1. Apple Cider - brewed
2. Mead - brewed and still aging in bottles
3. Beer - We chose to brew a pumpkin ale!
1. Apple Cider
We got 3.5 gallons of cider, with the juice of one lemon into the primary fermenter, and 2/3 package of dry wine yeast. Left that to ferment for 3 days and racked it off to a glass carboy. Then bottled after 4 days in the glass carboy.
ABV ~8%
Taste: Light, dry, refreshing with a light apple flavor. Good carbonation. The flavor was a bit closer to champagne than a typical cider. I rather liked it!
2. Mead (1 gallon batch)
14 cups of water to a boil and added 2 lbs of pure honey and juice of one lemon, added 1/8 tsp. DAP (di-amonium phosphate). After the honey solution cooled down to 120 F, we added 1/3 package of dry wine yeast.
3. Pumpkin Ale
This was a fun one to make, even though we got started a little late in the season. After visiting family before Thanksgiving, we brought back a home-grown pumpkin with the hope of turning it in to beer.
We didn't realize, until we spoke with Griz, that it would need 6 to 8 weeks from brew-time to drink-time.
It's been about 6 weeks since we've brewed and we're finally ready to taste.
This was a much more involved brewing process, so we won't go into the details now, but keep an eye out for a future post devoted to our Pumpkin Ale.
We also separated the batch into two portions; one spiced, one not spiced. I'll admit that I was a little afraid to go all-out and spice the whole batch so we only spiced about a gallon worth.
It was definitely a lesson in taking some risks because the spiced portion turned out to be delicious! The un-spiced portion is not bad by any measure, but after tasting the nice pumpkin-pie flavor of the smaller batch, I regret not being bolder with the whole batch.
J&M
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