Skittles Infused Alcohol?

I decided to try out the infamous Skittles Infused Vodka recipe.

This recipe is from an info-graphic by Iheartmonster that floats around the web quite often.  I made a few alterations for a test run.

I followed the info-graphic for the most part, but I had no vodka.  I used everclear instead...which caused a bit of an issue.  I also used a small bag of skittles and had just enough to make to make a small batch.
 

You need 60 skittles of one color ( i used red and there were only 60 in the small bag) per 6 .oz of vodka ( I used everclear).

The steps:
-separate the skittles by color
-add 60 skittles to a clean and empty plastic water bottle (or another bottle)
-add 6 .oz of vodka
-shake and let the skittles completely dissolve.  (lots of shaking or let it sit over night)
-filter the brew threw a coffee filter
-refrigerate 

This only makes about 8 oz per color.  I only did red for the experiment. 

In the end,  the skittles took a very long time to dissolve because I used everclear instead of vodka.  There is a solubility issue because vodka has much more water than everclear.  It still worked and tasted great though.  I added some seltzer water to it and it made a tasty drink.  I would recommend getting a larger bag of skittles and using vodka instead of everclear like the info-graphic suggests.

Im going to start up a batch of Chianti here soon and make some more smash

Porter carbonated and other updates

Here are some updates with the brews I have been working on lately:

The Porter is finally carbonated!

The kit said it would take roughly 2 weeks to carbonate, yet it took nearly 4.  I have read about darker beers and lagers taking more time to reach the appropriate carbonation levels, so that appears to be true.

The taste is excellent.  I would compare it to Yeungling Porter, although the spices and hint of chocolate remind me of Sam Adam's Holiday Porter.  So needless to say, I am very pleased.  I think I'm going to try to make a reduction out of this for some brisket or for a steak marinade...

Wine / Bar Cupboard??


This cat condo, I mean TV stand, was acquired for free.  A friend was moving and had no room for it so I am going to convert it.  There is an adjustable shelf inside the cupboard portion, so that gives me a few options.  I am thinking about creating a wine rack in the bottom portion and perhaps a mini bar cupboard/stand in the upper portions.  I can attach a bottle opener and a towel rack and maybe do some other things.  I may sand and stain it as well.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. 

 Chocolate mint tea champagne (lol)

I finished off my experimental chocolate mint tea champagne.  It was carbonated very very well and would foam like a freshly opened champagne bottle unless it was kept chilled.  I think I need to use a little less yeast if I do it again, or perhaps rack it one more time to keep the yeast flavor down, even though champagne yeast is pretty mild.

I will definitely make some of this again.  I just need to score some fresh mint and dry it out. 





My planned brewing list:
Chianti -kit is here, just looking for some spare time
Limecello -almost out, and is too good not to always have it in-stock
Smash -I nearly finished off my Smash on St. Patrick's day, so I need to get more of that brewing soon because it takes at least 7 weeks before it is drinkable and about another 4 before a normal man can handle it

Bottling the Porter

The porter cleared up pretty well in the secondary and the SG had held steady for a few days.  So it was time to bottle.

I just ordered this capper online.  Workers very well for a hand-held and you cant beat the price. 

After cleaning and sanitizing everything I prepared the corn sugar (helps create the carbonation) and siphoned the beer out of the secondary carboy and into the bottling bucket.

I did run into some trouble though.  I ended up being short on bottles.  These caps and capper only work on american style bottles. 
 
In the pic you can see an American style bottle on the right and a European style bottle on the left.  The difference looks pretty small but...

<---This is what happens with the European bottle

The caps don't grip and they can easily be knocked off, they hold up to the carbonation nor keep out the O2.  So I lost quite a bit of bottles this way and ended up searching around the joint for some other bottles that could be capped.   I found a few and also found that champagne bottles won't work (at least with this capper) even though they have a good lip for a cap because the neck has a bulge where the wire tie downs often rest. 



I ended up with 46 bottles total (minus what I drank while bottling) I threw the rest of the brew in a sanitized gallon jug.  I have been drinking from that to keep me from opening up too many bottles before the carbonation sets in (takes 2 weeks with the priming sugar).  The stuff still tastes great even though it is flat.  So I'm excited to see how it ends up here in a couple weeks.

