Cider, Apple Cider

The time has come for me to stop talking about committing cider and put my money where my mouth is, or some other more appropriate analogy. The holdup was because I ordered a special sweet Mead/Cider yeast to replace the champagne yeast I bought when I got my first pile of equipment. I was told that the champagne yeast would produce a bone dry beverage and I would rather have a cider with some personality, sweetness, and some body...

Cider, Apple Cider, to be exact. Sorry, I'm still jonsing to see Skyfall.

Apple Cider 'take 1' was achieved thusly:

Ask for a recipe.

Instantly decide to modify recipe with absolutely no cider brewing experience and relying only on the ridiculously good luck that protects idiots and children. I'm 28. Make of that what you will. What seemed like such a bright addition to me beyond brown sugar? It's the holidays, so mulling spices just seemed like a smashing addition.

Apparently mulling spices in Lawton requires the skills of James Bond to obtain. Alas! I am Bondless, but it can't be that hard to get the tasty holiday spice I was going for, so I decided to abandon the quest for commercial mulling spices and appeal to google. For the first time in the history of my personal universe, Google was no help. All the recipes involved exotic stuff like cinnamon sticks and orange peel. Wal-Mart was out of cinnamon sticks and I didn't have any oranges.

Time for plan 3. Do it anyway. Dionysus will protect me.

I already had my five gallons of apple juice. I read the labels of each brand and the only one that didn't have either added grape juice or used chemical yeast and bacteria inhibitors was the dirt cheap, three dollars a gallon off, off, off brand. Dirt cheap off brand apple juice only had apple juice and asorbic acid, which is vitamin C, so the yeast I tossed in should do fine, be happy, and make lots of little yeastlings.

Should. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I dragged a clean bucket and lid upstairs along with an airlock, the giant spoon we bought after the last debacle, and the StarSan in the spray bottle. I shook it and it made bubbles, proving it was still good. Bubbles are very important to the brewing process. <-- Remember that, there will be a test later.

The yeast came in a bag about the size of a regular ziplock sandwich bag called a 'Smack Pack'. Cute. The directions on the back said to hold it in one hand and break the inner bag by... wait for it... smacking it. In theory the bag would inflate over the next three hours as the yeast activated. It felt like breaking a glow stick. I tossed the bag on the counter to come up to room temperature and promptly forgot about it.

Seven hours later:

I walked back into the kitchen and remembered what I'd forgotten. By then it was ten at night and I was just doing my evening cruise through to make sure that there wasn't anything perishable left out. LIKE THE YEAST. LEFT OUT BY ME. Disaster averted. The bag didn't look like it inflated that much, but maybe it had and then the CO2 had bled off. I wasn't supposed to leave it out for seven hours. My bad.

I sprayed the bucket and spoon really well with the Star San and let it sit. Then I got the one pound bag of dark brown sugar, the only part of the original recipe, and added some water to make it into a syrup. I also dumped in about a 1/3 cup honey, 1 tbs cinnamon, 1 ts allspice, 1ts nutmeg, and 1 ts cloves. While that was heating up, I dumped the apple juice into the bucket.

Two minutes later, the spiced sugar mix was simmering. I let it simmer for a couple of minutes just to make sure to kill any bacteria or wild yeast that was on the spice, then poured it into the apple juice. It smelled and tasted divine. I waited a few minutes and stirred it up really well before I sanitized my hands and ripped open the yeast package, and that's when I discovered that I fail at breaking glow sticks.

The inner nutrient packet was still intact, floating in a sea of inert yeast. Balls.

I suppose the slight inflating was only the package coming to room temperature.

On the back it said that I could just pitch it directly if I wanted, so after some sweary words, I did. I figured it was going into pure sugar, the tiny head start given by being able to follow the directions and break a simple plastic bubble probably weren't going to matter that much over the long run.

Unless I'd managed to kill the yeast by letting it sit out four hours longer that it was supposed to.

I didn't know what to do, so I fell back on the old standby of charge blindly ahead and let things work themselves out. As a life philosophy, it's worked for me so far.

A quick spritz of Star San on the lid and the bucket was sealed. I secured the airlock without mishap and left it to ferment. Early the next morning I checked the airlock. No bubbles. The bubbles coming up in the airlock would be a sign that the yeast was doing its thing and producing alcohol. But it had only been overnight. Maybe it needed longer?

I checked it that evening.

No.

Bubbles.

