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Millstone Cellars – Fruit, Funk, Fermentation

August 31, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

I stuck my nose deep into the little glass of pale yellow, letting my nostrils swim in a smell I’d never expect from a cider: blue cheese.

Kyle Sherrer played thief-wielding, sample-slinging host to us this weekend, as he lead us around his cidery, Millstone Cellars. With his father, Curt, Kyle makes cider and mead using old world methods: wood barrels, wild yeasts, spontaneous fermentation. They’re creating dry marvels from a forgotten time, using locally sourced ingredients (even some from their own backyard).

I could wax voluble about the intriguing apple, honey, and berry fermentations; the spicy wood and musty stone of the building; or the puckering joy of sour meads, but I’ll let the pictures do the talking.

How to Homebrew: Back to Basics

January 14, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

In honor of my first batch of all-grain beer, this week on LitLib is all about homebrewing!

I fell into my homebrewing hobby as a side effect of growing up in a household that consumed and appreciated a lot of alcohol. My dad used to make what I can only call “odd” wine: carrot, rhubarb, banana, and other things you won’t find at the local liquor store. Our basement was a menagerie of white buckets, glass carboys, empty green wine bottles, and a utility sink over flowing with sodium metabisulfite and thick bristled white brushes.

I learned how to brew the same way a kid learns how to use a Q-tip; through a lot of painful trial-and-error. One of my first batches ended up at about 2% alcohol because I added four gallons of water to a single gallon of actual brew. An early batch of English style pale ale had the delicious added flavor of rotten-eggs sulfur because I did the entire main boil with the lid on the pot. I never made anything undrinkable, but I certainly made a lot of beer only its brewer could love.

As my brewing skills slowly evolve, I spend a lot of time poking through homebrewing forums, looking up recipes, learning about proper yeast pitching temperatures, sometimes even stumbling upon a some unexpected pictures of pimped out kegerators. This has given me a pretty broad knowledge of various homebrewing techniques, but I still have yet to find a single, succinct overview of the very basics of brewing.

So I decided to make my own.

In addition to this guide, I am happy to answer any and all questions about the basics of homebrewing in the comments below!

What is homebrewing?

Without sounding dense, homebrewing is brewing that is done at home, without commercial equipment. It usually means brewing on a significantly smaller scale (5-10 gallons as opposed to say, 7,000,000 gallons) with significantly less control and consistency in the final product. It encompasses beer, wine, cider, and any sub-genre therein, but does not include distillation, as that is illegal and should be left to those few (with even fewer teeth) in the Appalachian foothills.

Despite popular belief, homebrewing is pretty safe. There are some minor threats that come from over-filling or over-sugaring, but for the most part, it’s a low risk, high reward hobby. In a poor attempt at humor, Buffalo Wild Wings lampooned home brewers with a less than flattering commercial. The truth is that most homebrew, even the poorly sanitized or drank-too-early, isn’t going to send you to the ER with GI issues.

And if you don’t believe me, believe science! Yeast eats sugar and poops out carbon dioxide and alcohol, which has the added bonus of sterilizing the liquid. Alcohol disrupts the natural equilibrium of water outside of any bacteria cells, killing them as osmosis forcefully pushes water out of the cells to reestablish the balance. Thermodynamics are awesome. The only obvious health concern is mold, which aside from being visible and gross, usually makes the beer so foul tasting that not even the most self-destructive frat boy could stomach enough to make him sick.

So you want to be a home brewer?

First, ask yourself why.

If the answer is to save money on your alcohol, you need a new/better business model. While the ingredients-per-gallon cost is pretty cheap, you have to factor in equipment and opportunity cost. In the long run, you’re not going to save yourself an extraordinary amount of money by making it yourself.

If the answer is to impress your friends, I hope you’re patient. An ale takes on average 3-4 weeks to be ready to drink, where a lager takes 6-8 weeks. Wine of almost any variant takes even longer. Your first few batches won’t likely win any contests either, so it’ll be a while before your friends start greeting you as “Brewmaster.”

