Hard Cider Experiment

So Sheila has become a fan of some hard ciders, especially some of the "craft brewed" ones that she's tried when we're at beer bars.  So I put together some experimental batches to see if I can successfully homebrew some.  For two of the batches, I used some very tasty fresh cider from a local orchard that they were selling at Keystone Homebrew Store.  The plan is let these age until next fall, and see what the results are.

Batch #1:
1 gallon Solebury Orchard cider
1 tsp yeast nutrient
Wyeast 4766 cider yeast

Batch #2:
1 gallon Solebury Orchard cider
1 tsp yeast nutrient
Danstar Nottingham Ale Yeast

Batch #3:
1 gallon Nature's Choice organic apple juice (no preservatives)
8 oz corn sugar
1 tsp yeast nutrient
Wyeast 4766 cider yeast

Black IPA with homegrown hops

So the Black IPA that I made using the staggered harvest of Cascade and Nugget hops turned out pretty good.  The beer has a big hop aroma from the dry hopping, and the taste is nice balance of slightly roasted grains and pungent hop flavors - citrus, pine, grassy, earthy.  Nice body too.

Recipe was:

6.6 lb Pale Liquid Malt Extract
2.0 lb Light Dry Malt Extract @30min
.75 lb Carafa III Special Malt (steeped)
.75 lb Crystal 60 Malt (steeped)

1.75 oz Chinook @60min
1.5 oz Centennial @60min
1.0 oz Nugget @30min
2 to 3 oz (equivalent) of homegrown wet Nugget and Cascade @ 5min

Wyeast 1056 American Ale yeast
Dry Hop of 3 oz of homegrown dried Nugget and Cascade in secondary for 1 week

O.G. 1.070
F.G. 1.020
abv ~6.5%

Homebrewing happenings

Brewed my first high gravity beer back in August, a partial-mash Russian Imperial Stout, so that it will be ready by Christmas time.  That style is big and bold, and good for winter drinking.  It will be about 10% abv.   I brewed a 3 gallon batch that was left in primary fermentation for a month.   I used the yeast cake from a previous amber ale to ferment the beer, since high gravity beer needs lots of yeast to be able to ferment, as yeast can struggle with such a sugar-rich wort. 

 I then racked it into a smaller 3 gallon carboy for secondary fermentation.  It was in secondary for 2 months, and bottled in the middle of November.  I added some additional yeast when bottling, in case the original yeast was too tired to keep going to carbonate the bottles.  Hopefully it's carbonated and ready to go in a month.

 The hop harvest of the Cascade and Nugget hops turned out decent for the 1st year, which isn't supposed to be real great.

 You can see the lupulin powder inside the hop cones, which is what gives off the hop aroma and oils that flavor and acts as a preservative in beer.

 I had enough hops to use as the flavor/aroma addition in a batch.  So I decided to brew a Black IPA, which is basically a hoppy Indian Pale Ale, but has a little dark malt, so the beer ends up black.  But it doesn't have the strong roasted coffee and chocolate flavors that porters and stouts have.

I also dry hopped the beer with the homegrown hops, as the hops were ready for harvest in two batches.  Hop cones are ready to pick when they are crunchy and papery feeling.  Dry hopping refers to adding the hops directly into the secondary fermentation carboy, which adds a huge hop aroma to the beer. 

 

I have been feeding my spent grains to the chickens, which they seem to love. 

Homebrew Yeast "Washing"

With this last batch of homebrew, I decided to experiment with harvesting and washing the yeast for re-use in future batches.  The yeast I had used for the Porter was a standard English Ale yeast that could be used for a fairly wide array of beers in the future.  When a beer is finished primary fermentation, the yeast have eaten all of the sugars in the wort that they can (to make alcohol and CO2), and have dropped out of suspension in the beer.  The amount dropped out is dependant on how flocculent the yeast strain is. More info: http://www.wyeastlab.com/hb_clarification.cfm

A few days before I was ready to bottle the Porter, I boiled 3 mason jars (two quart jars and one big 2-quart jar) to sanitize them and capped them full of the boiled sanitized water.  Put them in the fridge until needed.  

After racking the beer out of the fermenting carboy and into the bottling bucket, what is left on the bottom of the carboy is a thick layer of sludge-like sediment called trub, consisting of inactive yeast, proteins, and hop particles leftover from the brewing process.   So I need to seperate out the yeast to save, called "washing", by removing the stuff I don't want.

Poured the santized water from the 2-quart mason jar into the carboy, swirled around, and poured into the jar.  Put back in the fridge.  After a couple of days, it seperated into 3 layers that looked like this:

The top brown layer is beer liquid, the creamy middle is the yeast, and the bottom darker layer is the trub sediment I don't want.   So I drained off the beer liquid, and poured the creamy yeast layer into one of the smaller jar with about half of the sanitized water.  Shook it up, so it starts looking like this:

 Again, after a few days in the fridge, it again seperates into 3 layers:

 Pour the yeast layer into the 3rd jar, which again after a few days in the fridge, I have refined the yeast layer down to the small amount here:

So I will store this in the fridge until I want to use this yeast again, which will just require making a yeast starter to wake the yeast back up before brewing.