Anchorage Brewing Dregs, Brewing Journal

This post is to document the progress of my first (hopefully) funky brews, using the the dregs from a bottle of Anchorage Brewing's Tide and its Takers.

2-26-15; Drank the beer, and added about 4oz of apple cider to dregs.  I covered the bottle with foil and left in front of the heater, swirling a couple times a day.  I did add a pinch of nutrients.

3-3-15; Added approximately 1 more cup of fresh cider to the starter, once there were signs of fermentation (mainly the accumulation of more lees than the dregs could have originally contained).

3-10-15; Saved 1 cup of the starter in a sanitized mason jar.  The rest got pitched into a gallon of apple cider with a touch of nutrients.

3-20-15; The cider tastes lovely.  I would say it is around 1.008-1.010 right now, based on taste.  Flavours of citrus and pineapple.  I'm having to resist just drinking it fresh--I may very well do so anyways by starting a fresh batch to drink as house cider...

The mason jar starter has produced krausen, and possibly a pellicle by now; I can’t tell.  I got the brilliant idea to take two bottles of my Belgian Walnut Graff, pour them into a sanitized 1.5 litre bottle, pitch the starter, and see what happens (the bottle is airlocked, and clear).  I also added half a bottle of the Cherry Cyser I was drinking at the time.  I included some of the dregs from the graffs—whatever poured with the rest.  I did not allow the head to subside completely, and sloshed it around once sealed—this hopefully filled most of the headspace with Co2.

Time will tell whether this was a good or bad idea.  At the very least, the starter should be safe in there, and I have a backup in the form of the cider.  The point of this was to see how the yeast/s perform in a malt based environment, compared to the cider.

3-22-15; The experiment has signs of fermentation, with patches of bubbles on the surface.

3-22-15.  There is nothing I can do about the blurryness--it's residue on the inside from decarbonating the graff.

  

© John Frey, 2015. The Author of this work retains full copyright for this material.  The recipes and other contents therein may not be used for any commercial purposes.