Now I started to freak out again. Maybe it had been too hot when I pitched the yeast. Maybe all the yeast was dead! I hadn't bothered to use a thermometer. I dug the yeast package out of the trash and read it again. 24-48 hours before activity would be obvious. Maybe I just needed to give it a little more time. I checked it again.

The next morning:

This calls for drastic measures. I sanitized my hands and gently pried up the lid for a peek inside.

IT WAS DISGUSTING! Which meant it was fermenting! There was scummy layer on the top and the faintest trace of alcohol was very evident when I cracked the lid. I hadn't killed it! I pressed the lid back down and when I did:

I get bubbles in the airlock when I press the lid down. I suppose there isn't enough pressure in there to force the bubbles up through the airlock, or maybe it wasn't sealed all the way and the CO2 was oozing out the side, but it's bubbling right now.

Now, if it only tastes as good as it smells...

The .gifs were used with permission from http://justburntsomepopcorn.tumblr.com/ and y'know, Pixar. Pixar not so much with permission.

Smashing pumpkin ale!

Pumpkin Ale. Or as the advertising says, SMASHING PUMPKIN ALE! from Northern brewer.

I've been interested in home brewing for a looooooooooong time. I remember reading how moonshiners did it in my grandmother's Foxfire books when I was 12. It never seemed that complicated, but I never got around to actually getting the equipment and stuff to make my own alcohol. But y'know, reading about surgery doesn't make it sound that complicated either. So there's that.

When I was in farrier school (lo those many years ago) a fellow student, a Kentucky native, made prison shine in a clean garbage bag using all the fruit and fruit juice he could scavenge out of our dorms. The beverage at the end tasted like coconut. Which was very odd because there was no coconut actually involved in the process. Still, it wasn't too bad. I don't want to think about what it says about me as a person that I drank liquor produced in a garbage bag.

As he said, "All the house guarantees is you don't go blind."

Then a friend gave me some supplies and a 'Learn to Brew' book and I swore to stop saying someday and just do it. It's like writing. Why write today what I can put off until tomorrow? Wait, that doesn't make any sense! Exactly. I can't do that anymore. I have to make the time for stuff I want to do and create. Creating excellent beer happens to be on that list.

It took longer to get Sunbeams* on board. He thought it was a nice idea in theory, but he wasn't especially interested. Now, keep in mind this is the same man that was on a cruise ship for eight hours before he decided that he was going to have fun. A CRUISE SHIP. It takes a lot to get him excited about anything so my style is to forge ahead and drag him along. Otherwise we'd never do anything new.

In all my random brewer sleuthing, I learned there's two types of kits; Malt Extract and Whole Grain. In malt extract, you boil the water, dump in a jug or two of malt, add yeast and wait. In whole grain, you boil the water, add a pound or two of grain, add yeast and wait. <-- this is slightly simplified. I left out added the hops. It's like making soup, really.

Being me, I managed to cross the streams. I love pumpkin flavored everything, so I picked out a pumpkin spice ale. There's a version of the recipe where you use real pumpkin, grains AND malt syrup and that version seemed to have the best reviews. Enter my 'go big or go home' philosophy.

I suppose it was a bad sign when we finally settled down to actually do this that we couldn't find pumpkin. It was four days after Halloween and pumpkin season had apparently ended. All the pumpkins were sent back to the Great Pumpkin in the sky. We had to use butternut squash instead, which I think might actually give it more flavor. We also couldn't find a giant spoon that would reach down in the bottom of the pot but that's okay. Another guy in the home brew club told me that he uses a regular spoon and just makes a whirlpool.

Also whenever I say 'we' I mean 'I' because Sunbeams was busy dicking around on facebook for most of this. EDIT: Sunbeams was also reading over my shoulder and he says he was on xkcd.com doing important internet stuff. Only a hipster douche would spend two hours on facebook at one time. He was most offended I implied he was a hipster douche. Also he got the propane. He feels very hurt I didn't honor his contribution of hunting and gathering the propane. Let's all have a moment of utmost respect for Sunbeams, may he return the perky little ball of happiness and joy he is normally.

ANYWAY:

Step 1. Roast the squash and smoosh it up. Okay. Easy peasy. Did that.


Step 2. Add about 2 1/2 gallons of water and the grain. Simmer gently. Okay. I got this.

Step 3. Take the grain out. That was easy, it's in a bag. It was like a teabag. I WAS TEABAGGING MY BEER! <-- mandatory crude sex joke, in case you missed it.

Step 4. Take the smooshed up boiled squash out. This was accomplished by Sunbeams holding a colander over the big boiling pot and I poured it. Very slowly. I guess he did help. At this point I also managed to break my neat-o floating thermometer, but I didn't break it in the beer, so the entire experiment wasn't fucked.

