HomeBrewing

[Pat]

Chuck52, Please let us know about the pepper beer. I've had pepper everything else. I got two jars of pepper jelly as a late birthday gift a couple days ago. Should go great on pepper cornbread along with a slice of pepper cheese.

By the way... I had to realign my expectations. I was predisposed to think of home brewing as scratch building electronic projects and such. I don't get out much...

Pat

[Chuck52]

Pat,

I racked it to the secondary yesterday afternoon. I was prepared to add more peppers if it didn't have as much bite as I wanted, but it seemed about right to me. It is also much lighter colored than my usual brews, which is something I was trying for, and with a nice fresh pepper aroma. I think the shorter boil I used helped there, and not using any of the crystal malts I normally add. Even the lighter crystal malts add some color. A couple days ago I had the green chili beer at the local brew pub. It was pretty good, and went perfectly with the cajun-style pasta dish I had. My brew will have a bit more pepper bite than theirs, and more than Cave Creek, but should be about right to my taste.....and it is my taste I brew for! [img]/forums/images/icons/laugh.gif[/img] I'm thinking of pots of chili, Mexican cornbread and my jalapeno beer as a perfect cold weather antidote.

Chuck

[Chuck52]

By the way, for those who are interested in costs, I figure my pepper brew ingredients set me back about $15. The DME was the major expense, and I got it from St. Pats at a decent $2/lb. So, about $10 for the DME, maybe $2 for the grains, and a buck's worth of hops. The peppers came out of my garden and I originally cultured the yeast from a six-pack of Red Hook Hefeweisen a few years ago, so the total was about $13 for 5 gallons. That makes it about $0.35 a pint....the chili beer at the brewpub cost $2.50, and I think that was the Happy Hour price. Cave Creek, the only bottled chili beer I can get around here, is about $6 a six-pack of 12oz. Now, if I could just bring myself to take the all-grain plunge, I could probably get the price down to $0.20 a pint, or so! Not that money is of any real significance when we're talking about beer! [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

Chuck


Chuck

[Pat]

Sounds great Chuck! Maybe I'll try an experiment one of these years. I hope to make a lot of pear cider next year from our abundant but underutilized crop. I wonder how hard pear cider with a hot pepper note would be? Served cold with the flavor and sweetness blooming on the palet as it warms in the mouth and throat THEN POW, hey this stuff is tangy, man!

Pass the pepper cheese and I'll have another of those jalapeno biscuits please...

Pat

[Chuck52]

Wow! A pepper perry! Unlike my had-it-before pepper beer, I do believe a pepper perry would be a first. Are you thinking, sweet, sparkling and zippy? The sweet and sparkling part can get difficult if you are using natural bottle fermentation to carbonate. Ciders and perrys are usually about 5% alcohol, I think, and so getting one sweet and sparkling using bottle fermentation either means you have to catch the bottles at just the right stage and then refrigerate all of them until drinking, or you use some non-fermentable sweetener like lactose. Sparkling dry is easier, but with pepper too, you'd end up with interesting champagne....talk about Brute! Now if you kegged, you could filter out the yeast when you liked the sweetness, and then force carbonate in the keg. One of my buddies kegs, and I envy him his almost immediate access to the fruits of his brewing labors. My pepper beer will have to sit in the bottle for at least two weeks to carbonate, and will probably really only get properly drinkable after a month.

For sure let us know how you make out with the perry. I plan to put in several apple and pear trees this year and next, and part of my plans include cider. My kegging buddy also keeps bees, and we will collarorate on various honey-fruit combinations.

Chuck

[Pat]

Chuck, I try to be open minded but when it comes to LACTOSE I, like Jerry Seinfeld, just will not tollerate it. Yeah, I too am one of the many lactose intollerant people at large in our polulation. I tried counselling and midnight draughts of spunk water but to no avail... I remain lactose intollerant.

I can take medication for it when consuming something with lactose content but...

Pat

[Chuck52]

Oooh, too bad Pat. I really never liked the idea of using lactose or any other non-fermenatable sweetener to make a sweet and sparkling anything. However, it does get interesting if you want to do the natural carbonation and still have sweetness. Sweet and flat, or dry and sparkling are no problemo. I made a nice cider once that was both sweet and sparkling, but if I hadn't consumed it in time, it would have decorated my basement with glass shards.