If the answer is for fun and because you’re so stubborn you have to try to do everything yourself, then you’re at least temperamentally ready to fire up your boil pot.

What do you mean you don’t understand these words?

Veteran home brewers like to throw around a lot of jargon and hardly ever qualify any of it. It’s like they expect us to figure these things out, as if there were some kind of widely available, magical book that contained definitions of things.

This is list of the things I had to discover on my own, but it is not nearly exhaustive:

Wort (beer) – a mixture of grain sugars and waters that will be fermentted into beer
Must (wine) – the same as wort, but with different sugars, including fruit pulp
Yeast – eukaryotic microorganisms that are obsessed with eating sugar and produce alcohol as a biproduct
Sugar – alcohol is formed in beer and wine based on the amount of added sugars, which are introduced to the brew bia fruit, grain, honey, or other sources
Sparge (beer) – the process of removing sugars from cracked grain using very hot water to create wort
Fermentation – the process of yeast converting sugars into alcohol
Primary fermentation – the initial conversion of the sugar into alcohol after yeast is first introduced to the worst/must
Secondary fermentation – the secondary conversion that removes extra sediment and allows time for the brew to settle/clear/mellow
Priming – adding extra sugar after secondary fermentation to promote carbonation in bottles/kegs/growlers (only applicable if you want to carbonate your beverage)

What will you need?

Before I get into the actual equipment that is necessary, I’m going to point out a few things you should have that often get overlooked by early brewers:

Experience drinking what it is you’re brewing (know, at least roughly, why you like certain styles and what they’re made of)
Basic cooking skills (if you can’t boil water without scalding yourself or manage temperatures on the fly, you’re going to struggle to brew anything)
Upper body strength (seriously, a gallon of liquid weighs about eight pounds, so a five gallon batch will weigh 40+)
Patience, commitment, and persistence (a full brew can take most of a day, and can’t really be hurried)

As for the gear (you can buy all of this stuff online, but be a good member of the community and pick it up at a local homebrew store, if reasonable):

A stove (like the one you usually make pancakes on)
A sink (like the one you usually leave dirty dishes in)
Towels (and not your wife’s good towels; don’t even look at them)
Your ingredients (this is going to vary wildly per type of brew and recipe, think of it as the “food” part of your recipe)

1 x brew boil pot w/lid (large aluminum or stainless steel, 5.5 gallons at minimum)
1 x plastic brew pail (these are the infamous “white buckets” used for primary fermentation – 5.5-6 gallon)
1 x lid for your brew pail (if you seal it, they will brew)
1 x air lock w/rubber bung (there are several styles of air locks, but any will work)
1 x glass carboy (this is for your secondary; the brew will sit and clarify in this)
1 x big metal spoon (for all the stirrin’ you’s gonna be doin’)
1 x container of a no-rinse sanitizer (never use soap, try not to use bleach)
1 x large thermometer (or just get an infrared temperature gun already)
1 x auto-siphon (this will save you a ton of headaches and sticky spill spots on your kitchen floor)
6 x gallons of water (distilled, spring, anything clear and tasty)

You’ll also need bottles, growlers, or a keg for your finished brew, but that’s up to you (as I won’t be including bottling in this overview).

You’ve got all the stuff, now what?

This is a high-level, technical overview of the steps involved in brewing almost anything. Some specialty brews requires steps other than these, but that’s what a recipe is for!

Boil/sanitize your wort/must without the lid on the pot – If you’re brewing beer, you’ll want to bring your wort to a rolling boil in your brew pot. If you’re making a fruit based wine, you don’t need to achieve a full boil just raise the internal temperature to ~175 degrees.
Add any other ingredients – like hops, spices, etc. – while the pre-brew is still hot.
Put the lid on your pot and rapidly cool down the liquid using an ice bath or something similar.
Pour your cooled wort into your primary fermentation vessel.
Stir the wort vigorously to oxygenate the brew, then add your yeast.
Seal your bucket and wait for primary fermentation to finish (the bubbles in your airlock should slow down considerably)
Siphon the brew into your secondary vessel, avoiding any of the settled sediment.
Allow your brew to settle/clarify as per the recipe.
Bottle/keg your brew.
Enjoy!

