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Home brewing - wine - update: banananananana wine

DrPizza

DrPizza

Administrator Elite Member Goat Whisperer
Jan 2015 Update: dandelions are still sitting in the freezer. After a while, I got pretty sick of picking petals off the flowers. Just racked 7 gallons of banana wine. Had some banana wine over the summer that my brother made. The only way to describe it... <skeptical voice> banana wine??? <sniff> "Mmmm, that smells pretty good, just a light aroma of bananas." <tasting> "MMmmm, this stuff tastes pretty.... <pause> BANANAS!" It was the favorite of the wines we tasted during the summer.
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May 18:With spring comes dandelions. I picked a shitload this afternoon - gallons upon gallons of dandelion flowers - just the flowers, no stems. And now, as I start another movie, I'm 1/4 of the way through peeling all the petals off them. This better be worth it next year! In other news, consuming blueberry wine is quite enjoyable while watching movies. 🙂
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Got all the equipment, ingredients, etc. By this weekend, I'm going to finish spinning out all my honeycomb & will be starting a 6 gallon batch of mead. Possibly will be adding blueberries and making a blueberry mead instead (a melomel.) Then... it's a 2 year wait.

And, on the way home from picking up my mowing deck, stopped by an Amish farm and purchased a huge box of #2 apricots. Wife wants to make a batch of apricot wine. Will get the rest of the ingredients (and a smaller carboy) tomorrow evening.

Plus, debating on picking enough blackberries for a blackberry wine.

Update #3: 20 bottles of apricot done, 10 bottles of blueberry done; 4 gallons (20 bottles) of blueberry bulk aging (ooops! ran out of corks), 6 gallons of apple-pear outside freeze concentrating (supposed to be below zero; should work out awesome), 6 gallons of apple about to do the same with, but too tired to sanitize another bucket tonight. Plus 6 gallons of blackberry to start this week.
wine.jpg


Update #4: drinking
MMMmmmmmm. The apricot is really smooth, and the blueberry is awesome. The blueberry hits just after you swallow it.
 
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First brew a mead? Ballsy. I never made a mead though I thought about it many times as a wedding gift - not too many 1-2 year engagements these days though 🙂

I haven't brewed in 10+ years, and I can't say I miss it, though I did enjoy it for a while. It just got to be a PITA when you can go buy a six pack down the street.
 
waggy said:
I keep debating getting into it. i just don't think i would drink the beer fast enough.
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That's why I'm not going to bother with beer. 🙂 Plus, beer is for the impatient. I'm patient enough to wait 2 years to taste my first product.
Wife wanted me to make a gallon of apricot wine. I'm not sure if it's quite the same as aquariums - bigger is easier to care for than smaller - but I think I'm going with 5 gallons of apricot wine tomorrow; well, Wednesday, since I'll need to purchase a couple things at the wine/beer brewing store. Every video I watch, I think, "wow, that's pretty easy." It appears that you simply have to take care to be sanitary, follow the steps, and know how to use a hydrometer. 5 gallon of apricot wine will cost me less than $30 to make. The mead will cost me next to nothing - I have my own blueberries (if I go that route), and have my own beehives & ample supply of honey.

I figure, I know what people are getting for Christmas from now on. 🙂 And, if a batch tastes like shit - it won't make me cringe to dump it.

It looks like an unbelievably cheap hobby. I got the starter set with everything I need, plus my yeasts, etc., for the mead, for a total of $140. A 5 gallon carboy is $30ish, and 1 gallon carboys are only a few bucks. So, for example, this fall if I start a batch of apple wine, it'll cost me $0 for the apples, maybe $15 for all the ingredients, including the sugar, yeast, campden tablets, etc., and $30 for a new carboy (which can be reused after I bottle the wine.) The bottles ranged from $5 to $15 per dozen wine bottles. I'm pretty excited to get started doing this.
 
Welcome! Although I've never tried my hand at a mead I do enjoy brewing up a batch of beer every now then. Your brew sounds very interesting and tasty. Is it your own recipe?
 