Chuck

[Pat]

Chuck, Decades ago I used to brew rootbeer. I used the larger reusable (deposit required) pop bottles and still have the capper and some caps. In-brewed carbonation was the name of the game and of course you wanted a sweet product. I preferred to increase the proportion of root extract for stouter flavor than commercial product and slightly reduce the sugar so as to not be quite as sweet as the commercial stuff.

I would always bottle a few small bottles, like in 6 oz coke bottles. These were used as samples. Try one every so often and when it had sufficient carbonation the rest was ready to be refrigerated. One of the favorite spots for sitting a bunch of bottles was on the living room mantle. I had made the mantle from a 4x16 fir construction timber, burning and scraping and burning and brushing, beating with chains and various tools to distress it then preserving it with a few coats of Deft a clear wood topcoat. It was a tough board, fire hardened and multi-coated with sealer.

We went away for a few days, there was a warm spell, and when we returned there were glass shards embedded in the wall, glass shards embedded in the mantle, glass shards lying on the floor in the mostly dried residue of rootbeer.

As you know, excess air in the bottle is NOT GOOD as it can lead to spoiling. Over filling is also NOT GOOD as you need headspace to accomodate expansion with any increase in temperature. In theory there is a happy medium.

I will never know for sure what happened but I guess one of the bottles was over stressed (overfilled?) and ruptured. Why it couldn't just have the decency to pop its top I'll never know. Anyway, I suppose, one of the group burst which started a chain reaction that went critical and the whole assembly of bottles (lying on their sides in a pyramid pile between book ends) blew up.

IT took a while to extract the glass from the wall and mantle. the mantle just got washed and a top cote of Deft. The wall needed drywall repair and paint.

In-brewed carbonation is a wonderful thing and those little yeast dudes really loved their invert sugar.

If nothing else comes to mind, I'll just artificially carbonate the pear cider. Ever note the price of sparkling apple juice (non-alcoholic)? WOW! I am thinking of using sweet cider and a seltzer bottle.

Pat

[Chuck52]

Pat,

There are some neat devices available for carbonating beer or pop using plastic bottles and CO2 cartridges. Look at homwbrew sites, like St. Pats of Texas. They tend to be kid of expensive and I have decided in the past that if I ever wanted to go the kegging route, I'd just save up for a soda keg system.

The thing about bottle conditioning, or carbonating, is that the yeast will continue to convert the available sugars, at least those it's enzymes can handle, until it uses it all up (dry brew), or gets to an alcohol content that stops the fermentation. Even the wimpiest beer yeasts will go to at least 8% alcohol, and probably more. Wine yeasts are good to 12-18%, depending on the strain. So, though air space is important, unless you leave the bottle half empty, it's gonna blow if there's still sugar to ferment and the yeast is alive and kicking. Soda is usually brewed with bakers yeast, isn't it? Less alcohol produced, but it will still keep kicking out the CO2 until it blows or you chill it to stop fermentation.

If you decide to force carbonate in some manner, you may have to let the perry/cider go dry and wait for the yeast to settle out. Then rack it off the yeast, hoping you leave it all behind if you don't filter. You could then sweeten to taste, bottle and force carbonate. However, if you don't do something to kill or filter out any residual yeast, and it doesn't take many cells, or chill the whole batch, fermentation will eventually start up and you'll get "interesting" results!

Chuck

[Pat]

Chuck, Yes, we used baking yeast and it should top out at a very low alcohol content. I don't recall if I knew, and I sure don't recall, why we used invert sugar instead of plain granulated sugar. I don't know how cold you'd have to chill baking yeast to stop it (dare I say) cold. Before our "interesting" results we had some pretty tasty rootbeer. If I recall, we used Hires brand extract. Really nasty looking stuff, not at all what you'd expect you'd be drinking.

A bud and I made a "poor man's" hookah rig that employed a stainless steel soda syrup pressure vessel as a "bail out bottle" in case of compressor malfunction or loss of power. Would something like that be good for carbonating beverages? The guy who was my neighbor, lived three slips down from me when I was living on a sailboat, now lives 80 miles from me here in Oklahoma (we were on boats in San Diego.) He may have some more of those syrup vessels.

Pat