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May 31, 2016 19:49:37 GMT
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Yes, I've done most of my wines with Young's wine yeast which is just a general purpose wine yeast which imparts little flavour to the final brew. I've done loads of cider with it using supermarket apple juice (called turbo cider) which comes out great. Natural cider I used to use yeast but the last few years I've just used the natural yeast in the apples. The only times I've used a different yeast is for very clear/clean white wines where you want that very clean crisp taste where the yeast has contributed very little flavour, which tends to be a more expensive yeast. I made a Chardonnay type wine with white grapes, apple juice and lemon and when I do elderflower champagne I use a champagne yeast. The difference seems to be that you get that dry astringent champagne quality with a very heavy fizz. Young's wine yeast, like many of the commercial wine yeasts, imparts a little of that homebrew taste but it ferments incredibly quickly, drops to the bottom and clears quickly by itself and forms a really solid sediment which makes it dead easy to rack. The 'homebrew' taste disappears in time and depends on the wine you make. So parsnip takes a long time to get rid of it, for example, and I've heard mead can hang onto it for an age. A lot of that odd flavour is trapped in the initial fizz, so if you shake all the gas out of it after the initial ferment, it 'ages' faster. As I understand it, the key difference between beer and wine yeasts is the alcohol tolerance. Beer yeast can only tolerate about 7% abv, whereas a wine yeast will take about 15-17%. Then you can get the high alcohol 'turbo' yeasts like Alcotec which are a much more aggressive yeast that can brew up over 20% but need conditioning with charcoal to remove the weird flavours. I've not experimented with a beer yeast so I can't say for sure that it can only take the low abv. So a wine aiming for 11-12% (~1kg total sugar in 4.5 litres) takes about 4-6 weeks to brew all the way through to dry depending on how warm it is. I keep meaning to try a mead - I think it's time! ben711200 has done a lot of beer. How strong have you had it get fella?
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May 31, 2016 20:09:36 GMT
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Jonny69 is right about alcohol tolerance of beer yeasts, but there's quite a variety. Most will see up to 8 or 9% with no problem, some less (such as 'Windsor') some will do much more. I have had 11% out of a Duvel yeast, and that will go further if pushed, it certainly isn't clean tasting though. My knowledge on it is limited, but as well as the lower tolerance to alcohol, the apparent attenuation is affected by the more complex sugars it has to ferment with beer. Using the examples above, Windsor struggles with the sugars converted when mashing malted barley at higher temperatures, whereas Duvel will eat through everything and leave the final product very dry. Most generic ale yeasts are a strain known as Nottingham which is fairly clean tasting if temperatures are low and has reasonably high attenuation for a beer yeast, but not as high as wine. If you used that with simple sugars, tolerance to alcohol would be the limiting factor
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...proper medallion man chest wig motoring.
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May 31, 2016 22:19:13 GMT
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Interesting. The beer yeasts I have been using can get up to 12% pretty comfortably apparently, so will see what happens. I haven't noticed any weird flavours, but the honey probably masks a fair bit of that. Strong booze flavours aren't really an issue, as I'm used to drinking cask strength whiskey and rum. Everything is starting to slow down now as it gets colder here. I have been thinking about adding some more Dextrose to speed things up a bit, as I only added a little when racked them. The honey is meant to be harder for them to work through, so some extra Dextrose may help the yeast through the colder weeks? Jonny, you should try it! There's some very simple speed mead recipes that can be done with little effort, to get an idea of what flavour you want to go with. But as you've already been doing wines and ciders I imagine you'd have a pretty good idea of the direction you want to go.
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I'm getting thirsty now!
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I haven't brewed for a couple of years, but the biggest thing was keeping the temp relatively stable. We found that cupboards in the middle of the house had the best stability. Sit your fermenting unit (we used 20L drums from bunnings) on top of styrofoam if you have wooden floors.
I might ask my bro if he's made mead. I know he's won gold medals for beer brewing and has done ciders and ginger beers as well, but not sure about mead. He got his Russian Imperial stout up to 17%, so I reckon he'd have a good crack at it.
