On Saturday afternoon, we put the old apple press to work.

Our target was 3 gallons of cider for this first attempt.  I read somewhere online that one would need 12.5 lbs of apples to make 1 gallon of cider.  We picked about 40 pounds from the orchard down the street and felt like we had enough.

We started chopping the apples in half and then french fry cutting the halves to get them ready for the press.

After pressing with all our might, we learned that the apples needed to be process even further to get more juice.

We employed a 3 three pronged attack (food processor, stick blender, and regular blender) to prep the apples for more productive pressing! 

The regular blender didn’t work all that well, so we stuck with the food processor and the stick blender.  We turned the 40 lbs of apple fries into mush in no time.

We put them all back into the press and watched the huge flow of cider spill down into the kettle.

I added 2 cups of sugar to the cider and pasteurized it by heating it to 170°F for 20 minutes.  We felt it was our best option to kill any unwanted critters. 

We cooled it in a kiddie pool ice bath, added some pectic enzyme, some yeast nutrient, and two packages of proofed Champagne yeast.    

Sunday morning, it was fermenting like crazy.  We’ll see how it turns out.

Lessons Learned:

Need an apple grinder or some kind of way to mill apples into a nice mush quickly and easily.

Need to fix the bottom of the old press.  There are a few leaks - we had a temporary fix with plastic wrap…but that’s not ideal.

We were only able to press 2.75 gallons of cider.  We may have a larger yield next time, but maybe we should pick a few more pounds of apples.

Some photos:

So I brewed up a honey wheat ale about a month ago and somehow made two different beers from it.  I bottled up half of the batch as one normally would and the other half was introduced to a gallon of a honey solution for a secondary fermentation.

Both beers are ready to be imbibed and analyzed.  Here are my notes from a side by side tasting:

Honey Wheat Ale

Appearance: Light amber, cloudy like a wheat beer should be.  Foamy off white head.

Aroma: Sweet caramel, like the center of a Rollo.  Some floral honey, I guess.

Taste: Spicy wheat.  Medium bitterness from the hop.  Some hotness from some fusel alcohols, but I wonder about  that.  The flavors have mellowed a bit, so I am not sure where this spiciness is coming from.

Mouthfeel: Medium body, some pleasant graininess.

Overall:  High fermentation temps have left its mark on this beer.  It may mellow out further, but I am not betting on it.  There are some good sweet and wheat flavors here.  Good head lacing.

If I brew this one in the winter, it’s a different beer.

Honey Wheat Ale with honey addition

Appearance:  Lighter in color than the original brew.  Head is not as strong.  I suppose we should expect these differences.

Aroma:  Some of that honey malt aroma is still coming through, especially as it warms up.

Taste:  Smooth - mild.  A little bit of the wheat flavor at the end.    The craziness??  It appears that all crappy flavors from the primary fermentation have been scrubbed out.  Any graininess and hotness is gone.  Just gone.  Hop flavors are muted.  I am not sure this is beer, but it’s going down very easy.  Very clean aftertaste.  It seems to have picked up a tangy fruity characteristic that I can’t put my finger on…

Mouthfeel:  Much thinner and lighter than the original brew.

Overall:  Not sure what I created here.  It is certainly drinkable.  Very drinkable as I am on my third sample as I type this sentence, but not sure what a beer judge would say about it.  I am feeling good about the second half of the brew.  I am thinking of presenting this beer at the pseudo-Oktoberfest we are putting on.

As more of a proof of concept than a true beer enhancing exercise, I am cold conditioning my honey wheat ale MACH II for 72 hours before bottling.  It’s going to help get some of that yeast to settle out more…but I don’t think it’s going to clarify it much since it is a wheat beer.

I wanted to see how cool I could get my glass fermenter in the styrofoam box using water and frozen water bottles.  By freezing eight .5 liter bottles of spring water (the spring water consumed…I filled them with tap water for freezing) and rotating 4 every 12 hours, I was able to get it down 25 degrees below the air temperature in my basement. 

Knowing that my basement sits around 55F in the winter, I feel I can bring my fermenter’s temperature down to near freezing using this set up.  Nice!  This winter may be the season of lagers.

Some photos:

The lowest temperature I was able to hit was 46F…  Again, if I really tried I could probably get it colder but I was just playing around.

I am going to let the beer come to room temperature before bottling to try to wake up the yeast for bottling/carbonation. 

Well, Mike and I bottled up half of the honey wheat ale last night and racked the other half onto a gallon of honey water goodness (1.5 pounds of honey in one gallon of water heated at 170F for 30 minutes -cooled to fermentation temperatures).

These photos will tell a better story:

Bottles and siphon ready to go

Opening up the fermentation bucket

Racking to the bottling bucket 

Sanitized carboy ready for the second half

Finished bottles.

