Recent content by robostill

Yeah. It was a big purchase all at once, between my tax return and a birthday coming up, I managed to convince myself. I really waffled on it for awhile. Thought about only 1 keg instead of 2, but I knew as soon as I filled one I'd want the variety of having another keg filled. Also thought...

Thumbs up! I pulled the trigger this week as well. Ordered the double-tower system from Ontario Beer Kegs, with Perlick's, two ball-lock corny's, a 5lb CO2 tank and a carbonator stone. Also picked up a Danby DAR125SLDD on sale from Costco. Big price tag on all that gear, I considered going...

My first mead smelled AWFUL for the first two weeks in the primary. Lots of sulfur smell blowing out the airlock. I thought for sure I had screwed something up. Slowly (ever-so-slowly) the sulfur smell dissipated, and was replaced by the delicious smell of fermenting honey. My original recipe...

Jack, Thanks for the input. I've been to 3 grocery stores now, and everyone is out of strawberries. I'm hoping to head to Costco this evening and get some frozen ones. Selection is pretty limited where I live, especially in the fresh fruit department. Given the OG is relatively low, and with...

I'm using EC1118. I debated getting more strawberries, but it's a bit of a haul to the supermarket here. Given the high tolerance of EC1118, I could add more strawberries (bringing up the SG) There seems to be a large variance in recipes here, some people say 2-3 lbs / gallon, others are 5-6...

Having found a sale on strawberries last week, I was inspired to make a strawberry wine / mead. I read through a few of the strawberry wine (berries + sugar) and mead (berries + honey) recipes on here, since I already have so much mead in stock, I decided to do a hybrid of sorts. Brown sugar...

Racked this off the lees yesterday, it's quite clear. The nose isn't great, very subtle, but the taste is not so sour anymore. More bitter, almost tannic. I suspect this comes from the pith of the orange, as I did not add any tannins. Perhaps the sour taste I previously noted was the yeast...

What would re-pitching the yeast do? It seems from the SG (~1.000) that it is mostly fermented out? I suppose I could add more honey, EC1118 does well up to 18% IIRC.

Thanks fatbloke. I won't dump it, too stingy for that, it will either age well and become drinkable (fingers crossed!) or it won't age well, and I'll try to get some mother of vinegar to make 5 gal of salad dressing. After the next racking, I'll tuck it into a corner and forget about it for a...

:( Definitely disappointing. It was tasting so good up until now! I still have some blind hope that perhaps the sour flavor is just bitter flavors from sitting on the fruit too long. Racked into the secondary yesterday, today already the gross lees have started settling out. I think...

I've made several (4) batches of honey mead in the past few years, and plenty of wine and beer, and never had a bad batch. This is the first one that's concerned me. After so much delicious honey mead, I found frozen blueberries on sale, and made a 5 gal batch of Blueberry Melomel, as per the...