One of the things about making things like meads and sour beers is, you have a much bigger problem in terms of dealing with bulk aging. For the average brewer, most beers they make finish fermenting within a few weeks, or a month at most. After that, it’s common to move that beer to a keg or to bottles, and condition it, and then start enjoying it. Even if one decides to age bottles, one typically doesn’t age them all, and even if one does, those bottles don’t prevent one fermenting anything new. (Yes, homebrewers sometimes go ahead and make …
Tag: BEER & HOMEBREWING
Chestnut Honey Mead
I thought, when I made my last few meads, that I was done with meadmaking, but then I happened to accumulate some other honeys — which will be featured in other upcoming projects, including a braggot and some beers. However, I also came across 1.5 kilograms of chestnut honey. By all accounts, this makes a really interesting mead, so I figured I’d just go for it with the chestnut honey on its own; having racked my pomegranate melomel and my minty metheglin to new containers the other day, I have one spare 4-liter jug on hand. The recipe is dead simple: …
Gluten-Free Brewday: Celiac Brew
One of my friends in Seoul, Chris, is gluten intolerant, so he’s been unable to taste any of my brews to date. (He has had some mead, and I hope he will be able to partake of my apple cider when it has aged nicely, but not beer.) When his sister came to Korea to visit, we figured it’d be a good time to ask her to bring along some gluten-free brewing stuff. I’m quite intimidated by the prospect of brewing a GF ale: after all, it’s the first time for me, and while I’ve done extract brews before, this …
Transcultural Brewday: Wonmisan Chicha Jora Pacifica
One of the folk-beers of South America is called “chicha,” a brew that is today most often made with corn of some kind — often malted corn, and traditionally chewed to allow conversion of starches into sugars. (Corn lacks the enzymes that wheat and barley have for self-conversion, so the enzymes were sourced from an obvious place: human saliva.) When I mentioned to some brewed friends that I had gotten some blue corn and was thinking about making chicha jora, people immediately asked whether I would be chewing the corn. This is probably because on the TV show The Brew …
Smokey the Brewer
Finally! Yesterday afternoon, the wood chips Miss Jiwaku ordered for me arrived, so now I can start trying to smoke various grains and foods! I got the stuff in a few different forms. For traditional wood chips, we got two bags of hickory (and now I guess I have to make home-cured bacon, right?) and one bag of mesquite. We also got three sticks of processed smoking wood of Japanese origin: one each of chestnut, oak, and walnut. (Rant warning: every webshop we checked listed three other very enticing varieties of processed smoking wood — apple, cherry, and something else …