Carboy bomb

Yesterday, I came home to a site that no brewer wants to see, but all brewers expect to happen.

A carboy bomb.

Now, brewers will know that preventing this type of occurence is the very reason why we use blow-off tubes for a primary fermentation. A small airlock can get filled with pulp and clogged. A tube into a bucket is relatively save.

Relatively.

Bad things can still happen when you have 10 lbs of fresh press pear juice and you see skins and large pieces floating in the carboy and think “Eh, what the hell, it’ll just drop to the bottom anyway.”

Sometimes, it doesn’t drop to the bottom. Sometimes it floats on a pillow of carbon dioxide and pear pulp, and is carried up into the neck. Sometimes it efficiently blocks the blow-off tube, preventing the carbon dioxide from escaping and eventually building up enough pressure to pop.

All things considered, this was relatively minor, and a quick clean-up session got us back on track. I consider myself lucky. I once had a carboy of mead blow and become a fountain of syrupy liquid that shot over my head, coating everything from ceiling to floor. You have no idea how difficult cleaning sugar water can be until you have to clean it off the ceiling. The ants bugged us for quite a while after that. I hope I never make THAT mistake again.

So, this Thanksgiving Jessica ran off and left me. Luckily, I had friends that I could turn to, so I prepared to make my signature squash pie. Luckily, as she so often does, Freyja had other plans for me because the Goddess of fertility didn’t make the squash people have babies. Not finding any good pie squashes, I decided to buy cranberries planning to make a sauce. Still she planned, and my friends didn’t want cranberries. So, faced with a large amount of these small tart jewels, I had to come up with a use for them. Since I was in the middle of making a large amount of mead, I finally realized what Freyja wanted: cranberry mead!¹

This is actually my first berry melomel, although I’ve made a blackberry mead using blackberry honey. It’ll be interesting to see how the brewing of berries goes because cranberries have one of the highest pectin concentrations ever; thus, I’m guessing that either this mead will clarify beautifully (not be cloudy) or it’ll be damn near opaque.

Details

• Start date: 28 Nov, 2008
• Yeast: Red Star Champagne
• Fermentables:
  • Honey: About 6 cps (4.5 lbs) of meadowfoam honey from Edwards
  • Cranberries: 3 12 oz packages of dried cranberries
• Additions:2 3 liter bottles of straight, unsweetend cranberry juice
• Energizers: None
• Gravity: 1.092
• Important Notes:

Procedures

I deviated quite a bit from my basic procedures for this recipe. First, I heated one bag of the cranberries in water with all of the honey. I tried not to boil the water, which meant that the cranberries didn’t really pop. When they were as heated as they were going to be, I dumped this honey/cranberry liquid into the carboy, added 2 bottles of cranberry juice and water to bring it to 5 gallons and pitched the yeast. Three days later, I boiled two bags of cranberries to make basically a cranberry sauce and added this to the carboy.

1. Quite honestly, she probably wanted Lingonberry mead, since Freyja’s from Northern Europe, but I imagine she’ll take what she can get.

Bagpipe Braggot

This recipe is a braggot, half mead, half beer. It’s my first braggot, so I’m using a light pilsner malt instead of something more substantial because I wanted to keep a malty, not caramel or chocolate or other flavor. Hopefully it turns out and I can come up with some great name worthy of Sæxœnja, since I was thinking of describing a braggot as the main mead drink in that story. If you have any good words in Old German, Saxon or even Old English, I’d be happy to consider them.

Update

Jessie named this the Bagpipe Braggot because it’s a mix of Scottish Ale and a mead. I’ll accept that only because bagpipes are ubiquitous in Europe, existing from Iran to Turkey to The Balkans and Eastern Europe through Western Europe and finally to Ireland and, yes, Scotland.¹

Details

• Start date: Dec 12, 2008
• Yeast: Wy’east 1728, Scottish Ale
• Fermentables:
  • Honey: About 6 cups (4.5 lbs) Meadowfoam honey from Edwards
  • Malt: 6 lbs Briess Dry Malt (Pilsen Light) extract
• Additions: None
• Energizers: None
• Gravity: 1.100
• Important Notes:

Procedures

I followed my basic procedures pretty much to the letter here.

1. In case you missed the link, there’s a great Wikipedia article that lists many types of Bagpipes.

What 50 gallons look like

And by “wine” I mean “cider” and “mead.” Which is okay because, technically, cider is apple wine, and mead is honey wine. So put away your prejudices about what constitutes “wine,” lay aside your hatred of everything that is not a grape, and enjoy the awesome power of this fully operational winemaker!

Here’s a picutre of 10 5-gallon carboys in our office. This represents the sum of our latest group of cider and mead batches for 2008. Eventually, I’ll be posting my recipes for all of these batches, as well as recipes from the previous 3 years of winemaking. My notes are helter skelter, so making a WordPress template and posting them will put them in a database and force me to formalize them as well, in case others want to use the recipes.

In the picture are 4 batches of cider, 2 batches of mead, one batch of (hot) ginger melomel,¹ one batch of cranberry melomel, and one carboy (the mostly empty one) that is read to become braggot² when I must some grain tomorrow.

I really can’t express how much I love winemaking. It’s part of the creative side of me (I’m something of a Maker), along with lots of other things like writing, music, quilting, knitting, pottery, and yes, programming. I love the expression of a spirtual side in the creation of something that other people enjoy.

Scooping "sugared" honey into the must

Wine is probably one of my favorite things to make because people so often enjoy it over meals of laughter and feelings of togetherness. It’s what we end up drinking when we are eating together and sharing our lives. It’s a very positive feeling to create something like that.

It’s also just rollicking good fun to make. Here’s a picture of me scooping crystallized (also called “sugared”) honey into a measuring cup to add it to hot water so it dissolves. I get my honey from a local bee keeper, a really nice family who lives between Odell and Parkdale in the Hood River valley.

This is a 5 gallon bucket (about 60 pounds) of meadowfoam honey. I’d never actually heard of meadowfoam before this, so I’m excited to try it out. It’s a dark honey with a wonderfully strong vanilla smell.

It takes about 10-12 pounds of honey to make a dry mead. which means this 60 pounds of honey ended up making about 60 gallons of mead. The cost of the honey was about $60. Do the math. 2.5 cases of wine – roughly 30 bottles- per carboy. I have 6 carboys, making that 180 bottles of very good, dry, oaked, almost chardonnay-like mead. That’s roughly $0.33/bottle. Given our start-up costs, time, and equipment, it comes to about $1.00/bottle.

Talk about cost savings!

1. Melomel is the term for mead that has been made with fruit… I’m calling ginger a fruit
2. Braggot is mead that is made with malt, as in barley or wheat, about equal percentages of each. It’s sort of a meadish beer… or maybe a beerish mead.