Bottled : Peach Wine

As from this post I'm trying out a new format to the blog and not going to post every stage of the brew process as individual posts anymore but will post just 2 blogs post per brew with the brew-day being one and the bottling day as the other, with a break down of the process. Just to save a little time and make the posts easier to find when I look back at them.

Bottled the Peach Wine today that was made on the 26/05/14. Got 5 full bottles (750ml) and a half bottle for drinking young. So pretty good all in all. It's a nice colour and from a quick taste test not a bad wine at all.

• 26/05/14 Made up the wine Must
• 27/05/14 Yeast and Nutrient added.
• 01/06/14 Racked into Demijohn
• 14/07/14 Racked
• 15/07/14 Clear-It wine fining's added.
• 30/09/14 Bottled

Autumn is here, Garlic Planting time!

Well Autumn seems to be here, and the harvesting from the Allotment is now slowing down.

I went down to the plots to do lots of sorting ready for winter, a general dig over and tidy up, with no more beans to pick I was preparing to remove all the canes to be stored over winter in the shed, but I have now decided to leave the beans alone for a while while I collect some free bean seed for next year from the pods that were to big and stringy  to eat.

So I just ended up pottering around doing bits and pieces around the site but not really accomplishing much.

There is so much to do, but I just can't do it at the moment. The Hops need relocating but I can't do that until the plants die back, the canes need taking down where the climbing beans are and the whole bed needs a weed and a dig over, but I am collecting seed so thats on hold. I'm splitting another bed into two parts for next year but I can't do that until the beetroot is up.

I did plant my Elephant Garlic cloves that I grew last year, so hopefully FREE garlic for next year. 18 cloves planted with still loads left to cook with here at home. I can't remember when I planted the Elephant Garlic last year, it was sometime around now I think. The internet says it's planted in the Autumn so they are in. Along side the Elephant Garlic I have also planted 27 cloves of Marco Garlic (Softneck) £2.99 for two bulbs at the Garden Center. I still have room for another type of Garlic in that bed and as we use it quite a bit and it stores so well I might invest in another garlic as it becomes available in the garden centres to fill the bed right up.

I'm still picking Chillies and Sweet peppers from the Greenhouse, with so much more to come that are still unripe. Had another bumper harvest I'm running out of things to do with the Hot Peppers.



There are a few more things still growing and that I am able to harvest, the Autumn fruiting raspberries are now fruiting well and I have now collected a good half of a icecream tub that are in the freezer. Which for their 1st year in the ground I don't think thats to bad so far, I have made a wine with them already and we have also had a load in a trifle so half a tub saved so far is doing good . The courgettes and patti pan's are still coming, but a lot slower now. Chard is doing well, and the Kale is nearly at a point that we can start to eat it.

The Kale has been a lot slower this year but I think thats due to it being the wrong side of the polytunnel and it's not getting quite enough sunshine with it there.



I had to pick 2 of my three Invincible Pumpkins today as the plants had died right back to the stalks of the fruit. I still have one going strong which I hope will get to full size as the packet says 5kg each fruit, but my ones I had to pick are only just over 1.5kg each. Should still make a good Pumpkin Beer though.

Got a couple of butternut squashes doing okay, they seem to grow so slowly though.

Well I think that's it for today. Next time I'm down the 'Lottie I need to have a good look on my cabbages, and see how the Savoy's are getting on/eaten

Fermenting/Dry Hop : Fat Rabbit IPA

The Fat Rabbit IPA sat in the No-Chill Cube on the 25g of mixed Challenger/Redsell's Eastwell Goldings hops for 2 days until a got the fermentation fridge sorted out ready for this brew to ferment with Safale S04. I dry pitched the yeast right on top of the sweet wort. Really should have made a starter or something as after I pitched the yeast, I noticed it was nearly a year after it's use by date. Got away with it though as it started fermenting by the next morning.

I set the fridge to 22'C as the Temperature Range for this yeast is  15-24'C. This was left to ferment undisturbed for 7 days before I checked the gravity, it dropped down to 1020 SG from 1058 SG. So Happy days.

Sample tasted very good, and it's a great colour at the moment. A pale gold.

