Question about kits and how I learned to love Cider

First off, we were at a party last night and a friend was asking about the kits we keep referring to.  While there are kits that contain all the equipment you need from companies like the Brooklyn Brewing Company, the kits we are usually referring to only contain the ingredients meant for that style of beer.  What happens is we go to the homebrewing store and tell them what style of beer we are hoping to make, and they go and find the appropriate "kit" which is a plastic baggy filled with all of the ingredients anyone making a classic style of that beer would use and prepackage it.

In that same store it is possible to get however much you want of any grain, hops, or yeast, but the kits are meant to make it easier for you so you don't have to do all that work for the same effect.  That being said, we are planning out our first experimental recipe in which I have been looking up where to get local barley and hops.  Our plan is to make a beer using 100% local ingredients, though we're still figuring out what sort of beer style it will be.

Now, last week we brewed an American Wheat beer.  We specify that because Hefeweizen requires specific breed of wheat and yeast apparently to be considered a true Hefeweizen.  The wheat was very strange as it was ONLY the wheat and some hops.  The wheat itself is unlike the barley we've used in the past as the wheat is crushed into a powder which we dumped into the water directly.  We put hops in for bittering but there were no aroma hops to add so it was a very simple brew.  After placing it in the fermenter, a few days later, we discovered the yeast was having high production of CO2 so Kristi had to do damage control for the beer to ensure the sanitizer didn't get blasted out of the plug and cause the beer to get infected.

This week we transferred the wheat beer to a secondary fermenter, but we also bottled our Cider.  I did my usual tasting for both beers.  The wheat was interesting and Kristi and I are excited to see what it's like in a few weeks after it's been bottled for a bit.  The Cider, however, blew me away.  I'm not generally a fan of Ciders, mainly because they're generally very sweet and I'm not fond of most sweet things.  What Kristi did to convince me to make this Cider was to inform me that a traditional English Cider is more dry than sweet, so I was interested to see what it was like.  The Cider has been fermenting for a few weeks now and it's already tasting great, with a hint of tart that I find pleasing.  I can only imagine what it's going to taste like when it's all done.  The most important detail is that it should be completely ready by the end of May when friends from out of town show up.  Most of those friends don't like beer, but love cider so we think this should be popular.  Tomorrow we look to brew a Red Kolsch, and as I've never had one before I'm interested to see how that turns out.

Edit: Forgot to mention we used local honey instead of sugar for bottling the cider.  We think it will give an interesting after taste as we've found using honey doesn't make what you brewed sweeter, but gives it an interesting character instead.

Learning with Cider

This is a rather brief post as Ciders apparently don't have much to them.  Kristi spoke to some of the guys at the homebrewing store and they informed her that for a cider you really only need to get Frozen concentrate apple juice as it won't make a difference.  She got 6 containers and put it into the pot, and we put the normal amount of water in.  As a note, we usually put in 6 gallons to account for evaporation, but with ciders you aren't quite boiling so we ended up with too much cider at the end but we're making due.  We heated the cider to 185 degrees Fahrenheit for 45 minutes.  Once we were done we cooled it down and put it into the fermentor with the yeast.

That's it, that's all there is to a cider.  The major part is that it takes FOREVER to ferment.  So much so that Kristi and I were getting worried it wasn't quite working as we didn't see much activity.  I stopped by the homebrewing shop and they said it's a slow fermentation and gave me some nutrients to use to help the yeast feed more as they don't get much out of a cider apparently.  It should take a few months of fermenting and then bottling and fermenting that in the bottle for a few months more.  I'm still trying to get a straight answer about how long it takes as Kristi was told quick fermentation in the fermentor and months in the bottles, and someone else told me months in the fermentor and months more in the bottle.  So we'll see, but it probably won't be as good as we were hoping for since we were having this confusion.  Still, those that enjoy ciders will likely still enjoy them, but I'm going to keep some to the side to ferment longer as I really prefer a dry cider.

Long Break, Quick Update

We've been rather busy lately so it's been hard to get around to actually updating the blog.  At this point Kristi has already brewed her 1gal Belgian Ale, added the Orange zest (the outer part of an orange peel) and we've now bottled the Belgian Ale AND Irish Red both.  We've learned a lot from previous experiences and made some improvements.

For bottling the Irish Red in particular we used two fermenters, moving from a first to a second after some time, then for bottling we moved to the bottling bucket which has a spigot at the bottom.  One of the differences this time around is that Kristi found out about a "bottling wand" and got us one.  Basically, it's a wand you attach to a tube which is attached to the spigot but it does not let any beer out until it presses against a surface.  This is useful because it means we can place it in the bottles directly at the bottom, it makes it so it doesn't really foam at all, we get a consistent amount with every bottle because of stopping when it reaches the top, and it speeds up the process since we don't have to turn the spigot on or off or have anyone pumping.

This made the bottling process so much easier to the point that having a third person no longer feels necessary.  Kristi was able to pump out the filled bottles while I capped them and placed them to the side.  We've found it does a better job of keeping a lot of the useless dead yeast out of the bottles as well, though we ensured keeping some live yeast so it could continue to ferment properly in the bottle.  Which brings me to the next point.

We found with the Kolsch's that we had an inconsistency in the amount of final carbonation that had occurred.  Much of this had to do with how we mixed the sugar in before the bottling process, which we corrected with the Irish Reds by slowly pouring it in as we filled the bucket with beer.  This meant some Kolsch's were very carbonated by the end, and some were not very carbonated.  Fortunately, it seems time has solved that problem for the rest of the Kolsch's after we put them aside for a few weeks before having more.  Now the bottles seem to be better fermented.  But back to the Irish Red and Belgian Ale bottlings.

When we were bottling the Irish Red I tried a taste in my tasting glass and found that it had a strange, yet pleasing, oak taste.  According to Kristi, that oak taste is actually a specific trait to the Irish yeast we had used and is commonly used by homebrewers for just that reason.  I'm keeping it in mind for an experiment I may do in the future.  As for the Belgian Ale, when tasting I found the zest was extremely strong in it, but Kristi has learned that fermenting beers with fruit and ciders both require some aging in the bottle to mellow out the flavors.  Because of this we are waiting about a month after bottling the Belgian Ale to actually try it, but this is also good to know as tonight we plan on brewing our first cider.  I'll try to post an update tomorrow as to the process for Ciders, but what I will tell you is that you keep it in the fermenter for about a week before bottling it.  We've been told it's best to keep it in there for months so we are hoping to have it ready by late May when we expect to see a bunch of friends from out of town.  Wish us luck.