Homebrewing - Beer, Mead, Wine, Cider

Did a raw ale with heather tips foraged from the forest that turned out pretty good.

And now fermenting a raw pumpkin ale. Added around 3 kg pumpkin mash to the mash. A bit difficult to work with and had an OG of around 1.055, bit on the low end there. Fingers crossed it'll be drinkable. Assuming it's going to come in at session strength.

Success - Blond smash. Once again proves that 5 weeks in the bottle is a magic number. 4 weeks? Eh. 5 weeks? AMAZING.

Failure - Watermelon wine. It's just sour. Not in a good way, at all. Tastes kinda like the rind, though there was no rind in it. Maybe backsweetening?

Waiting - choc hazelnut porter. choc comes thru, hazelnut not at all. Needs more aging time. I feel like darker beers need more time. It's almost 3 months, gonna test it.

Fermenting - ginger bugged root beer. Made root beer syrup to make root beer soda. Was ok, needs work. Remaining half into a 1 gal fermenter. It was due 2 weeks ago, but it's fine. It'll need back sweetening and bottle carb, but that'll be another drumroll 5 weeks.

On deck - It's time for a holiday beer. Something spiced. IDK what. It takes 2 months, so it'll be ready early December if I start now. Hmm...

I haven't brewed anything in a while. I was thinking of doing some kilju soon

Brewed a Pale Ale with some leftover hops I had from last batch. Sadly I accidentally replaced (due to it being out of stock) ~60EBC crystal with a ~110 EBC crystal, so it's quite red. Then the BIAB bag broke during sparge, smashed down into my wort, splashing about 40% of it out onto the ground. And myself.
So we'll see.

Finished my 'try and see' cider batch. Three kinds of apples from the yard, juiced at the juicers, plus a homeopathic 22 g/L pale ale malt. Fermented to fully dry in 17 days at 14 C and 1,8 bar. After that a couple days at 2,5 C to clear it out. Plenty of forced carbonation. Came out a bit mild, like a dry white wine, but that made it easy to drink. Gave most of it away in 3 L bags, because I want to get the vessel empty and get a beer going.

Lesson learned: much more acidic apples next time, and the malt wort needs to be as concentrated as possible so it doesn't dilute the apple juice.

I'm getting ready to bottle a 20l batch of Altbier, this afternoon.

I started a Bochet Cyser this month; really looking forward to seeing how it tastes. Its my first bochet and first cyser, so really exploring new territory.

I've got my Tang ferment that I mentioned in my other post and some Fireweed wine, which is basically a sugar wine, but its bright fuchsia.

Currently mulling over ideas for what to do with all the blueberries I've harvested. I'll probably just be boring and make a wine but if anyone has any dumb ideas I'd love to try them.

I've got a pineapple habanero cider in its last week before I bottle it right now.

Used apple juice as the base for primary, infused habanero into pineapple juice and added into secondary fermentation. It's pretty spicy, I'm going to back sweeten with pineapple concentrate I think and then pasteurize.

I have finished the brewing stage of what will hopefully be my first gin and now need to gather up the mental fortitude to stare at a thermometer for several hours and potentially ruin all the prior work. I'm not very good at distillation yet.

Picture is my test cider with hops. My boss said that if I told him it is some kind of beer he would believe me. He really liked it.