Clicky for biggy.

How to Make (Kind of) Traditional Perry

October 9, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

Perry : Pears :: Cider : Apples

Don’t you just love fruit and alcohol analogies presented using symbolic logic? I know I do. Oh, you don’t? Well this post ain’t gonna get any less logical. Or Symbolic. Or analogic. Yea, that last one isn’t a real word.

Some of you may remember that I made Pear Mead/Cider last year, and it turned out deliciously potent. The same generous lady who gave me a bucket-o-pears last year has given me a box-o-pears this year. I decided to do something a little different, foregoing the honey completely this time for a 100% fruit based beverage.

Last go-round, I juiced the pears using a food processor, which accidentally caused the fruit to prematurely oxidize, which I have since learned is a bad thing, which I have since learned should be avoided if you want your finished product to actually taste good, which I have since learned is an important characteristic of things people want to put into their mouths.

This go-round, I decided to get all Amish on the pears and crush them under the immense wooden weight of a manual fruit press!

I am fortunate to live very near Maryland Homebrew, who offer cider press rentals for a mere $15 for three days.

Note: A 50lb cider press does not fit into a Mini Cooper S very easily.

Paring pairs of pears in a press.

How to Brew Perry (Pear Cider)

Things you’ll need:

~30lbs of pears (ripe but not rotten, easily squishable with a strong grip)
A fermentation bucket (5 gallons or bigger, for best results)
A hammer (you’ll see why in a bit)
A cider press (to squish them there fruits)
A can opener (you’ll [also] see why in a bit)
A large mash pot (to catch the juice)
Cider or wine yeast (unless you want 5 gallons of pear juice instead of cider)
Campden Tablets (in case you need to stabilize your batch)
Beer! (or cider!)

Step 1: Mash up the pears

The kind and helpful staff at Maryland Homebrew suggested that I mash up my pears before trying to press them. Overestimating my Herculean strength and Odyssian ingenuity, I figured I could just use tools and brainpower to juice the pears without going through the trouble of turning them into pulp first.

As usual, I was wrong.

So, I hit them with a hammer.

Stop, hammer time, etc.

This is an incredibly messy and fun process. Just spread out a tarp (or a series of plastic bags) and smash them there pears like they are your work computer right after it crashes in the middle of that huge document you’ve been working on for 6 hours straight.

Hopefully the pears are ripe enough that a few good thwacks will turn them into pear-puree. If not, you’ll be hammering for a while. Have fun with that.

Once you’ve got a big soggy heap of pear parts, drop them in your press.

Science!

Step 2: Supplement

At this point, you’ll realize that you don’t really have enough pears for the amount of juice you wanted to make a 5 gallon batch of perry. Short of going to find a local pear tree, your options are limited. I opted to harness the power of the industrial-culinary complex, and bought cans and cans of pear, floating in 100% pear juice.

If you buy store-brand, you can usually get cans for ~$1 a piece, and they contain a pair of pears with about 10 ounces of juice.

Open them things up. You can use the hammer again if you want, but a can opener might be a little less dangerous. Pour the extra juice into your mash pot to add even more sugar for your hungry, hungry yeast.

Not as visceral as hammer-opened cans, but much more elegant.

Step 3: Juice!

Now you can finally set to juicing the pile of fruit you’ve got sitting out on your back deck, exposed to the air and bugs and falling acorns. The style of press I used had a ratcheting handle that attached to two half-circles of wood that applied consistent downward pressure on the fruit. It was surprisingly effective, but also very labor intensive. I sweat despite the chilly weather.

I was genuinely surprised at how much liquid came out of these pears. I collected nearly 2.5 gallons after I had pressed and mixed the pears three times. I added this to my fermentation bucket, but realized I still needed a lot more liquid to get a full 5 gallon batch.

Pressed Pear Cake, coming this fall to Martha Stewart Living.

Step 4: Supplement again!

