Lots going on lately on the homebrewing front here, even though it's now full on triple-digit summer in Tucson and too hot to really make beer. I bottled my last batch for awhile a few weeks ago, a Maibock, which turned out mostly pretty great - the exception was caused by the weird method I used - I don't have a way to really lager a whole batch in one fermenter, at least when it's not colder outside, so I split it into gallon jugs each with its own airlock. most of them fit in a cooler with icy water but one I had to put in the fridge. It turns out the 40 degree cold of our fridge is too cold for the yeast to do its job, so that one gallon never really fermented. When I went to bottle, that jug's contents was totally a different color than the others!Consequently, I had to let that jug ferment longer and i think it got a bit contaminated, judging from early tastes so far. oh well, live and learn. the stuff from the other jugs turned out great, i think.

Meanwhile, I've been growing hops since April and they're now doing great. Many vines are now taller than the front of the house, and cones are already forming. This seems fast to me, since harvest time isn't till August or September, but perhaps the alpha acid-laden oils need time to build up in the cones before it's time to pick them.
I've also been fermenting mead (actually a sort of "cyser", since it has a little apple juice in it, but only a half gallon out of the 5-gallon batch) for the last 6 weeks or so). Yesterday I racked the batch into gallon jugs and did different things with some of them, creating sub-batches: added prickly-pear syrup to one, made "braggot" (which is a mead with malt and hops) with 2 other gallons, one pure, and one dry-hopped.

Today i'm starting a batch of "bouza" which is an ancient egyptian beer, from a recipe in the book "Wild Fermentation" by Sander Katz. Bouza is thought to be the original very first beer, probably accidentally created from old wet bread sitting in a dark corner somewhere. I started with wheat berries, some of which I sprouted (malted) and roasted a couple weeks ago. The rest I ground and made into a sourdough bread that I partially baked this morning. The malted wheat and crumbled bread then get put in water to ferment. I'm going to slightly alter Katz's recipe, because his book seems aimed at folks who don't already have experience or equipment for brewing and hence is mostly going for small, fast batches of stuff that's more about trying some historical oddity than about making something that tastes good. So i'm doing a short boil and adding a bit of hops. I can't resist, especially because some reports online conclude that this bouza recipe is just not that tasty. I'll keep you posted later here when I find out how my attempt works out, as well as the above mead experiments. Read more>>>