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Yeast Diary - April 27, 2020
Apr. 27th, 2020 10:24 amOkay, for those who have been following along, I've got a yeast culture that I developed from the wild yeast living on raisins. Yesterday, I switched to dumping 3/4 of the water/fruit, then topping up and feeding every 12 hours in order to get the yeast reproducing vigorously. It seems to be working, since by this morning all the fresh fruit was floating and it had that distinctive cloudiness.
That means time to put it to use!
So Experiment #1 is wild fermented cranberry wine. It's pretty much the simplest thing you can do, so it's a great test bed.
So here's the process:
First of all, I got myself a 3 litre jug of cranberry juice. For you Americans that's somewhere in the ballpark of a gallon, maybe just under. I wanted to get grape and do a simple red wine, but literally every bottled juice in the store was either cranberry or a cranberry mix. So you do what you gotta. Next time I'm thinking of getting a couple of frozen concentrated grape juice cans and add those, plus whatever water I need.
Next step is pour off about 4 cups of the juice and stick it in the fridge. I won't be needing that.
So now that I've got headspace, I poured in 4 cups of sugar. Cranberry juice isn't sweetened all that much, and the yeast needs something to eat. So in it goes, and give it a vigorous shake to mix in the sugar and aerate the liquid. Plenty of oxygen at the start is a good thing, and then toward the end you want less of it.
At this point the yeast culture goes in. instructions I've found seem to settle on about 3/4 of a cup, but I have no idea how potent (or otherwise) my culture is, so I put a full cup in. That left plenty of headspace so it's not prone to overflow if it gets really ridiculous.
I don't have a vapour lock at this point (Amazon deliveries for stuff like that can take a whole month right now so I'm looking at options) so i looked around and found that if you tighten the cap and then loosen it just a tidge to let gas escape, that's good enough in a pinch. i do want to get the right gear though, since I want to keep trying this in the future.
And that's really it. The bottle itself is your carbuoy, which means it's already sanitized for the first use, and since you've got a way for gas to escape it doesn't need to be especially sturdy. I've got some plastic bottles meant for home brewing beer that I can sterilize to let it age after the fermenting is done, which I gather is about 6 months given the amount of sugar I added. That's okay, i can wait.
This isn't fine winemaking by any stretch of the imagination. But you know, this slapdash, kitchen sink approach suits me and if I end up with something tasty in October or so, that's just fine by me.
Here's a pic I took before mixing everything together, over on Instagram.
That means time to put it to use!
So Experiment #1 is wild fermented cranberry wine. It's pretty much the simplest thing you can do, so it's a great test bed.
So here's the process:
First of all, I got myself a 3 litre jug of cranberry juice. For you Americans that's somewhere in the ballpark of a gallon, maybe just under. I wanted to get grape and do a simple red wine, but literally every bottled juice in the store was either cranberry or a cranberry mix. So you do what you gotta. Next time I'm thinking of getting a couple of frozen concentrated grape juice cans and add those, plus whatever water I need.
Next step is pour off about 4 cups of the juice and stick it in the fridge. I won't be needing that.
So now that I've got headspace, I poured in 4 cups of sugar. Cranberry juice isn't sweetened all that much, and the yeast needs something to eat. So in it goes, and give it a vigorous shake to mix in the sugar and aerate the liquid. Plenty of oxygen at the start is a good thing, and then toward the end you want less of it.
At this point the yeast culture goes in. instructions I've found seem to settle on about 3/4 of a cup, but I have no idea how potent (or otherwise) my culture is, so I put a full cup in. That left plenty of headspace so it's not prone to overflow if it gets really ridiculous.
I don't have a vapour lock at this point (Amazon deliveries for stuff like that can take a whole month right now so I'm looking at options) so i looked around and found that if you tighten the cap and then loosen it just a tidge to let gas escape, that's good enough in a pinch. i do want to get the right gear though, since I want to keep trying this in the future.
And that's really it. The bottle itself is your carbuoy, which means it's already sanitized for the first use, and since you've got a way for gas to escape it doesn't need to be especially sturdy. I've got some plastic bottles meant for home brewing beer that I can sterilize to let it age after the fermenting is done, which I gather is about 6 months given the amount of sugar I added. That's okay, i can wait.
This isn't fine winemaking by any stretch of the imagination. But you know, this slapdash, kitchen sink approach suits me and if I end up with something tasty in October or so, that's just fine by me.
Here's a pic I took before mixing everything together, over on Instagram.