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Oh? Who's your brother? We know a fair few craft brewers. My mead is in a wardrobe so reasonably stable temp and it'd off the floor. At the moment its wearing pajamas, too.
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Love this thread. Go for it. Heres a few things ive thought. Ive enjoyed making mead a few times and as a beekeeper the honey itself is important to the flavour of the mead. I'm lucky to have been able to try my own different honeys for mead making. The honey you get from the supermarket is usually already heated to make it easier to jar up and often is pasteurised too. So most of the flavour is ruined before you even get it. The honey you get from your guy on the farm is definitely the stuff you need for mead and try to get a dark strong one. The honey has loads of different flavours that come from the types of flowers the bees collect it from. So for example in the UK the honey from oilseed rape flowers is a sweet light honey that goes hard in the jars really quickly. Then the honey from clover is a darker stronger honey but not as sweet. Heather honey is really strong and can even be red in colour and doesn't go hard and crystallise. So ive found that the sugar content of honey varies massively and so your fermentation will too. The recipe ive used has only honey, water, yeast, and lemon juice some yeast nutrients, but each time it was totally different. Some batches was really strong and not sweet and some was 'winey' tasting etc. The yeast I used was a Maury yeast for port wine which survives a poor nutrient environment well and also will not be killed off quickly which gives a long slow fermentation. Ive left it to go full all the way through the fermentation until the alcohol stopped the yeast. The water is really important too.... any thing with chlorine, as our tap water is, is rubbish for brewing. Ive used bottled spring water. You are lucky as the honey you would get in Aussi is great and you probably get Manuka honey cheaply too. I would try some strong Eucalyptus tree honey. Let the mead go fermenting as long as possible. Some batches were still going weeks and weeks and they were the better ones. It really gets better the longer you can leave it to age. A year after its racked off the lees and still in the demijohn is minimum I would say then bottle it.... But its difficult not to drink it, and the hangover can be intense !!!! We drink it cold from the fridge in small doses.
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fulvia series 1 1200. rolling restoration fulvia series 1 1300. definitely in bits golf Mk4 v6 4motion. weekend fun T4 transporter. daily
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Yeah now that I have a good idea of what kind of flavours I want I am willing to invest more patience in them. I will do a 20l soon of probably berry mix and bottle it soon after, then I can probably convince myself to spare the second batch and be patient. The honey I am getting, I have no idea what it would be called. But it is reasonably dark. The guy who does it has hives in a 50km area or so around him on various properties, and mixes for consistent taste.
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Depends if you're on AHB forum. One of my bros is Lord Raja Goomba, one of the mods.
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Well, it's been a while! The mead has been sitting for the whole time, I only bottled it on Thursday and remembered to take a photo halfway through. This was the Cinnamon Pear. I took a reading. Had a taste. Bottled it. Rinse and repeat. All done. I took readings of all the batches. I am using this calculator, using the alternate formula for higher gravity readings. Using the original Specific Gravity of 1.150 and ignoring the midway measure as it barely changed: Cinnamon Vanilla came in at 1.020 which puts it at 20.33%. Berry was 1.000 so 23%! Cinnamon Pear got to 1.004 and thus 22.47% Chocolate Orange ended up at 1.022 and so 20.06%. This sounds about right to me, as I was tasting them as I was bottling and they seem to be pretty damn high. They are going to have to sit for a while to bring some flavour back as at the moment there's just a lot of booze. The flavours are there, just much overpowered. I'm surprised that they got so close to zeroing out the SG. Anyway, that's it for now. I am moving house in about a month so need to save money/not have so much stuff to shift so not the ideal time to start a new batch. Will be doing beer there, though, as well. Vanilla Cinnamon Pitched: 29.04.2016 Racked: 16.05.2016 Bottled: 07.07.2016 Choc Orange Pitched: 29.04.2016 Racked: 16.05.2016 Bottled: 07.07.2016 Pear Cinnamon Pitched: 29.04.2016 Racked: 16.05.2016 Bottled: 07.07.2016 Berry Pitched: 29.04.2016 Racked: 16.05.2016 Bottled: 07.07.2016 Cheers, Matt
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Last Edit: Jul 10, 2016 9:05:29 GMT by varelse
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