The Experimenter
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Dec 5, 2020
- Messages
- 88
- Reaction score
- 24
Introduction:
Hi! I'm the Experimenter and I'm new here (just created my account like 1 hour ago). I am also new to brewing and have been doing it for 3 months (as of today). I got into it mostly because I thought it would be fun (and it is!!) and to share what I make with family and friends.
I call myself the Experimenter because I love to just try random things; if it's on store shelves, has fermentable sugars, and doesn't have preservatives, I've thought about throwing yeast into it, just to see what happens! I don't really follow recipes; however, I do take meticulous notes on all brews so I can retry it and tweak it if it turns out good the first time... which basically everything I've tried has (except for one). I mostly try random things without much equipment, ingredients, or chemicals. I do use diammonium phosphate (nutrient) and all the basic equipment (bungs, airlocks, hydrometer, siphon, etc.), but that's it, no fining agents, or clearing agents, or metabisulfite, or any of that... not because I'm huge into natural approaches or anything like that, but just because I'm lazy. In addition to laziness, I'm also very impatient. Because of my laziness and impatience, the holy grail for me in homebrewing is finding a wine, mead, or cider recipe I love that ferments quickly (a week or two) without too many ingredients, pieces of equipment, or crazy chemicals and then only needs a couple weeks to a month (maybe 2 or 3 at most) to taste great. I cannot wait years for aging and even if I did I'd be so frustrated by the idea of finding a good recipe more than a year after starting something and then being like, "Darn, I shoulda done more than a gallon of that!" and knowing if I want more I gotta replicate it and wait more than a year again.
Anyway, enough about me and my techniques and my interests... let's get to the question I referenced in the title:
For my first ever HomeBrewTalk Forum post, I wanted to tell you about (and ask you a question about) an interesting brew I made and what you would call it or classify it as. Early in my homebrewing experience, while making my first ever cider (which used regular Mott's Apple Juice, which I was surprised to find doesn't use preservatives and tastes awesome when brewed with a beer or cider yeast), something in the grocery store juice aisle caught my eye... Mott's Apple White Grape Juice! I immediately grabbed a bunch of the 64oz bottles. I didn't know what this would create, but I figured it would taste like some sort of delicious cider/white wine blend. Before leaving the store I grabbed some strained (not filtered) clover honey... Just because I am the Experimenter and that's what I do! I put it all together (~1 gallon of the juice with 3/4 pound of the honey) in a 1 gallon fermenter with K1V. OG was 1.072 and after only 5 days it was 0.998. I checked it again 2 days later and it was the same and I racked it. After 7 days in secondary it had cleared significantly and I bottled (since it had run dry, I back sweetened with 14.5-15g of erythritol per 1 liter bottle which made it semi-sweet). The erythritol did leave a slightly cooling sensation as erythritol and xylitol are sometimes known to do, but that did age out. The longest my family let it age though was a month... because we couldn't help ourselves!! It was amazing. After only 2-3 weeks the cooling sensation had aged out and the flavor was amazing and smooth!! Everyone in my family loved it and told me I needed to get to work on my next batch right away (they even told me they'd pay for the ingredients because they knew they were going to wind up drinking all of it haha). So, I started two 2-gallon batches with the same juice and same proportion of honey, 3/4 pound per gallon (or 1.5lbs per 2-gallon batch), this time experimenting with different yeasts; one was Red Star Cuvee and the other was Red Star Premier Blanc. I also added about 3-1/2 cups of white sugar per gallon to raise the gravity in hope of achieving an actual wine-like ABV around 12-13% (since both batches were the exact same recipe except for the yeasts, both had an OG of 1.104). After about 2.5 weeks the Cuvee hit 0.996 and stopped (~14%) and the Blanc hit 1.020 (~11%) and stopped. The Cuvee was WAY TOO dry and tart, but had a lot of apple flavor. The Blanc was too sweet and not appley enough. As such, after both spent some time in secondary alone, I made a 50/50 blend of the two at bottling time which came out GREAT (and also gave me the ABV I was looking for right around 12.5%).
Long story short, while I love this brew, I don't know what to call it. Someone once told me that defining what a brew is depends on which ingredient contributes the most fermentable sugars by weight (which makes sense, if you have a gallon of apple juice with ~1lb of natural sugars in it and you add one cup of white sugar, it doesn't become a sugar wine, it's still a cider). I don't know if this is the universal rule everyone uses, but make sense to me. As such I'd like to define how much of each sugars this recipe includes (I didn't spend time trying to do exact calculations, but these are my best guesses after a few minutes with a calculator):
What the heck is this stuff? What did I create!? What would YOU call this?
P.S. - Sorry for the really long post, but I wanted to include all necessary details you might need to answer my question (I also wanted to include the recipe specifics in case anyone wanted to try it for themselves).
Hi! I'm the Experimenter and I'm new here (just created my account like 1 hour ago). I am also new to brewing and have been doing it for 3 months (as of today). I got into it mostly because I thought it would be fun (and it is!!) and to share what I make with family and friends.
