Also not repeating last year’s mistake (ie: the massive back breaking effort to hand press something like 130lbs of apples), today we swung by the apple farm and simply bought six gallons of cider. That was cheaper than buying apples. And saved eight hours of labor. So there’s five plus gallons of apple juice fermenting as well with the extra in the fridge for non-hard drinking because it’s just that time of year. The apple farm smelled like heaven. I skipped the campden tablets this time, because the store bought cider isn’t truly raw and I’m thinking it shouldn’t be too risky from a bacteria/fermentation standpoint to just dive right in with some biotin nutrient, pectic enzyme and wine yeast. We bought proper (plastic) champagne bottle corks and wire baskets since it seemed like our capper didn’t seal quite well enough to hold in the CO2 and get decent carbonation in the first batch. Or that’s my theory anyway currently. I may decide I need to supplement sugar and/or yeast at bottling time. We’ll see. It’s barely batch number two…it’ll be a while before we have the hard apple cider thing truly worked out.

I am tiiiiiired. Brewing’s hard work.

The Willamette turned out to be 13oz. I’d guess the Nugget will come in around 9oz. Which would translate easily into 15gallons of my fresh hops IPA. I think I’ll do just one 5gal batch though and put the rest towards some other varieties of brew, like our Scottish Ale and the ’12 edition of our ever improving espresso chocolate stout.

The quality is nearly identical as far as I can tell to the commercial fresh whole leaf hops I buy. Not bad for my third year of amateur hops growing.

Except the apples yielded around 2gallons of cider when we pressed them on Monday at Paul’s. So Jenn ran back to the far and bought that much again plus we used some of Paul’s apples. Similar proportions still: mostly Gravenstein, plus some McIntosh and maybe a few random others. After about four hours of cutting and cranking we had 5gallons of raw cider. The culls from Paul’s yard clearly yielded more juice than the good eating apples we got from the farm. The farm talked like we could get culls if we arranged for it (and got them later in the season). Having pressed something like 120lbs of apples I’m inclined to just buy five gallons of raw apple cider next time.

At any rate, that 5gallons of juice went into a plastic fermenter along with 5 crushed campden tablets and we loosely covered the container. After two days I added a packet of MA33 wine yeast, 3.5tsp pectic enzyme and 2.5tsp biotin nutrient.

I also pulled out some of the cider to measure the specific gravity. The original gravity read to be 1.048 which is right about on target given the collective hive mind opinion of the internet as presented by google. I didn’t stir the must before I did that so my reading might be on the light side, but I doubt it’s going to be as stratified as a hot beer wort just poured on top of a gallon block of ice (which gives a nonsensical reading).

I’m expecting to rack the cider multiple times between fermenters over a number of weeks in order to get the end result more clear, but the sample I took to measure the gravity is a very nice light yellow color and already fairly clear. At some point in the coming weeks then we’ll to bottle. The end result should be a sparkling but dry cider. Fingers crossed. If it works, I may try kegging it next year with the aim of making a semi-sweet cider.

As it currently stands the recipe comprises:

• 1c. Ghirardelli Natural Unsweetened Cocoa powder
• grains:
• 0.5lbs rolled oats
• 1lb chocolate
• 1.5lbs roast barley
• 0.5lbs 80L crystal
• 7lbs amber malt extract
• hops:
• 2oz fuggles (60minutes)
• 1oz goldings (20minutes)
• White Labs liquid London Ale Yeast or better Dry English Yeast…or even better is to swing by HUB during their Friday afternoon dock sale for a bottle of their amazing fruity yeast (supposed to be the same as used in Young’s ales)

The house has an amazing aroma of fruity yeast and dark espresso.

99 bottles of beer on the wall

We bottle the chocolate stout last night and racked the bitter over into a keg. Both sampled quite well. My benchmark tends to be if room temperature and flat tastes good then cold and carbonated will also. And both of these are quite yum. From this sample I’m inclined to think the chocolate stout might just be our best beer ever.

Oh and if you happen to be such a nerd to look at image exif data you’ll spot that I’ve got the new camera! Will post more later on that as I get some experience with it. So far I’m loving it.

Kiwi

Today I took a break from work and planted the hops. I still need to rig up something for it to climb on, but in the meantime it is in the ground and will hopefully take. It’ll be really interesting to see if we get hops production this year.

I also decided to train some kiwi (a male and female “Hayward fuzzy”) on the back fence.

And I was happy to see the asparagus is actually sprouting!

Hops rhizomes

Some time back Madi carpooled with her school/soccer friend Amy and when she was dropped off we ended up chatting homebrewing with Amy’s mom and she mentioned they grew hops. This morning the two of them were texting and it reminded me I’d been meaning to inquire about getting some hops rhizomes since spring planting time’s come around. I wasn’t thinking we’d do it on Easter day, but they said come on over today. So Madi got to see a friend and I got to grill the parents on hops growing (and raising chickens) and got a tonne of rhizomes for Cascade, Willamette and Nugget varieties.

I know I’ve seen hops growing in massive agricultural production, but I underestimated it’s backyard growing ability. The Krager’s had 16foot 4×4′s in the ground supporting wire, up to which the hops is trained. I could use a slightly bigger yard to have the space to do that and not be shading my garden. But I’ll try to get creative in the meantime and can always transplant rhizomes elsewhere someday if the opportunity presents.

2009 spring beers fermenting

We’ve got 20gallons of beer fermenting at the moment. There’s a Czech style lager cooling in the crawlspace in its long secondary fermentation, which will end any week now. And in the image, from left to right, is our Scotch Ale, this years (the 3rd) attempt at finding the perfect Chocolate Stout for our tastes, and what will hopefully be a simple light easy drinking sunny weather beer in the form of a classic English Bitter.