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10/27/2006: "A Brew Break"

Let's take a break from the quest for the woodstove, partially so we can see how the next portion of the adventure plays out! To give you a hint, it has something to do with the ceiling/upstairs floor being too overbuilt for the chimney.

So to relax I thought I might share a little bit about brewing. No, not witch’s brew! Making home brewed beer, wine and cider is one of our favorite crafts at Living Green Farm.






To start with, cider is super easy to make. You press a bunch of apples, add some tablets that kill wild yeast, a little pectin enzyme for clarity of brew and toss in the little yeasty beasties. Now, cider is different from beer. Beer yeasts work slowly converting sugar to alcohol. You have to love on the yeasties, giving them proper conditions and temperatures. We just threw the carboy full of juice into the back room and turned it loose! The cider yeast went crazy! The apple juice and yeast started frothing and eventually made its way up and out of the airlock! I’ve never seen such active fermentation.

Here's a picture of the setup before bottling. Cider, plum wine and A+ Amber. ps: We love nicely rinsed out non-screw top bottles!

Beer usually takes about a week to go through the first stage of active fermentation. This batch of cider actively fermented for nearly three weeks. If I looked at the carboy funny, it would burble gases at me.

So the cider we started on Labor Day was bottled about 10 days ago. When bottling, I added a little honey and sugar, an additional food source for the surviving yeasts. By that time, the yeasts were so fed up with alcohol, that they started making carbon dioxide instead, so the drink has fizz.

The same evening, Nate and I bottled the amber ale. We’re calling it A+ Amber. It sure is tasty!! Joel down at Corvallis Brew Supply (http://brewbeer.cc) knows how to write a recipe. Yumm! Our only problem with it is that it hasn’t carbonated yet. I’m a little worried. It’s been in bottles for 10 days now, and gives a slight pst! when a bottle is opened. We want a PSST! and a nice foamy head. No luck yet. I am notoriously impatient with my brews, though, and it will probably take off in the next few days. We’re looking forward to it.

The third thing we did during that brew-a-thon was transfer or “rack off” my plum wine from one carboy to another. Remember the picture of Winter helping me prepare? That's the wine! This gets the alcoholic brew off of the layer of dead yeast that has formed on the bottom of the old carboy. With fruit wines and meads you want to rack off every 3 months or so until it’s ready to be bottled. The plum wine is a beautiful deep pink color and incredibly alcoholic. You could get drunk just from the fumes. I’m still very new at this wine business, so we’ll see how it turns out.

I also have a carboy of strawberry mead that I started in June. It’s due for another racking off in the next few weeks. It has a beautiful medium pink color, but tastes very yeastie. I’m hoping that subsequent racking offs will help reduce the yeast particles in suspension and help clear the color and taste.

Here's a photo of an almost finished evening of bottling. Each 5 gallon carboy can fill 8 six packs. It seems like a lot, but it always seems to disappear!