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.
