Tag: Home Brewing

November 15, 2022 – Plum Wine… Liquid Fire or Liquid Gold?

November 15, 2022 /

It is finally bottling day. The wine has been in the secondary over a year. I think that it has been ready to bottle for six months or so but I have been consumed with other activities.

My first challenge was bottles. I hate dealing with bottle preparation. To top it off, I really didn’t have enough wine bottles as five gallons need two cases of bottles. I had 2/3 of a case (or eight) bottles open. Instead of spending $50 on bottles, I decided to put them in 22oz beer bottles. So this meant cleaning them.

This is a task that I don’t mind doing as much in the summer time, but now the temperature is near freezing. Soaking these bottles in sanitizer and scrubbing them with a bottle brush is drag and it is pretty cold too. I found three bottles that needed some extra attention, so much so that I actually abandoned them and found other bottles to use. They took days of soaking, scrubbing, pouring boiling water and other cleaning chemicals to try and get these clean.

I have two bottle brushes. One does not fit into my bottles and the other does not fan out properly at the bottom. I need to be in the market for a third brush so that this task is not so difficult. The real, real lesson is to not leave bottles dirty. I could have avoided all of this by rinsing them properly before putting them away.

The bottling process is not too bad. It involves a spring-loaded plunger and a gravity syphon. Essentially, while there is pressure on the tip of the plunger, liquid will feed from above until you release the pressure. I try to fill the bottle as full as I can get it because once the bottle dispenser is removed, that volume is replace with air (or headspace). Beer will utilize that oxygen to do it’s bottle carbonation. Wine really doesn’t benefit from any extra oxygen and should be avoided.

Once all the bottles are filled, they can be corked or capped. I write the page number of my brew log on the cap for identification. You can see the color, kind of a reddish-orangish color. Very nice.

When I was originally brewing this, I was planning that this recipe would make three gallons. It turned out to make five. I suspect that because I froze the fruit, most of it remained in the brew, adding volume. Had this actually been three gallons, I think it would have been way out of proportion. I didn’t actually weigh the fruit, I estimated it. To do this again, I would make some modifications, likely less added sugar.

I brewed this on a whim. A mysterious box of plums showed up on my deck one day. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a starting sugar, so I don’t know what the actual alcohol content is. But it is kind of rocket fuel. It has a distinctly plum taste to it but it is not sweet like the Asian wines. I probably need to cold crash it so it stays a little sweet and is not quite so strong. Otherwise, this is an Altf4.co success; found fruit brewed into future enjoyment. This is exactly what I wanted to do with this site.

End Your Programming Routine: Now that this is done, it is time to start turning into brewing beer again. I have four kits and two empty kegs sitting and waiting. I also want to make a decision on apple cider. I am strongly thinking that I will brew that as well. I guess now that the weather has changed, it is a good time to be working in the kitchen.

February 16, 2022 – Brewing and Keezer Project

February 16, 2022 /

I’m going to do something that I haven’t done in quite a while. That is to make beer. But of course, I cant just do something that I am proficient with, I have to amp up the complexity and number of variables.

A long time ago, I tried to brew a lager beer (2003ish). That is done at temperatures between 45 and 60. I had a refrigerator that had temperature control but it just didn’t work well. I am not totally sure why I failed but I thought that I would do it again. Part of what is causing me to do it now is that I am watching my plum wine settle and I can see the temperature going between 48 and 58 depending on the day. That is just setting in the basement, no refrigeration required.

A couple of years ago, my friend gave me a keezer. That is a freezer that has been converted to hold and dispense kegs. This is also new to me. I have never kegged beer before. It allegedly reduces the clean-up (mostly bottling time). That is the biggest reason I have moved away from brewing.

So, in order of my issues

  1. Time spent on the brewing and bottling process
  2. Cost of materials, there is little money saving brewing
  3. The quality of what I was making was substandard, in my opinion

Combine those three together and I think you can see why I stopped. Or should I say shifted focus. If you remember a long time ago, I wrote about looking for free or cheap sources to brew. Hence the plum wine, they were given to me. Just to punctuate this a bit more my kit costs $50. That is malt, hops and yeast in sufficient quantity to make 5 gallons.

5 gals * 128 oz/gal = 640 ozs

640 oz / 12 oz/bottle = 53.33 bottles yield

53.33 bottles / 6 bottles = 8.88 six packs per batch

$50 / 8.88 = $5.63 per six pack

Now, that might sound alright given that I am seeing Modelo or Corona at $11-13 per six pack. However, the other factors time and effort as well as results come into play. Generally speaking, this is going to be a low alcohol content batch. The more things that go in, the price starts to go up. Malt extract is $5/pound and hops are running more like $15/oz. That means if you are brewing an imperial IPA with lots of hops and alcohol you are getting closer to $10 a six pack or about what you are going to buy it at.

I purchased a brewing kit that is styled as a Mexican Lager. I am shooting to have this ready for Cinco de Mayo. Hopefully, I have given myself plenty of time but not so much that it is gone before we get there! If all goes well, then something else I have never done is all grain brewing. That can save quite a bit of money. So, who knows maybe this is the key to getting back into brewing beer again?

I want to try kegging. I want to try lagering. I want get this keezer working to see if I would rather like to keep going, expand or get rid of it myself. If it works out, then it is going to figure prominently in the wine cellar design as well. This all ties back to the basement cleanup efforts. See my crazy logic?

End Your Programming Routine: This is going to be a quick mini-series on brewing beer, specifically what I did. I had talked about writing on brewing in my About page and some of my early writings, but I have rarely done it. I suppose it goes back the time and the cost. I am looking forward to kicking this process off.