Tim, the empty Fast Ferment, and the full bottles.
After visiting a commercial brewery in-progress over the weekend, Tim was newly inspired to get to work on his brewing project. Tim bottled his 5 gallons of extra-hoppy IPA for their final phase of fermentation, then got busy grinding up apples from Eastern Washington and our own property.
Getting ready to make cider, Tim read complex plans for building your own wooden cider press, then read DIY alternatives using a like-new garbage disposal and some buckets and hoses... For a few dollars, Tim got a great juicer from the thrift store - surely a $100+ item someone was excited about in the '90's, used once, and has now finally cleaned out of the back of their pantry as was so popular. Maybe juicing is back in style and I'm out of the loop, but I do remember this trend when I was young of used-once juicers in the backs of pantries. It turns out juicers are totally rad! We chopped up rather hard apples from our trees and threw them down the feed tube where clear juice came out one side and dry pulp out the other. From many many apples we made nearly 4 gallons of juice and about a gallon of pulp which delighted the chickens and goats.
Immediately after collecting all the juice in our Fast Ferment, Tim added 4 tablets (one per gallon) of crushed campden to kill anything untoward in the juice. After 12 hours, I added about 3 teaspoons (3/4 per gallon) of
some time late tonight or tomorrow morning (24-48 hours after adding the campden), we will finally throw in the "Pasteur Champagne" active dry wine yeast. I'm not sure when the hops go in, but Tim also got an ounce of hops for the cider.
No comments:
Post a Comment