SWIMBO's Cider

I have to admit something a little embarrassing - my lovely wife does not like beer.  I'm not sure how we make our relationship work, but it can be a trial at times.  I get excited about a new batch of beer, give her a sip, only to be informed that she doesn't like this batch either...

...Luckily, she does like wine and cider.  We've brewed a bunch of wine, but seeing as its prime apple season we're now doing a batch of cider, largely following the instructions in this BrewingTV video:



We are fortunate that our orchard UV-sanitizes their cider, so we don't need to sulphate it to kill off wild yeast.  We're not looking to mess with things much, so we merely added 0.5kg of dextrose to up the low-ish gravity of our cider from 1.042 to 1.053 - leading to a remarkably simple recipe and process, which can be found below the fold...

Metric Infusion Ratios

Just a super-quick post; mostly so that I'll have this table handy for when I need it. Here is a table of for inter-converting between US (qt/lb) and metric (l/kg) infusion ratios. This is a simple calculation - multiply US units by 2.086345096 to get metric & vice-versa; you can multiply by 2 for simplicity...

qt/lb	L/kg		qt/lb	L/kg
0.75	1.56		1.65	3.44
0.80	1.67		1.70	3.55
0.85	1.77		1.75	3.65
0.90	1.88		1.80	3.76
0.95	1.98		1.85	3.86
1.00	2.09		1.90	3.96
1.05	2.19		1.95	4.07
1.10	2.29		2.00	4.17
1.15	2.40		2.05	4.28
1.20	2.50		2.10	4.38
1.25	2.61		2.15	4.49
1.30	2.71		2.20	4.59
1.35	2.82		2.25	4.69
1.40	2.92		2.30	4.80
1.45	3.03		2.35	4.90
1.50	3.13		2.40	5.01
1.55	3.23		2.45	5.11
1.60	3.34		2.50	5.22

Brewing Lagers without Lagering

This video, from Brewing TV, covers a topic of interest to many brewers - how to get a clean, crisp lager beer without the need for lagering equipment (i.e. dedicated fridge + temperature controller).  This video covers three methods on how to do this.

 

Methods & results are summarized below the fold...