Due to the fact that this beer is using home grown Hops and I have plenty to spare I am having my first go at Dry Hopping a beer.

I spent a day in town trying to hunt down a nylon or muslin bag to use to dry hop this brew in the Primary fermentor (I don't have a second 25litre bucket) ended up finding one of these.

So in went a Jack Daniels glass and I StarSan'ed the bag and glass, added a massive load of Hops (50g) and dropped it into the fermenting bucket in the fridge. Dropped the temperature in the fridge to 20'C and the bag and Hops will now stay there for a few days to extract the aromas.

I expect I'll be bottling this by the end of the month and hopefully it will turn out a good brew, as I'm hoping this will be the basic recipe for my House IPA

Brewday: Mead (Honey Wine) with @AlexharwoodUk

Alex (@AlexharwoodUk ) from Twitter came over today with 3 jars of Rowse Honey, just over 2kg of lovely honey to make a Mead as well a 5 liters of Spring Water, a orange and a lemon.


Mead is a simple Honey Wine, and we wanted to keep it just that, Simple.

So we just warmed up the Honey pots to help the honey escape the Jars and poured it into my Jam Pan, topped the Pan up with Spring Water to 5 litres and brought the Honey and water mix to a gentle simmer, skimming off any foam.

Then transferred the soon to be Mead liquid into one of my 5 litre fermenting buckets and let it cool down. By early evening it was cool enough to add the lemon and orange juice, along with the yeast and yeast nutrient and it is now slowly bubbling away turning all that natural sugar into alcohol.

I actually checked the SG of the Must this time and if it ferments right out it should come in at 17% ABV

Bottled: Turbo Cider & Blackberry

Forgot about this one, it was sat behind the other wines in the demijohns, quite happy. I made this way back on the 17/07/14 so it's now not really a turbo cider any more.

It was made up the standard way for a turbo cider, 4 litres of Tesco Value Apple juice dumped right into the demijohn, and then added some Youngs Cider Yeast.

Did a little twist to this one, once the Turbo Cider had stopped fermenting I added 200ml of home made blackberry cordial to the demijohn, then just forgot about it until now.

Bottled it all up today into 550ml beer bottles and primed with a 1/2 tsp of sugar to give it a little sparkle.Ended up with Seven 550ml bottles to add to my stock in the Cabin Brewery.

Had a sneaky taste on bottling, as you do, and it's pretty good Cider, with the light purple colour and the aroma from the blackberries coming through quite well.

With the slight carbonation from the sugar in the bottles I think it will be a nice drink.

Brewday : Fat Rabbit IPA

Made up a beer today, due to the fact I have over a kilo of mixed Challenger/Redsell's Eastwell Goldings hops all bagged up I decided to do a big hopped IPA hence the name Fat Rabbit (Big Hopped)

At the same time I thought I would give the BeerSmith software a trial as version 2 now supports BIAB. I started out doing a SmAsH beer (Single Malt & Single Hop), but I wanted a bit more colour to the beer so added a little black and crystal malt bringing the EBC value to around 20.

The BeerSmith software is quite easy to used so I banged in the grain bill to make up a IPA at around 6% ABV, added the hops in pretty much a hap hazard way to give me quite a high bitterness value and ended up with the recipe you see below apart from where it just says Challenger it is in fact my Challenger/Goldings mix.

Fat Rabbit IPA

English IPA (14 A)

Created with BeerSmith

Type: All Grain
Batch Size: 23.00 l
Boil Size: 34.49 l
Boil Time: 90 min
End of Boil Vol: 27.23 l
Final Bottling Vol: 21.60 l
Fermentation: Ale, Single Stage

Date: 16 Sep 2014
Brewer:  Simon
Asst Brewer:
Equipment: Electric Urn (10 Gal/40 L) - BIAB
Efficiency: 70.00 %
Est Mash Efficiency: 79.7 %
Taste Rating: 30.0

Taste Notes:

