Hell yeah good work! And I get it on the alcohol part, I think when I abstained for a month i dropped like 10 pounds (that I gained back immediately after because summer is still stout season damnit) keep it up friend
Yep. I’m in an apartment with all electric now, but the city had a massive snow storm and power outage that lasted a week 3-4 years ago. 30-40 people died. The roads were so bad it was illegal to try and drive (travel ban) so a lot of people ended up freezing to death. I’m fortunate enough to have both a 23000 btu kerosene heater for emergencies and do a lot of camping so butane stove canisters for days, but all electric still has its downsides.
So turns out next upgrade for the bike is going to be some not road tires, whoda thunk riding on silt and mud with 80/20s was a terrible idea. All in all just some plastic pieces broke which I can model and 3d print to fix. At least now I can say I have adventured.
I can’t say that I have! I totally will try next time though. I will say though, the tincture I made with habaneros got my beer to the spice level I wanted (I order an 11/10 spice level at hole in the wall Thai restaurants if that gives any indication as to the spice level I like) but efficiency and extraction percent wise, no idea lol.
I would highly recommend doing a tincture!
For 6 oz of extract, usually enough for 10 gallons depending on spice level, use 6 oz Vodka (something decent, but not too expensive) add in your peppers (I like extra spicy so I think last time I did like 6? Habaneros In the jar) and shake every now and then for about 4 days. Strain out the peppers and toss the jar in the freezer. If there’s any crud at the top that froze over scoop it out and toss it. Then add that to your beer.
I prefer using tinctures since it gives you a lot more control, what I’ll do is pour 1-2 oz of beer into a glass and add in a few ml of the tincture. (Mixing imperial and metric units, I know) until I find the spice level I like. Once I know how many ml for 1-2oz of beer I’ll extrapolate that out and do math for a 640oz (5gal) batch and add that much in to my keg. I like this method since it gives you a lot more control and repeatability than just tossing peppers into secondary (some might be super spicy some might be duds, etc). One other thing: I don’t know if I’m crazy and I’ve wanted to test it but I’ve been busy, I find dehydrated peppers add in more heat than fresh peppers, not sure why though, maybe it’s just in my head lol.
That looks phenomenal! How I got started in making my own recipes is just looking up clones of ones I like and going from there with little tweaks as needed. You definitely gotta post an update once you’ve tried your stout though!
I think the discord exodus kicked their ass into gear dev wise, they seem to have finished up the rebranding (discord no longer shows revolt as the activity) and the desktop app got a few new features yesterday. But yeah, the lack federation thing is a definite downside, I think you can self host but it doesn’t seem to be super intuitive (granted I’m not the most technical). I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this though. Thanks for sharing it!
This is the kinda positivity that I needed to start my day, thanks stranger lol
I set up stoat and I’m loving it so far, I’ll be curious to follow the development of this as well but I think the few people I got to join stoat out of the two dozen on my discord server would tar and feather me if I started talking about yet another alternative after the teeth pulling that was getting them to join the first one lol
Honestly I just tried stoat and setting up a server (it’s not hosted by me so maybe just a space) to try to get my friends to migrate to. We have ~20 some odd people and have lots of chats categorized by outdoor/indoor with channels for diy/gaming/cooking/ordering out and so far, stoat has a few limitations I miss from discord (editing category or custom emoji names, for example) and I have yet to try out the voice chat aspect of it but it looks like this is going to be the clear winner for my use case. I’m hoping they get a mobile app working for some of the more casual just want to chat and share interesting pictures of our day without sitting at the pc members but besides that I’m loving it. Maybe at some point I’ll try to look into seeing if I can self host, but for now it’s nice to know there’s something that feels just like discord from an organization of topics perspective that hasn’t gone down their path (yet?)
I plan on following this process:
My girlfriend is a research scientist and she said they basically do the same thing but with a higher percentage of glycerine for their -80 degree freezers and liquid nitrogen so it should work well in a home freezer at the 25/75% ratio. One way to find out though lol
Doing a weekend of brewing. Started it off today making a bourbon mash. I got an ultrasonic cleaner a while back I’ve been itching to use. I’ve seen research papers showing some evidence of it speeding up the aging process and I’ve been dying to try it. Tomorrow I’m doing two experiments, brewing an imperial milk stout and doing a keg fermentation with a jumper to another keg to purge the o2 because I’m a cheap bastard. Never fermenter in a keg so I figure it’ll be a fun thing to try. Lastly, because the yeast was expensive I’m going to try to freeze back some yeast from the starter I overbuilt and use it in another brew down the line.