I've made a few batched of caramel apple cider, a ginger beer, and some apple cyser. One of the things that I've also experimented with was pasteurizing in the dishwasher to make sure the cider and the ginger beer didn't ferment out to be too dry, but I'm going to go ahead and get a force carbonation rig and keg. This is mostly because I am worried about having a bottle break and ruin the dishwasher.

Anyways, I've been happy with most of the stuff I made minus the cyser which is an apple mead type drink. I'm not really into stuff with a high alcohol content. I also have an ipa kit that I am thinking about brewing, but have put that on the back burner for the time being.
 
Mead = Good

I have 20 gallons ageing right now. 1 is a Orange Blossum Honey / Apple Juice that has been ageing ~5 years.

There is a good mead that is ready to drink in about 90 days. Search for JAO. If you make it follow the directions exactly. It was my first and is still a favorite. I made it in a 1-gallon glass juice jug the first time. After that nothing smaller than 5-gallons.😉 JAO ingredients can be got at my local Kroger store.


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Kwatt said:
Mead = Good

I have 20 gallons ageing right now. 1 is a Orange Blossum Honey / Apple Juice that has been ageing ~5 years.

There is a good mead that is ready to drink in about 90 days. Search for JAO. If you make it follow the directions exactly. It was my first and is still a favorite. I made it in a 1-gallon glass juice jug the first time. After that nothing smaller than 5-gallons.😉 JAO ingredients can be got at my local Kroger store.


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Thanks! I think I'll try making a gallon. Very simple recipe.
 
DrPizza said:
Thanks! I think I'll try making a gallon. Very simple recipe.
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Having you own bees will make it to easy to get deep into it. I buy 5 gallon buckets of honey online the shipping cost is getting higher every order.

After you get the hang of JAO. Try a JAO with apple juice instead of water. It will take a little longer to clear but it is worth the wait. Stick to the recipe at first. I have read some reports that small changes made a big and not very satisfactory result.

Every recipe I have tried with apple juice was wonderful.

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Harrod said:
Does anyone know if it would be ok, to link to recipes on another forum that we've tried?
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I don't think that homebrewing forums directly compete with tech forums, so I'd imagine that it would be OK.

The best beer that I've ever brewed was probably based off of this recipe.
 
Kwatt said:
Having you own bees will make it to easy to get deep into it. I buy 5 gallon buckets of honey online the shipping cost is getting higher every order.

After you get the hang of JAO. Try a JAO with apple juice instead of water. It will take a little longer to clear but it is worth the wait. Stick to the recipe at first. I have read some reports that small changes made a big and not very satisfactory result.

Every recipe I have tried with apple juice was wonderful.

.
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Did you use apple juice or cider (which is unfiltered apple juice)?

Dave
 
in 2 years DrPizza is gonna have a bunch of weirdos showing up at his house unexpectedly!


Can I borrow a cup of sugar and some meade neighbor?
 
Here is the recipe for the caramel apple cider that I tried, this is probably one of the easiest ones you could start with, most of the time spent was just getting everything sterilized. The rest of the time was literally the amount of time it took to poor 5 gallons of apple juice into a carboy, and add sugar and yeast. After 6 months in a bottle it was close to an angry orchard crisp cider.


http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f32/caramel-apple-hard-cider-292770/
 
Apathetic said:
Did you use apple juice or cider (which is unfiltered apple juice)?

Dave
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Both 🙂 The place where I get it has both unfiltered pasteurized and filtered unpasteurized. In 1 gallon large mouth glass jugs. Either works although the unfiltered is a more vigorous fermentation. When making JAO I can't tell the difference once bottled. I have not bought any juice in a while but any that does not have any preservatives should be fine. I have used R.W. Knudsens from Kroger.



NOTE: With the JAO the final alcohol by volume ends up at 14-16%.