Don’t add water to your juice to get the volume you want, this will only (shocker!) water down the flavors. Instead, you can either 1) add unpasteurized apple cider (often found in the produce aisle during the fall months) or 2) use 100% pear juice (often found in 32 ounces bottles in the baby food aisle). The prior has more sugar for your yeast but will obviously add some apple flavor to the final product, the second has been clarified which can impact the final flavor as well.

I split the difference and used a little bit of both. Once you’ve reach 5 gallons, toss in your yeast and seal the bucket. Unlike beer, the airlock may not bubble like a mad science experiment. Don’t worry if it doesn’t. Every few days peak inside the bucket to make sure the yeast looks like it is doing its thing. You’ll be able to tell by the gross brown sediment that lines the bucket as the yeast eats up all of the sugar.

Congratulations! You’ve now got a batch of 100% fruit perry that will be ready to drink in 4-6 weeks.

Note: If the batch smells a little odd, or really yeasty, you can toss a few campden tablets into the bucket to make sure no nasty bacteria ruin your hard work.

Give her…the rack!

October 17, 2011 · by Oliver Gray

Just a quick update (in between work, installing laminate flooring over 1000+ sq/ft, recovering from surgery, and generally being awesome/busy): the cider-mead has been racked!

Not like, stretched out very painfully as a method of torture, but like, siphoned into a big glass carboy.

Behold!

As Tiff said, "It looks way less gross in the glass bottle."

Now we just wait 6-8 weeks, pour it into one more thing (keg or bottles, haven’t decided yet), then pour it into our glasses and or mouths.

Also, obligatory:

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Pear Cider-Mead

September 22, 2011 · by Oliver Gray

When I started this blog over a year ago, I had intended to occasionally chronicle my brewing adventures. Since then, I’ve broken my arm, transitioned into a new job with a new company, and gotten engaged. I’ve been a tad otherwise occupied.

But I digress. Here be the first in a randomly timed collection of intimate guides into my haphazard brewing process! Maybe the “libation” part of the title can actually be relevant, instead of an abstract homage to my propensity to write while intoxicated.

Pear Cider-Mead

All of the ingredients, minus water.

I call it “Cider-mead” because I didn’t commit to either in the brewing process. The ratio of juice to honey is rather random, which will yield either a very strong, sweet cider, or a very light, sweet wine. It’s in the hands of the fates now.

A very nice coworker of mine, Deb, jokingly (or so I thought) offered me a bevy of pears from her trees. I accepted, not expecting her to actually follow through. A few days later, in she walked with a 5 gallon bucket full to the brim with slowly ripening, pear shaped fruit-things.

I decided to do the the only decent thing a person can do when given dozens of pounds of fruit: make booze!

I forgot to take a picture before I started, so here is the bucket after I'd had my way with it.

I had planned to just do a cut and dry cider, using a very beer-like process. But after reading about how honey and pears seem to form some sort of angelic union in-fermentation-utero, I opted for the slightly more elaborate (and sweet!) option.

Step 1: Cut them things up!

I halved, and then halved, and then halved, and then halved them.

It’s a good idea to remove as many seeds as possible as they tend to add bitterness to the pear juice, but don’t spend hours trying to dig out every little guy that just refuses to leave his delicious fleshy home. I hadn’t washed the pears yet, but for good reason.

I continued to chop them up until I had halfway filled my pre-sterilized (figured I wouldn’t bore you with pictures of me cleaning stuff) mash pot. This was about 40 pears worth of choppings. If you do this yourself, do not wait until the pears are ripe; they’ll be too squishy to cut without making a huge mess, and a lot of the sugars that will make the cider-mead delicious are already starting to break down.

No need to remove the cores.

Step 2: Wash them things!

Since these were from a farm, and a good number of them had been on the ground, or played home to spiders/bees, it was important to wash them pretty thoroughly. I waited to wash them after they were cut up for three reasons: 1) it’s faster, 2) it will knock out any extra loose seeds, and 3) it helps to soak them a tiny bit before juicing them. Make sure you use very cold water. Rinse them until the water runs clear and the large seeds/chunks of gross crap are gone.

Wash your hands before you wash the pears, if that isn't a given.

