failure. But in either event, I'm very sorry I hurt your feelings. Forgive me?

Posted by tgl on 2008-01-14 19:41:58 +0000

Probably. I didn't have this problem last year, even though I used Fleischman's. Certainly last year's had alcohol, even if it was odious. I knew the cider was pasteurized (just as the stuff I used last year), didn't think it also had a preservative.

Posted by pchippy on 2008-01-16 03:02:10 +0000

Well, if it makes you feel any better, I just poured out the remainder of my balsam maple beer, which was by far the worst fermented beverage I've ever tasted. Though this might give it a run for its money.

Posted by G lib on 2008-01-16 13:55:13 +0000

It was by far the worst fermented beverage I've ever tasted, too.

Posted by virtue on 2008-01-16 14:51:21 +0000

"There's no doubt these neolithic people were fermenting alcohol from grain," she said. "In fact I think they were making barley malt for brewing before they thought about grinding up grain for bread." My peeps!

Posted by tgl on 2008-01-16 15:38:00 +0000

Way easier to ingest barley malt in liquid form then in bread form. There is that overly long fermenting period though. While this is sort of off-topic for the Cider thread: I like to think about how the first beer was discovered. I think there must have been a grain storage cave or hut or something. There was a fire. Some of the barley burned, but some of it got toasted. The fire was doused with water, then maybe it rained for a day or two. The runoff collected in pools and sat for a couple weeks. Then someone came along and took a drink from a fermented pool of runoff water from a burnt-up barley pile. Fantastic! The story of coffee is similar.

Posted by pchippy on 2008-01-16 17:50:23 +0000

That doesn't explain how the barley got malted in the first place. More likely: People used to gather seeds, and eat them, cooked into a kind of porridge or grits to make them more digestible. One day, a forgetful peasant left a basket of barley grains out in the open, and it got rained on by a freak rainstorm. The peasant discovered the basket of wet grain a few days later, and brought it back to his hut. rather than let good grain go to waste, he decided to cook it up before it rotted. So he made a porridge, and found to his pleasure and surprise that the porridge was sweet, much sweeter than normal, because the starches in the dry seeds had turned to sugars through enzyme action when it got rained on. Thenceforth, whenever that peasant and his people wanted a batch of sweet porridge, they left the grain out in the rain and allowed it to stay wet a few days, until it started to sprout. They learned by experience what amount of wetness and what amount of sitting around produced the sweetest porridge. Then, one day, three hundred and fifty years later, the first peasant's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson made up a batch of sweet porridge. It was a fairly thin and watery porridge, because the man was poor and had only a few barley grains on hand. Just as he was about to sit down to enjoy a bowl of watery gruel, the soldiers from the great city of Ur appeared, and demanded that he accompany them to do his obligatory ten days' service for the priests of the great god Nanna. Reluctantly, he went, leaving the pot of gruel on the table in his hut, and spent ten days in Ur lugging mud bricks to make a ziggurat to the greater glory of Nanna. When he was finally allowed to return home, he saw that his pot of gruel had developed a foamy scum on the top, and it smelled kind of funny. But he had nothing else to eat (the priests of Nanna don't pay very well), so he ladled out a bowl of the spoiled gruel, and ate/drank it despite the fact that it tasted distinctly...off. It made him surprisingly happy. And he went to bed, and slept well, and woke up with a headache, and happily ladled out another bowl of fermented glop. Thus was beer born. So say I.

Posted by dyedon8 on 2008-01-16 17:59:39 +0000

A+.

Posted by ConorClockwise on 2008-01-16 18:05:18 +0000

I like it. How much earlier was winemaking though? And could there have been a winemaker turned brewer?

Posted by pchippy on 2008-01-26 00:41:27 +0000

Bottled up my cider today. (Made from 5 gals Stewart's not-from-concentrate no-preservatives New-England-grown apple juice, $3.00 a gallon at Market Basket.) Crystal-clear, pale yellow, and with a final gravity of 1.000 on the nose. I'm impatient. Hope it gets nice and sparkly.

Posted by tgl on 2008-01-26 14:14:00 +0000

Damn you Blossom Valley! I enjoyed my gil of Pchippy's Stewart's Fermented.

Posted by pchippy on 2008-01-26 16:40:08 +0000

I'm glad you liked it...but that wasn't the Stewart's. Stewart's, which I'm making the big batch of, is "apple juice," though unusually good apple juice for its price. What I fed you was Randall's "apple cider," not only unpreserved but unfiltered. Both are from Maine, and I like both of them, but unfortunately the Randall's stuff costs about $4.50 a gallon and isn't available (so far as I know) in Massachusetts. The one gallon of it I had here in Boston was left over from our weekend up north.

Posted by ConorClockwise on 2008-01-27 07:38:58 +0000

When one leaves a gallon of cider in the cellar for 30 days, and it "goes bad", is there ever a way for it to go good? Yes, I understand how pitching yeast gives better (more predictable) results in the fermentation, but I want a method that promotes the natural metro-Boston cerevisiae?

Posted by tgl on 2008-01-27 16:39:55 +0000

I'm not certain that the yeast you'd be promoting is actually from metro-Boston, it's more likely that the yeast is from the apples themselves, and wherever they came from. You should be able to take unpasteurizd cider and put it in a fermenter and let it go itself. It'll take longer than pitching in a Champagne yeast. Even here they pitched yeast. Everything else I read, relying on natural yeast means fermentation over months and months.

Posted by Corby Trouser Press on 2008-01-27 19:25:22 +0000

I recommend white labs english cider yeast - made a lovely tasty cider

Posted by ConorClockwise on 2008-01-28 04:08:54 +0000

Thank you both