Ingredients

Amt	Name	Type	#	%/IBU
6.90 kg	Pale Ale (Crisp) (7.9 EBC)	Grain	1	98.6 %
0.07 kg	Caramel/Crystal Malt - 80L (157.6 EBC)	Grain	2	1.0 %
0.03 kg	Black (Patent) Malt (985.0 EBC)	Grain	3	0.4 %
50.00 g	Challenger [7.50 %] - First Wort 90.0 min	Hop	4	42.2 IBUs
10.00 g	Challenger [7.50 %] - Boil 60.0 min	Hop	5	7.2 IBUs
10.00 g	Challenger [7.50 %] - Boil 30.0 min	Hop	6	5.5 IBUs
1 Items	Whirlfloc Tablet (Boil 15.0 mins)	Fining	7	-
25.00 g	Challenger [7.50 %] - Cube Hop	Hop	8	3.3 IBUs

Gravity, Alcohol Content and Color

Est Original Gravity: 1.067 SG
Est Final Gravity: 1.020 SG
Estimated Alcohol by Vol: 6.2 %
Bitterness: 58.1 IBUs
Est Color: 19.1 EBC

Measured Original Gravity: 1.058 SG
Measured Final Gravity: 1.010 SG
Actual Alcohol by Vol: 6.3 %

Calories: 543.1 kcal/l

Mash Profile

Mash Name: BIAB, Full Body
Sparge Water: -0.00 l
Sparge Temperature: 75.6 C
Adjust Temp for Equipment: TRUE

Total Grain Weight: 7.00 kg
Grain Temperature: 18.0 C
Tun Temperature: 22.2 C
Mash PH: 5.20

Mash Steps

Name	Description	Step Temperature	Step Time
Saccharification	Add 34.77 l of water at 73.5 C	68.9 C	90 min
Mash Out	Heat to 75.6 C over 7 min	75.6 C	10 min

Mash Notes: Brew in a bag method where the full boil volume is mashed within the boil vessel and then the grains are withdrawn at the end of the mash. No active sparging is required. This is a full body beer profile.

 

My Notes

The BeerSmith software was bang on with the volumes of water I needed for the Mash, it suggested I needed 34.771 litres of water in the Boiler before I added the grains, I added 35 litres just for ease of measuring. It left me with hardly any dead-space after the grains where rained into the hot water for the Mash.

Did my usual 90 min Mash with a stir at the 45 min stage with a quick reheat to get the temperature back to 66'C as it had dropped to 65'C at that point.

After lifting the grain bag at the end of the Mash, BeerSmith said I needed to add water to make the Pre-Boil volume 34.49 litres so I did pretty much as I was told and added 3 litres of water which the brought my Pre-Boil volume back up to 35 litres.

I checked my Pre-Boil SG and it was bang on what BeerSmith said it would be 1.051. So far so good.

Chucked in my FWH (50g) and got on with the boil. After the boil was done and the Hops all added , turned off the heat and whirlpooled and let the Wort settle for 10 min then drained the Wort from the boiler onto 25g of hops in the No-Chill cube.

This is where I don't understand the BeerSmith figures, as BeerSmith says that I should of had a Post Boil Vol of 27.23 litres and a SG of 1.067 ? Well 1.067 would give me a a AVB of around 7.5% but my measured SG post-boil was 1.058 which is pretty much where it should be to hit a 6% ABV beer so I'm not quite sure where BeerSmith got those figures from as on the Design Tab it reads at 6.2% ABV.

Yet the Post-Boil volume was quite close, 27.23 litres was the BeerSmith value, and when I transferred the Hot Wort into the No-Chill cube it came up to the 25 litre mark, so 2.23 litres different. Well I added a bit more water post-boil, to that bring the discrepancy down to  about 1.7 litres and with the 70g of Hops soaking up a fair bit I reckon it's pretty much bang on.

I'll have to do some research into the post-boil SG's and Pre-Boil SG's in BeerSmith.

Right now the Sweet Wort is sat in the No-Chill cube ready for when I get a chance to ferment it into Beer

Hot Stuff!!!

 

Had a bounty of a chilli harvest again this year, this lot is about 1/2 of what I have picked so far, and there are so many more to come.

I've only grown a couple of varieties this year, Habanero and Medina (Turbo Chilli) for the hot peppers, and Yummy and Britney for the sweet peppers. I've already had to put some in the freezer, made a few hot sauces, and I still have a tonne left to do something with.  I think I'll dry a load and hang them up in the Cabin Brewery, as well as for cooking later on in the year. Might smoke a few as well.