Step 3: Juice them things!

This part can either be super easy, or damn near impossible, depending on how equipped you are. The best way to juice them is manually; read: smash them with something big and heavy. This isn’t always practical, especially if the fruit in question is still pretty firm. Manually mashing them into a pulp and then squeezing the pulp through a muslin bag/cheese cloth will yield the nicest, tastiest juice.

That being said, it’s absolutely impossible. After 20 minutes of standing over the mash pot, armed with a potato masher and my Herculean will, I gave up and stuck them in a food processor/juicer (I know, I suck, shut up).

This does not work. Do not try.

Despite the shame I brought upon my Viking ancestors, using the food processors was much, much, much easier. ~40 pears yielded about 7-8 pints of delicious pear juice. I only needed 92 ounces based on the random recipe I made up in my head, so I drank the last glass and a half, feeling very pleased with myself. One note: the juice will start to brown almost immediately. Be sure you have you mash pot ready before you finish juicing all the fruit.

Looks like stout, but it's not. Or maybe it is. I can't remember.

Step 4: Mix them things up!

Time to actually make the pre-mead, or the must. I always confuse wort (pre-beer) and must (pre-wine), and I don’t even know if there is one for cider. I call it all pre-whatever-it-is; must simpler. Much simpler.

Take your newly juiced juice and add it to your mash pot. If you have an electric stove, it will take a good while for the 5 gallon pot to heat up to appropriate pasteurization temperature. Crank it up as high as it will go; I promise it will still take approximately forever to get to ~200 degrees. The must (erm, pre-cider-mead) will look pretty gross at this point; that’s OK.

Looks like Orc mischief to me.

Next, dump in a ton of water. 2.5-3 gallons should do. I used Deer Park™, but you can use anything that is clear and doesn’t have weird micro organisms living in it. Distilled water is a no-no as it doesn’t contain the right minerals, but tap water might have all kinds of other weird shit in it, so I can’t recommend that either.

Once you’ve added the water, and added to the time it will take your massive pot to reach any temperature beyond luke-warm, it’s time to add the secret, not-so-secret ingredient!

I'll give you a hint: it's made by bees and is called honey.

As per the recipe that came to me in a dream, I added 9 lbs of honey that I bought from Trader Joes™. Make sure you stir it all together so that the honey doesn’t just settle at the bottom. Hopefully your massive tankard of developing joy has gotten slightly warmer, and the honey will dissolve without issue. I also threw in some cinnamon and vanilla extract because I’m recklessly impulsive and they were just sitting there.

Now we wait. And wait. And wait some more. Best to clean up the huge mess you presumably made doing all of the prior (or was that just me), before you fiancee gets home and freaks out because the house is covered in a fine mist of pear juice.

You’re waiting for the must to reach ~190 F. This is very hard to judge if you don’t like have a thermometer like me. I do the “stick your finger in to see if it burns you” trick to get a rough estimate. I know our water heater says that 150 F water coming from the sink can scold your skin in 4 seconds, so I base my whole temperature pseudo-science around that.

Once I’ve burned my finger correctly, I turn the heat off, and prep the pre-washed fermentation bucket. Against all logic and advice offered by professionals, I added ice to the bucket to cool the must as soon as it was added to the bucket. The goal is to get the must to room temperature (~75 F) as quickly as possible, so that you can add your last ingredient.

Step 5: Yeast them things up!

Once the must has cooled appropriately (or not, I was impatient and added it when the must was still warm) you can add your yeast. This is my first time using a pre-suspended liquid yeast, but it turned out to be pretty damn simple. Shake, open, pour, stir, seal, done.

All yeast smells like beer...or vice versa.

Now we’re basically done! I stirred the whole mixture one more time to make sure the yeast had enough oxygen to start the fermentation process, then seal the lid with a little airlock.

Now we just want and listen for the happy sound of bubbling. In about 2 weeks I can rack the cider-mead into a glass carboy and be able to see the fruit of my labor (pun stretched, and intended). Should be ready some time around Thanksgiving!

Coming soon: LitLib India Pale Ale!