Step 5. Add enough water to bring it up to five gallons. That was easy. Then I dumped in some malt syrup, and that stuff is thicker than molasses. I cranked the temp up to start boiling it, and then dropped in the little baggie of hops. It was a really deep orangy brown color.


Step 6. Consulted directions again 'cause it looks really gross. This can't be right. I mean, there's a bubble of sludge in the middle. It looked like a picture of a bacteria colony on a culture, except it was all brown and y'know, macroscopic.


Step 7. Wow that looks gross. Why does that look so gross? BECAUSE HOLY FUCK IT'S BOILING OVER!


Step 8. Say bad words. Turn the burner down. Burner goes off. Struggle to light it again because there's butternut squash foam all over the propane burner bits. Say more bad words for luck. I was really glad I didn't do this on the stove. EDIT: I was told later that hops tend to cause boil over. Note to self for next time, cut the heat, add hops, turn heat back on.

Step 9. Get it lit again. Breath a sigh of relief.

Step 10. Boil GENTLY for an hour. Add more malt syrup. Why yes, I moved my laptop outside. I had some crazy idea I'd write while I was doing this. HAR HAR NO. I was up every ninety seconds checking the temp so steps 7-9 didn't happen again.


Step 11. Discovered there was black flakey stuff that keeps floating up. Da fuq is this? I had no idea what this stuff was. I thought maybe I'd failed at peeling the squash and it was squash skin. The picture didn't come out, but there was black flakey stuff like paper curled up and floating around in my wort (baby beer).

Step 12. Forget to add Pumpkin Pie spice.

Step 13. Cool it. You're supposed to drop it from boiling to about 80 degrees as fast as possible so the wort doesn't get infected with random nastiness floating around in the air. We stuck the pot in the sink and ran water around the base while stirring it with a metal spatula. Cooling it this way took forever.

Step 14. One eternity later, it's at 80 degrees. We poured it into the sterilized fermenting bucket. Then I looked down in the boiling pot and discovered that the flaky black stuff was not butternut squash skin that I missed. In fact, it was a layer of burned malt syrup on the bottom of the pot. Having a spoon that didn't reach the bottom may have just screwed us because it burned on so thick it could curl off. But the wort didn't taste burned.

Step 15. I tried to get a specific gravity reading and I'm pretty sure I did it wrong. I let the specific gravity thing float in the tester container and it settled at 60. Right on the border between beer and wine and if that's true it'll be at 15% alcohol, but I'm pretty sure I did it wrong. If it turns out drinkable, even at half that it'll be better than beer from the store. In this state beer sold in stores can't be more than 3.2% alcohol. Fuck that.
EDIT: I did read it wrong. I should have been looking at the other scale. The SG was really at 1.060 which will equal about 8.2%. Still better than 3.2 baby.

Step 16. Added yeast and put the lid on. At this point Sunbeams decides he's going to jam the airlock into the top. That's a little plastic thingie that lets gas out and keeps germs from getting in. It just barely fits in a tiny gasket on the top of the bucket, but Sunny was determined to jam it on there. I'm standing there saying, "No wait, let's put that on in the basement, it won't stay, don't mongo it-"

PLOP

The gasket falls down inside the bucket.

Shit.

Sunbeams sprays his arm down with StarSan (the sterilizer stuff) and it isn't until he's shoulder deep in the wort that I remember StarSan is supposed to sit on a surface for one minute before it's actually sterile. So he swished his arm germs all over the beer and it'll be a miracle if this works now.

Step 15. Remembered to add the pumpkin pie spice. \o/ \o/ \o/

Step 16. We lugged it down to the basement and put the airlock on again, gently this time. Except I forgot the middle part so it didn't actually function as an airlock for almost 12 hours. We said a prayer that it would work.

Step 17. Found the middle part of the airlock the next morning on the counter. I almost threw it away before I realized what it was. Put it together again. Holy shit it'll be a miracle if this works.

BUT THEN later that day the airlock was bubbling away as the gas escaped, so maybe it worked after all. Also, Sunbeams is WAY GUNG HO to do this again. He's already picked out an Irish Red kit he wants to make and he's planning a trip up to the brew store to get more buckets so we can do more than one at a time.

Finally he has a hobby. Also, BEER!


*Once my darling husband got really annoyed with me for using his real name on the internet. In the course of the argument I said, "What do you want me to call you then?" and without fully thinking the implications through, he says, "I don't care." 

So that is why he's Sunbeams.