I call myself the Experimenter because I love to just try random things; if it's on store shelves, has fermentable sugars, and doesn't have preservatives, I've thought about throwing yeast into it, just to see what happens! I don't really follow recipes; however, I do take meticulous notes on all brews so I can retry it and tweak it if it turns out good the first time... which basically everything I've tried has (except for one). I mostly try random things without much equipment, ingredients, or chemicals. I do use diammonium phosphate (nutrient) and all the basic equipment (bungs, airlocks, hydrometer, siphon, etc.), but that's it, no fining agents, or clearing agents, or metabisulfite, or any of that... not because I'm huge into natural approaches or anything like that, but just because I'm lazy. In addition to laziness, I'm also very impatient. Because of my laziness and impatience, the holy grail for me in homebrewing is finding a wine, mead, or cider recipe I love that ferments quickly (a week or two) without too many ingredients, pieces of equipment, or crazy chemicals and then only needs a couple weeks to a month (maybe 2 or 3 at most) to taste great. I cannot wait years for aging and even if I did I'd be so frustrated by the idea of finding a good recipe more than a year after starting something and then being like, "Darn, I shoulda done more than a gallon of that!" and knowing if I want more I gotta replicate it and wait more than a year again.
Anyway, enough about me and my techniques and my interests... let's get to the question I referenced in the title:
For my first ever HomeBrewTalk Forum post, I wanted to tell you about (and ask you a question about) an interesting brew I made and what you would call it or classify it as. Early in my homebrewing experience, while making my first ever cider (which used regular Mott's Apple Juice, which I was surprised to find doesn't use preservatives and tastes awesome when brewed with a beer or cider yeast), something in the grocery store juice aisle caught my eye... Mott's Apple White Grape Juice! I immediately grabbed a bunch of the 64oz bottles. I didn't know what this would create, but I figured it would taste like some sort of delicious cider/white wine blend. Before leaving the store I grabbed some strained (not filtered) clover honey... Just because I am the Experimenter and that's what I do! I put it all together (~1 gallon of the juice with 3/4 pound of the honey) in a 1 gallon fermenter with K1V. OG was 1.072 and after only 5 days it was 0.998. I checked it again 2 days later and it was the same and I racked it. After 7 days in secondary it had cleared significantly and I bottled (since it had run dry, I back sweetened with 14.5-15g of erythritol per 1 liter bottle which made it semi-sweet). The erythritol did leave a slightly cooling sensation as erythritol and xylitol are sometimes known to do, but that did age out. The longest my family let it age though was a month... because we couldn't help ourselves!! It was amazing. After only 2-3 weeks the cooling sensation had aged out and the flavor was amazing and smooth!! Everyone in my family loved it and told me I needed to get to work on my next batch right away (they even told me they'd pay for the ingredients because they knew they were going to wind up drinking all of it haha). So, I started two 2-gallon batches with the same juice and same proportion of honey, 3/4 pound per gallon (or 1.5lbs per 2-gallon batch), this time experimenting with different yeasts; one was Red Star Cuvee and the other was Red Star Premier Blanc. I also added about 3-1/2 cups of white sugar per gallon to raise the gravity in hope of achieving an actual wine-like ABV around 12-13% (since both batches were the exact same recipe except for the yeasts, both had an OG of 1.104). After about 2.5 weeks the Cuvee hit 0.996 and stopped (~14%) and the Blanc hit 1.020 (~11%) and stopped. The Cuvee was WAY TOO dry and tart, but had a lot of apple flavor. The Blanc was too sweet and not appley enough. As such, after both spent some time in secondary alone, I made a 50/50 blend of the two at bottling time which came out GREAT (and also gave me the ABV I was looking for right around 12.5%).
Long story short, while I love this brew, I don't know what to call it. Someone once told me that defining what a brew is depends on which ingredient contributes the most fermentable sugars by weight (which makes sense, if you have a gallon of apple juice with ~1lb of natural sugars in it and you add one cup of white sugar, it doesn't become a sugar wine, it's still a cider). I don't know if this is the universal rule everyone uses, but make sense to me. As such I'd like to define how much of each sugars this recipe includes (I didn't spend time trying to do exact calculations, but these are my best guesses after a few minutes with a calculator):
- 3/4 lbs of honey per gallon. Originally, I thought this might be classified as a Mead since 3/4 lbs is around 350 grams... but then I realized honey has around 80% sugar by weight on average, which gives us around 270g of sugar from the honey. So it's not a mead... or is it? I don't know.
- 3-1/2 cups of white sugar per two gallon batch (or 1.75 cups per gallon). At around 200g per cup, this gives us 350g of sugars from the white sugar. This is more than I originally planned on adding. I had planned for 2 cups, but I must have done my math wrong because that didn't get me to the gravity I wanted so I kept adding sugar (my family told me they liked the previous proportion of honey and not to add anymore in the second 2 batches).
- Mott's Apple White Grape juice (around 480g of sugar, or about 1 lbs 1 oz, per gallon)... the problem is, I don't know what proportion this juice is mixed in. Is it mixed 50% by volume of Apple Juice and 50% by volume of White Grape Juice? If so, there's slightly more Grape sugars involved since grapes naturally have more sugar than apples. Or is slightly more apple juice than grape juice such that each type of juice in the blend contributes about 50% of the sugars (~240g apple sugars and ~240g grape sugars)? I honestly don't know the answer here and I'm sure the Mott's Apple White Grape blend is a proprietary secret, a suspicion I think was confirmed by the fact that I could not find anywhere online what the proportions of the mix are... of course, all of this would be solved by just making my own blend of these two types of juices (buying apple juice and white grape juice and blending them myself... then I would know for certain which sugar is most abundant), but I can't find any White Grape Juices in my grocery store that don't have potassium sorbate.
What the heck is this stuff? What did I create!? What would YOU call this?
P.S. - Sorry for the really long post, but I wanted to include all necessary details you might need to answer my question (I also wanted to include the recipe specifics in case anyone wanted to try it for themselves).