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preslove said:
Why apple wine and not hard cider? Hard cider is an American tradition :colbert:
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Doesn't really matter to me; it'll probably end up being a hard cider recipe. I need to find a good recipe though, and one that's fairly detailed about the SG before fermentation. I have a nearly unlimited supply of apples this year (hundreds of bushels, if I was that ambitious.) I don't know how sour/sweet to have the original cider before fermentation - which works best. I could get more sour apples, with more apple flavor (but less sweetness) and add sugar, else I could start with sweeter apples. And, (haven't checked those trees), there's about half a dozen trees where the apples have a really nice pear flavor to them.
 
5 gallons of beer is only 40 pints. If you put it in a keg and on tap at your house. Drink 1 pint a night and you will kill the keg in 1.5 months.
 
my first 2 batches were meads.

Batch 1 was a sack mead, 2 gallons honey (24 poundsish) into 4 gallons water
Batch 2 was a milder mead, about 8 pounds of honey, 4 pounds of pineapple into 5 gallons water.

Then I sorta got sidetracked and didn't brew any more.

Batch 1 has now been in the bottle for 3 years, batch 2, about 20 months. I still have about a dozen bottles of each.

It's good stuff. I had planned on brewing an imperial stout or a belgian style, but never got around to it. I even picked up a 40 quart pot to make wort.
 
DrPizza said:
Doesn't really matter to me; it'll probably end up being a hard cider recipe. I need to find a good recipe though, and one that's fairly detailed about the SG before fermentation. I have a nearly unlimited supply of apples this year (hundreds of bushels, if I was that ambitious.) I don't know how sour/sweet to have the original cider before fermentation - which works best. I could get more sour apples, with more apple flavor (but less sweetness) and add sugar, else I could start with sweeter apples. And, (haven't checked those trees), there's about half a dozen trees where the apples have a really nice pear flavor to them.
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Just get a bunch of carboys and experiment 😉
 
waggy said:
I keep debating getting into it. i just don't think i would drink the beer fast enough.
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I thought so too when I started. You'd be surprised. I generally will go through a 5 gallon batch in a month, but a lot of it isn't me drinking it. It becomes the go-to guest gift (instead of, say, bringing a bottle of wine) every time we go to someone's place. Bringing a six pack of home brew is always popular.

OP, it's pretty hard to go wrong with mead. The major thing you need to be careful of is sanitizing. Far, far too many people just starting out don't properly sterilize everything and end up with sour beer. I recommend an acid-based sanitizer like star san, and rolling the inside of each bottle with 5mL or so of solution right before filling.

Also, if you want to try something different for a later batch: a friend of mine made a high ABV mead with champagne yeast. It was totally dried out (had no residual sugar). It was a very interesting flavor, not what you'd expect from mead, but really nice.
 
Nintendesert said:
http://aussiehomebrewer.com/topic/32762-jao-the-ultimate-beginners-mead-recipe/


So can anyone with experience say whether this is rubbish or worth attempting? I'm not sure if this is the same kind of JAO mead mentioned earlier in the thread.
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That's the 1.

Don't try the optional stuff at first. It really changes things. 2 cloves is to much for me. I still drank it of course! 😉 Just did not like it as much.

Known (by me and others) Fleischmann's Yeast Active "DRY" works. Avoid the bread machine and rapid rise. Others do work but I do not know what they are. Fleischmann's is easy for me to get and only ~$2.50 or less for a 3 pack. I use 1 pack per gallon and have made up to 10 gallons at a time. Just multiply everything by the # of gallons. Execpt for the yeast. I use a three packs for up to 6 gallons and five packs up to 10 gallons.

I don't use a "bubbler" airlock. I use a length of food grade tubing from Lowe's. By working it into the hole in the bung and putting the other end in a cleaned beer bottle half full of water. Sometimes the bubbler will back up into the jug.

Don't fill the jug full till the first fermentation (about 3 days) is over. The jug WILL over flow and make a mess. Leave enough room to add ~quart/liter after 3 or so days. And leave about 2 inches of space at all times.

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