Reward!

Krausen in the carboy (24 hours later)

In two weeks, we’ll know how the original beer came out.  In 4 weeks (and many weeks after that) we’ll see how the experiment came out.

If you would like to follow along with this brew session, check out these links:

Honey Wheat Ale Recipe

Honey Wheat Ale Ingredients

Honey Wheat Ale Update

Honey Wheat Ale Plans

Honey Water Solution

I wanted to figure out what kind of honey/water solution I could make for this honey wheat ale experiment.  Through an email conversation, Mike gave me information on how to determine the specific gravity of a honey/water solution.

Seeing how the gravity of honey is going to vary a bit from season to season/batch to batch, I tried to figure out the best way to get to the SG value.  Here is what I figured out:

Best thing is you can apply this method to any new sugar or sugar solution you may want to determine the SG and PPG for (agave nectare, fruit extracts, maple syrups, etc…)
Specific gravity is a measure of points per pound per gallon.  Therefore, let’s put a pound of honey in one gallon and see what the hydrometer says….but that would be a waste of honey.

So we’ll  calculate it down to a reasonable level.

I’ll assume that you need two cups of volume to get adequately fill a hydrometer tube.

One gallon is 16 cups.

So two cups is 1/8th of a gallon.

Conveniently enough, one pound is equal to 16 ounces by weight.

1/8 of 16oz is 2oz.
So if you put 2oz of honey into a total FINAL volume of 2 cups, you can read that with the hydrometer and get an SG and figure out the PPG as well [PPG=(SG-1)*1000].  Reason being, is that 2oz of honey in 2 cups of water would be the same thing as 16oz (1pound) in 16 cups (1 gallon).

The way to do this is to put a measuring cup on your scale, tare it to zero, then squeeze in 2oz (BY WEIGHT) of honey.  Then add some tap water until you hit the 2 cup mark.  You can’t add two cups of water to the honey, because the honey has volume too and some water in it (albeit very little H2O).  Stir well until you think all the honey is dissolved. Then transfer to the hydro tube and read it.

Now the only thing left to do is figure out how many of points of honey you want to add and decide if that is a reasonable number of pounds or ounces of honey to achieve a desired effect in the final product from a flavor perspective.

Advanced Lesson:  If you are really clever, you could even use one ounce of honey in a final volume of two cups, then multiply the resultant PPG times 2 to account for the extra dilution.  Why would you do this?  Save on honey.  You can dilute it even more, but keep in mind that you may slip below the accuracy of the hydrometer at too low a gravity (reading 1.004 probably isn’t very accurate).  I would only dilute it once anyway because I think the gravity of 2oz in 2 cups is going to come it around 1.045-1.035.

I think I would like to shoot for a SG of 1.060 for the honey solution.  After we run this little experiment, we’ll know how much honey to add or subtract from a gallon of water.

Update: I just ran this experiment (mixing 2 cups of water with 2 oz by weight of honey) and got a hydrometer reading of 1.040!  Using Mike’s post (see below), I will need 1.5 lbs of honey to dissolve into 1 gallon of water to get a 1.060 SG.

If you would like to know more about this subject, read this post about working with Points Per Pound Per Gallon and Specific Gravity.

More Honey Wheat Ale Brew Log posts:

Honey Wheat Ale Recipe

Honey Wheat Ale Ingredients

Honey Wheat Ale Update

Honey Wheat Ale Plans

Honey Wheat Ale Bottling Day

Mike and I were talking this weekend about the honey wheat ale I have in the fermenter right now.

Our conversation was a continuation of thoughts I had about this brew.

I want to split this brew in half.  One half I am going to prime and bottle as usual.

The other half I want to rack to a glass fermenter on top of some kind of honey/water mixture.

What we need to work out is what the honey/water ratio is going to be.

The second half batch is an experiment in infusing honey flavor into a beer.

Once it’s racked, I will let it ferment/condition for another 2 weeks and bottle again.

It will interesting to compare the two halves once they are ready to drink.

We’ll let you know what the ration we come up with will be.

If you would like to follow along with this brew session, check out these links:

Honey Wheat Ale Recipe

Honey Wheat Ale Ingredients

Honey Wheat Ale Update

Honey Water Solution

Honey Wheat Ale Bottling Day

I set up a Google alert a while back to send me links to web pages that are related to homebrewing. There was one link that had a subject of reusing hops. Here’s the link:
http://beeradvocate.com/forum/read/1898207

In this post, the author details how he reused hops to bitter a beer that were used to dry hop a previous beer. The facinating aspect of his experiment was that he used pellet hops.

Has anyone else tried this? If you have a BA login, you can read more.