Birch sap does contain sugar but not a lot. You have to boil 100L of sap down to get 1L of birch syrup (while for maple syrup you only need to boil 60L down to get 1L).
Fermenting the sap directly you’re not going to get much of anything, probably less than 0.5% abv if you don’t add any other sugars. I know you said you are going to add sugar, but I do wonder if you’ll be tasting much flavor from the sap at all if you don’t concentrate the sap.
For super cheap pseudo temp control, you could build a swamp cooler, basically put your carboy into a tub of water with a t-shirt or some cloth around it to soak water up around the entire thing and then blow a fan on it to create evaporative cooling.
Another option would be to use kveik yeast and then you don’t really need to worry about ferment temp (other than maybe being too cold).
That yeast isn’t dead, it’s just gone dormant as there’s no food (sugar) left in the bottle for it to eat. You could easily build up more yeast from the stuff in the bottom of one of these bottles.
looks like only the stuffie is available now. I’d really like a shirt.
TBF they’d probably take your lunch money for wearing a shirt with some latin words on it too
Che Guevara t-shirts seem to get sold quite a lot.
Got a link to where this stuff can be bought when available?
Everyone has a right to sell a shirt with some latin words written on it too. That didn’t stop bluesky from making a bunch of money doing so.
So is lemmy or mastodon selling shirts yet? if not, why not?
I’ve caught a few new wild yeast cultures that I need to try out in some beer, one from juniper berries my wife brought back from her trip to a wilderness area near LaCrosse, WI and the other from the honey, wax and bees from my bee hive (which had been kinda limping along and not doing much but doing enough to keep me from giving up, it recently fully sprang to life). So I need to plan some sort of brew to try them out in. I’d like to maybe split a 5 gallon batch between them both, which means I need to empty out my 3 gallon carboys that are all currently filled with various wines so that may prove to be a bit of a challenge. The beer will be a saison, of course.
I also pulled the ~40lbs/18kgs of blackberries I harvested last August out of the freezer and made wine with them, it’s been chugging along for about a week now and I need to press it soon, hopefully today or tomorrow if I can carve out some time, I’d prefer to not wait until the weekend if possible.
I got my bock to finally attenuate after putting a tsp of amylase enzyme into it, it was stuck at 1.025 and now finished at 1.008 so I just recently kegged that. I’m planning on bottling my wild yeast saison this weekend. It had the same wort as the bock, but the wild yeast did not care about the longer chain dextrins and just fermented everything anyway.
I have a new wild yeast capture that might be promising. And another capture that looks like it’s ready for risking a batch of beer on. So I need to get that planned out. I got a bunch of Kernza (perennial grain) so I may try that with it in a saison-like beer.
I’ve had varying luck with bottles like that, sometimes they don’t hold pressure and you end up drinking flat beer. Using those lids on standard wine bottles and carbonating in them is a recipe for creating high velocity glass shrapnel.
yeah, I pitched some additional lager yeast into it a few days ago, it’s been warmed up to 68F/20C for a couple weeks with no change. Hopefully the fresh yeast will help, if not I can try adding some glucoamylase.
unless you pitched a shit load of infecting bugs (like your dog barfed into the fermentor or something) there’s no way an infection would show up so dramatically after just 16 hours. Sounds like your yeast is just really happy and filling your headspace up with foam.
Are there any you’d like some help with in particular?
I brewed a bock and some wild yeast saison last month (combined mash, separate boils). I mashed way too hot and underpitched the lager yeast so the bock is kinda stuck with way too high a FG. The saison has been slowly plugging away as the yeast is (likely) diastaticus so it should at least eventually finish…
if you’re kegging the beers and are going to keep the keg cold for the entire time, you can probably just sweeten the beer without pasteurizing or sorbating, the residual yeast in the beer is probably not going to be very active at fridge temps (though I have had some wild yeasts keep on fermenting stuff in the fridge).
Alternatively you can also mash hotter to produce a wort with fewer fermentable sugars which will result in a sweeter finished beer, you can also reduce the bitterness of your hopping to swing the balance of the beer flavor towards the sweeter side of things.
I’d try all of that before attempting to low temp pasteurize your beer.
why are there leaves or flower petals in it?
There are certainly better places to harvest yeast but that doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not the yeast in the bottom of a naturally carbonated bottle of beer is alive or dead. It’s not dead, just dormant.