Dreams With Words

Most of this four-day weekend was devoted to bottling homebrew. Since yeast do the real work, most of the human labor in home brewing is cleaning. There have been four carboys sitting on the kitchen counter for four years and change because every time I would clean the kitchen on a Saturday with the goal of bottling on a Sunday, I wouldn't end up with the energy to follow through the next day. Then a week later, the kitchen would be dirty again, and it would be a month or two before there was time to consider the project again. Since this is the first Independence Day weekend in three years that we haven't gotten a shelter cat, we coordinated with Kelly's friend Jim to come over on Saturday to help. Having an external party deadline, plus two weekdays off work, helped motivate some house cleaning, and we were almost ready to go when he arrived.

The pending potables dated back to 2018. I made a cyser with apple cider from a community pressing that fall. I didn't really procrastinate on bottling this one: I siphoned out several bottles over time, but they all had too strong of an alcohol flavor that I like to describe as "The yeast are angry." I think this is due to fermentation at too high a temperature (my house doesn't have a great cool place), which releases a lot of unwanted esters. Advice from the Yeastherders Gatherum had been to just give it more time;. After six years on the counter, when I brought a bottle last year, it was really well received. Good things are worth waiting for.

While the cyser was in its early stages of aging, I successfully bottled at least twice. The straight cider from that year was bottled with no drouble. And the next fall I bought an all-grain system from a coworker. I made a dunkel weizen to learn how to do an all-grain brew, and bottled a month later. Awkwardly, I haven't done a whole grain beer since…

The bottling procrastination began with my red braggot misadventures in 2020. At the start of COVID lockdown I headed to the homebrew store for beer ingredients, figuring that being stuck at home would be a great opportunity to try some brewing. March and April 2020 turned out to be pretty distracting, and I didn't get around to cleaning the kitchen plus energy to brew until late May. I put the hops and red malt in the pot for half an hour, then discovered that my liquid malt extract had gone moldy while sitting around for two months. Not wanting to waste part of a brew, I switched my plan from a 50%/50% malt/honey braggot to a 3:1 or 4:1 mix with a little less volume and no aroma hops. 2020 continued to be distracting (remember doomscrolling?) so June rolled by without bottling, then July, and then the onset of "ugh, I cleaned the kitchen, I can't possibly accomplish anything else this weekend.

2021 brought a return to "go out in the world and do things. It was also a good year for apples in Boulder County, so I spent a weekend with good folks first shaking apple trees, then squishing apples. I got home Sunday night and put sulfites in five gallons of apple cider in a bucket and started a three gallon batch of cyser with a different honey. Monday night I pitched yeast in the cider, Tuesday we packed for Element 11, Utah's regional burn. Normally I would rack from the bucket to the carboy after a week or two. "We just got back from a Burn" is clearly not enough energy to clean the kitchen. The next weekend was also in energy recovery mode. And once again the cycle began. I finally had the time and energy to rack it to secondary two months later, probably on Thanksgiving weekend. And then I discovered that either the sulfites hadn't killed all the wild microbes, or the several inches of headroom in the fermenting bucket and a little unsanitary spot had allowed a significant layer of pellicle to form on top of the liquid. I was worried the project was ruined, but I racked it to a carboy anyway and planned to check the Internet for solutions. I put a quart of it in a separate bottle for investigation. I drank that over the ensuing weeks and it wasn't terrible, nor did I get sick. So now I just needed a plan for dealing with the pellicle.

2022 through 2024 continued to be distracting. I had a lot of vacation time saved up coming out of the pandemic, so I spent a lot of 2022 planning for, at, or returning from a fun adventure. In 2023 I got really into Parks on the Air, so any weekend with good weather was a lot more tempting to spend an afternoon playing radio than cleaning and bottling. 2023 and 2024's 4-day weekends in July were filled with Dead shows and new cats, and the November 4-day weekends had turned into "get ready for Advent of Code." I was at least responsible enough not to start any new homebrew projects while there were four carboys awaiting.

After twelve hours of moving fluids around, resterilizing equipment, and "relax, don't worry, have a homebrew," the complete bottle array looks kind of smaller than I'd imagined. The contents are pretty good, though. The previous night I racked the cider to the bucket, leaving the pellicle layer behind. I put a quarter teaspoon of potassium metasulfite in overnight, so hopefully that prevents anything from redeveloping in the bottle. The taste is quite dry and a little funky; it won't be to everyone's liking, but Jim liked it. The red braggot came out a dark amber, almost brown, with about 9% alcohol. It also left some interesting colors and shapes at the bototm of the carboy, and it's going to take several attempts to scrub the carboy completely clean. The 2018 cyser has mellowed pretty nicely and has a decent flavor, while packing a punch at 15% alcohol. The 2021 cyser is probably the best of the bunch: it started at 14% potential alcohol, but finished with 3% remaining: I used a British ale yeast instead of a wine yeast, so it can't hit ABV in the teens. This means it's remarkably sweet, preserving a lot of they honey flavor (though not so much of the apple). It also finished remarkably clear, a light gold color you can see through, while the 2018 cyser is a dark orange. I suspect the color difference is due to the honey: an American blend for 2021 and Brazilian wildflower in 2018.

Making mead with ale yeasts is something I'll have to pursue further. I'd been following the practices of other yeastherders and brewing with wine yeasts, which can generally process all the sugar you can pack in with honey. But a beer-strength yeast lets more sugars remain, better preserving the sweetness and character of the honey. Plus, I think there are more high-temperature ale yeasts than there are wine yeasts, for those of us without a cellar.