Joined. I’m down whenever assuming I can get back home in the winter weather lol
I feel like I haven’t posted here in a while… basically I decided to take a break from drinking and thus home brewing for a bit. I want to get back into meme spirits, and I also want to make a 0 oxygen beer from ferment to filter to serving, but for now I made a berry wine for the girlfriend from some Aldi frozen fruit. This has been sitting in the fermenter on the fruit for a good 3 months (started it just before my break from alcohol) and then I moved it into a keg, no cold crashing or anything. I then ran it through a 5 micron filter and then a 1 micron filter just to see how it went, I gotta say, it turned out great. I was expecting the filter to clog but it went through like a champ. I also then wanted to try pasteurizing it in the keg using my mash and boil to see if I get some delicious glue and rubber in my mashing vessel but I didn’t! I back sweetened the wine and haven’t had any re-fermentation happen after a few weeks, so project fuck around and find out was a success. I might end up retrying a milk wine again (last one had a few tiny cheese curds floating in it that turned off most people from it) and I definitely want to try making a spicy imperial stout, but for now, I’ve gotta buy wine bottles or give out samples of this wine until my keg is empty.
Orange on the left, lemon on the right. Lemon looks darker since I did an oopsie with the water level and had to boil for a while. Orange wine is at an fg of 1.006 and tastes very sweet, don’t even have to back sweeten it. It tastes different but I like it! 18% abv. Lemon wine has a very bitter back end. I’ll be screwing around with back sweetening it to see how it is. The lemon wine ended at 1.032 or 10% abv. Girlfriend likes both so I’m not sure which I’ll be turning into brandy but either way, citrus test was a success!
Appreciate the mandolin recommendation. Made this go so much quicker and easier. This one is going to be made into orange brandy. In retrospect I should have saved some of the oranges to candy them and toss them into the end product but depending on how lazy I get the next few weeks, I might end up doing just that.
Someone said that orange doesn’t ferment well so naturally, I’m going full send. I bought a mandolin and chain mail glove as recommended by someone on a comment from the lemon wine post. That’ll be in tomorrow so today I’m making a yeast starter for the orange brandy.
Girlfriend wanted wine so I brought up a spare fermenter from my other house, giving lemon wine a shot. This will be my first proper wine (that I won’t be immediately turning into brandy) Glad to be back at it after the hectic holidays. I want to make an orange brandy next, but after slicing 50 lemons by hand (I don’t own a mandolin) I think I need a short break from slicing citrus.
Last fermenter is about to be empty. This one is my blue razz jolly rancher. Smells amazing. Tastes terrible (without back sweetening) Came out at 11.8% abv. Back sweetening with simple syrup down to 8.5% seems to be the winning combo, if I were drinking it as a wine: smells much stronger than it tastes of the delicious artificial blue razz flavor. Over all a fun YOLO project. Guess we’ll see how it tastes as a spirit in the next few hours + 24 hours for the angels to have their share. Now to determine what to make next… I’m thinking of trying pressure fermenting in the keg for my beer, a wine for my girlfriend, and the third fermenter for whatever meme spirit I feel like whipping up next, which I haven’t the slightest clue of what I’m in the mood for yet.
I have definitely been posting in this community a lot over the last few weeks/days so apologies if it’s a bit much lol, things should slow down since I’m running out of jars and fermenters though. But here’s my fermenter with plenty of sugar, blue razz jolly ranchers, and lots of nutrient. Along side my meme I’m going to turn into moonshine I’ve also got a fall beer my girlfriend requested. I’ve made the pumpkin ale loads of times but this is the first time I’m doing it without pumpkin (the one I bought was rotting when I cut into it and I didn’t feel like going back out and buying another)
I don’t quite know why I didn’t realize I’d have to individually unwrap these and it’d be a pain in the ass, but there’s no going back now. Blue razz jolly rancher distillate soon. I’ve also got my sweet potato beer fermenting (it’s supposed to be pumpkin and sweet potato but the pumpkin I bought was rotting on the inside, so I just rolled with what I have). I also ended up making 80 dog treats from some of the spent grains from the beer, if pupper is happy I’m happy. Over all I think I’m coming back from my one year brewing break with a vengeance.
From left to right. Blueberry brandy with home made blueberry syrup for color and flavor, 48% ABV. Blueberry brandy, no additives, 54% abv. Flamin hot Cheeto liquor with 15 dehydrated Carolina reapers added to it for a few hours (it’s so spicy it makes my stomach hurt) 48% abv. Cheeto liquor 48% abv. All my fermenters are empty now. Let’s see what else we can do. Think I’m gonna do a beer and another meme spirit, but sadly I can’t find bulk sour warheads in a single flavor online so I’ve gotta spin my wheel of random shit to brew
Aw man but if I don’t drink the stouts who will!? I can commit to tomorrow through Wednesday (Thursdays going to be a long day lol) but I’m down.