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alexander

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Ah, this I may actually be able to help with. You bottled too soon. Beer you bottle when fermentation is still happening and that provides your carbonation as the pressure builds. With mead you have a few considerations. Honey has a lot more available sugar than malted grains do. Even if it looks like your fermentation is done racking your mead will normally restart fermentation that will go just as strong as the primary fermentation. At gotmead.com some of the more experienced meaders talk about racking 5-7 times per batch. That allows fermentation to completely finish (either due to all sugar being exhausted for a dry mead or a high enough alcohol ratio to kill the yeast for a semi-sweet or sweet mead). If you bottle too early the fermentation will continue and push the cork out of the bottle. Let fermentation go, rack it, let it go some more and rack it again, as fermentation slows down just rack and let it wind down again.

 

The exception is if you want a sparkling mead and then you need to use a thicker bottle and a wire secured cork like you find for champagne.

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i most certainly didnt bottle too soon, i think 3 months is enough time, but i think there was some carbonation in the carboy due to the type of yeast i used and the cork didnt push out, the bottle exploded on me, could ocfourse have been some other issue with it, like someone touching ma bottles... i may just uncork the bottles, shake them up real well, letting the gases go, and leave on the counter for a couple of days before recorking them....

 

busy with more important things at the moment, like my passion fruit belgian :eek_big:

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update on the crazy batch, it got racked today, it somewhere in the 1.040 mark now, problem is, since there has been a lot of sugar added to this beer, guessing the alcohol content is actually rather hard, if we take the original gravity 1.105 or so, and use that as a base we get somewhere around 8-9%, but i have added at least 6-7oz of sugar to the beer, so, tis hard to know correctly, i think its in 11-12 mark somewhere.

 

Anyways, here are a couple of things on preparing a yeast starter.

In this recipe, i used grape juice concentrate, which is perfect for a yeast starter, because unlike wart, grape juice has most of the minerals needed for the yeast to grow :)

 

i used about 1/10 of a quart of grape juice concentrate, about 1.5 cups of water, boil for a while, put in a wine bottle, add yeast, shake like hell, airlock and leave for 48 hours before pitching. This should grow many, many yeast cells, which really helps when you are trying to get them to take over as the main fermentation facilitators :)

 

Also you can dryhop a couple of different ways, i used a grain sock to contain all the hops, and i used plugs (as they are mostly full flowers that give you more smell, which is what you are achieving by dry hopping). Just break the plugs apart and then in half (my dumb self forgot).

 

Also aerated for another hour (with less sugar it does not foam).

 

Oh, before i forget, normally you dont want to aerate your beer after the start, this would make your beer taste more bitter, and sometimes cardboardy, but because i am pitching in another yeast and planning to let it go for another 2 weeks, and yeast NEED air, this is something i have to do for the high gravity yeast to make it multiply a lot faster and take over the batch.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Ok i gotta bottle 8+ gallons this weekend, and my shoulder still cant really be used (dislocated it 2 weeks ago) But beer has to be bottled, especially the belgian... (cuz i wanna drink it already)

 

Oh i finally calculated out the IBU here, the crazy beer is 125-130IBU (or thats the general consensus between different hop calculators i've used, they go as low as 77 and as high as 165 with the same setup)

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well, 11 hours of work later, i have finally reached envy... from you guys that is :) (jk)

 

Left, in the 22oz and 12 oz are the Belgian Wit with lime, sour orange and passion fruit. About 3-4%, its golden colored, should be good summer beer

 

Right, is my birthday batch, its 14-16% @ 125-135IBU, full body and very very delicious smelling, it has this fruity smell, that has a touch of a mead smell, some sweet in it, that finishes with a slight piney smell :) Having said, recommended serving size is about a 1/2 bottle, 3/4 and you are legally intoxicated, lastly 4 bottles and you are on your way to the hospital with alcohol poisoning :) And only ONE bottle is going to be opened before September :) (to check for carbonation)

post-472-128210106706_thumb.jpg

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brew with peppers... well there are vodkas and tequilas that are infused with peppers. Um, i know that northern Russian sailors have an absolutely insanifying drink to warm up sailors or whatever in very very cold weather... Now having that said, i actually dont know the recipe, i know some of the ingredients that go into it include hot pepper powder, usually of the scolding hot variety, over 100-150000 on the scouville scale, 95.6% alcohol (usually home made), and an egg yolk or two... thats all i know, but its supposed to be potent and make you breathe fire (or close)

 

I'll look, i am sure that there is something out there that is made with peppers...

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The one I tried had an actual pepper in the bottle, so I think it was added after bottling, but the last link I gave talks about adding pepper during the boiling stage, which makes sense to me if you want to really infuse the pepper flavor. Though, at the same time it would seem that boiling it would destroy the heat. ;)

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I have found some recipes, here's a beer recipe that sounds really interesting:

 

Smoked Chili IPA

(5 gallons, partial mash)

 

For the beer drinker who has tried everything before, just to prove that he or she hasn't. This beer is malty and fairly big underneath and hoppy in the middle, with a waft of beechwood smoke near the end. And, of course, you get dragon's breath for hours after!

Ingredients:

 

* 3 lbs. pale malt

* 1 lb. toasted pale malt (toast in oven for 30 minutes at 350°F)

* 1 lb. beechwood smoked rauchmalt

* 1 lb. medium crystal malt (50° to 60° Lovibond)

* 4 lbs. unhopped light dry malt extract (DME)

* 2/3 oz. of 12% alpha-acid Chinook hops (8 AAUs)

* 3/4 oz. of 8% alpha-acid Perle hops (6 AAUs)

* 1 oz. of 4% alpha-acid Kent Goldings hops (4 AAUs)

* 1 oz. of 4% alpha-acid Fuggles hops (4 AAUs)

* 1 large dried Anaheim chili o English ale yeast slurry (Wyeast 1098 or equivalent)

* 1 lb. oak chips (optional)

* 1 cup light DME for priming

* 25 medium dried Anaheim chilis, cut in half

 

Step by Step

 

Heat 10 quarts water to 164°F. Crush grains, mix into liquor and hold at 152°F for 90 minutes. Runoff and sparge with 15 quarts water at 169°F. Add DME to kettle, bring to a boil.

 

Total boil is 90 minutes. Add Chinook hops, boil 30 minutes. Add Perle hops, boil 30 minutes. Add Kent Goldings hops, boil 30 minutes. Turn off heat, add Fuggles hops and 1 dried Anaheim, chopped into small pieces.

 

Steep 30 minutes. Remove hops and pepper, chill wort. Steam (15 minutes) and toast (350°F, 30 minutes) oak chips, if desired, and place in fermenter. Add wort to fermenter along with enough preboiled and chilled water to make up 5.25 gallons. At 65° to 68°F, pitch yeast.

 

Ferment relatively warm (68-70°F) for two weeks. Rack to secondary and condition cool (55-60°F) for three to four weeks. Prime with DME, add half an Anaheim pepper to each bottle. Seal and condition for six weeks.

 

OG = 1.070 (17.5° Plato)

FG = 1.020 (5° Plato)

Bitterness = 55 IBUs

 

enjoy

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  • 1 month later...
its nearing the end of week two of fermentation. Firstly my air lock blew off sometime over sunday

I had a airlock just like the three-piece in one of your pics. It blew off on me every time. My first batch actually popped the lid. I actually had to keep a glass of sanitiser sitting next to my fermenter for days after pitching. After a few batches like that, I just ran my syphon hose into a beermug with sanitizer in it. See attatchment. Notice all the stuff that was trying to push through my airlock.

post-1876-128210106926_thumb.jpg

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