The Humulus lupulus (Hops) are all in

The last of the hops have now been picked, unfortunately the Challenger & Redsell's Eastwell Goldings have grown into one another, so that means I'll have a mixed bag of hops on this batch. Good job the Challenger hop is a duel purpose hop.

After six hours of picking the hops from the bines in the sunshine, I ended up with a rather large harvest of my mixed hops, in fact it came in at 6.5kg in four large carrier bags.

When I got all the hops home they where starting to sweat a bit in  the bags so to prevent them going bad I dumped the lot onto the floor of the Cabin Brewery to air them out. Then into the dehydrator to dry them out before storing them in vac-packed bags. To do the 6.5kg of mixed hops took a total of 4 days with the dehydrator and that gave me 1.481kg of hops in total.

So the end result of the 2014 hop harvest was 329g of Target, 269g of Fuggle, and 1481g of Challenger & Goldings Mixed. Giving me just over 2kg of dried hops to make beer with. That equates to around about 20 forty pint brewdays or about 800 pints.

With dried hops going for around £5 per 100g that is a bounty of around £70 as long as it makes a good beer. So it'll soon be time to test them out with a mega hopped IPA

The Hop Harvest 2014 (Challenger & Redsell's Eastwell) Part 3

The last of the hops have now been picked, unfortunately the Challenger & Redsell's Eastwell Goldings have grown into one another, so that means I'll have a mixed bag of hops on this batch. Good job the Challenger hop is a duel purpose hop.

After six hours of picking the hops from the bines in the sunshine, I ended up with a rather large harvest of my mixed hops, in fact it came in at 6.5kg in four large carrier bags.

When I got all the hops home they where starting to sweat a bit in  the bags so to prevent them going bad I dumped the lot onto the floor of the Cabin Brewery to air them out. Then into the dehydrator to dry them out before storing them in vac-packed bags. To do the 6.5kg of mixed hops took a total of 4 days with the dehydrator and that gave me 1.481kg of hops in total.

So the end result of the 2014 hop harvest was 329g of Target, 269g of Fuggle, and 1481g of Challenger & Goldings Mixed. Giving me just over 2kg of dried hops to make beer with. That equates to around about 20 forty pint brewdays or about 800 pints.

With dried hops going for around £5 per 100g that is a bounty of around £70 as long as it makes a good beer. So it'll soon be time to test them out with a mega hopped IPA

The Hop Harvest 2014 (Fuggles & Target) Part 2

The dehydrator has done it's stuff lovely with the 1.4kg of Fuggles Hops, and they are all packaged up in 50g zip lock bags, ended up with a total of 269 grams of dried Fuggle Hops.

The Target hops have also been picked from the bines as well now, 1.5kg of cones in total, these have also been dried now, 329 grams ready for brewing, again packed in 50g ziplocks.

The dehydrator was set at 50'C and the hops dried for around 11-12 hours. They lost around 80% of their weight in drying which I think is about right.

So it's just the Golding (Redsell's Eastwell) and the Challenger hops that still need to be picked, however these two plants are all wrapped up in each other so I may end up with a Golding/Challenger mix all in one bag, I'll soon see when it comes to picking time maybe this sunday.

The Hop Harvest 2014 (Fuggles) Part 1

A nice warm September day so walked down to the Allotment ready to harvest the hops. Decided to start with the Fuggles as it was the one that seemed to have the less hops on it. It was also the easiest of the four plants to get at.

So I slowly starting picking the cones from the Fuggles Hop into a carrier bag, after lowering the bines down on the string.

The bag soon filled up with lovely fuggle hop cones. In fact 1.4kg in total (green). In fact I had to call it a day with just the Fuggles as I ran out of room in my bag.

Looks like the poor old dehydrator is going to running flat out for a while and I better get a few brews going.

The dehydrator is now running at a recommended  temp of 50'C, it's pretty well packed so tomorrow morning I'll have to rotate the trays a bit to get an even dry.

At a guess when all this lot it dry I will have around about 500-600g of dried Fuggle hops to brew with.