Random experiment

Last night I decided to mess around with some left over ingredients I had.  With a bunch of lime juice left over from the Limecello, some yeast I needed to use up, and whatever else I could find I whipped up this odd brew.

8 cups of hot water, chocolate mint leaves, lime juice (20 limes), 4 cups sugar, 1/4 tsp yeast.
Basically I made a big batch of mint tea, added a crap load of sugar, and pitched some yeast in it. 
It has a high SG with a capability of producing 18% ABV.  The yeast I used won't go that high, and it is a type of champagne yeast, so it should be bubbly but not too alcoholic.  I needed to use the yeast up.  I had been using it for homemade root beer and ginger ale.

Here is an awesome way to make homemade tea bags 

This should work for most kinds of herb.. and other materials..

 Here are some raw chocolate Mint leaves that I have dried.  I usually add them to tea for a bit of extra flavor.

You can't easily open up a tea bag and add your own stuff without it leaking out into you water.  There are metal and plastic capsules you can buy that act as reusable tea bags, but I don't have a lot of cash and I don't know where to buy one in stores. 



So all you need is a coffee filter and a rubber band.

First, strip the leaves off of the stems.  I did this over top of a paper towel so it is easier to transfer any little pieces.

Then pick out any stems that broke off with the leaves.  You can leave them in, but some stems don't add flavors you are looking for.

Next, grab these pieces, or just pour them with the paper towel, and put them into a coffee filter.  Now just crush the leaves up with your fingers.  If your herb is dry this will be very easy.

Then you want to start bunching up the coffee filter by gathering up the top of the filter slowly.

See how the sides of the filter are like an accordion?  Bring the sides together like how an accordion closes. 

Then give it a little twist and secure it with a rubber band.  This is what it will look like, a little bag but not so tight that the herbs can move around inside a bit. 

Just drop this in your cup/teapot/pot or whatever and steep it like a normal tea bag.


It is not hard to do and it is cheap and disposable



  

Beer Brewing First Attempt

I normally brew wine, but everyone loves beer...including me.  

I have been desperately wanting to brew some of my own for a while and finally managed to score a large enough pot.  From brewing wine I have almost all of the equipment needed to make beer, aside from a big pot to boil the wort in and a few minor things.  You need to get a big stainless steel pot, mine is 20 quarts (5 gallons) and is considered small by the local home brewers in town, but will work fine.  These pots are a bit expensive and sometimes tough to find.  I found some online, however I found one on sale for a quarter of the price at a local shop. Just lucky I think.

For this batch, I am using a liquid malt extract (LME) kit.  I have most of the materials to do this from scrach except some hops, but since it is my first time I decided to try a kit out.  This is a Porter with some mild spices like coffee and chocolate.

This kit had 2 LME canisters, grains, flavoring spices, grain steeping bag, 3 bags of hops, yeast, priming sugars, and about 60 bottle caps.

So I had to have: a big pot, a big spoon for stirring, a thermometer ( I used a metal meat thermometer, looks like a big nail with a gauge at the head),
a heat source ( yes, it is possible to do it on a crappy stove like mine, but a big propane burner is often used by home brewers, the kind used for turkey deepfrying. there are other options like pots with electric elements in them),
something to cool the wort down quickly ( I used my sink with ice and water, a wort chiller is much better at doing this ), and a primary fermenter with an air lock.

Making the wort is mostly adjusting heat and stirring until your arm falls off.  First, you heat some water until it is between 155-165 F and you steep the grains and spices for 20-25min.  Then you take them out and bring the pot to a boil and add the LME to the water and boil for 20-30 min. Then you add the hops at 3 different stages.  This recipe had the first hops boil for 30 mins, second bag of hops for 25, then the last hops for 5.

At that point I had to rapidly cool the pot down to 70 F without adding anything to the liquid.  So I filled up a sink with ice, salt, and some water and put the pot in there.  I noticed this wasn't working as well as I hoped and started to fill my other sink with cold water and ice.  I switched the pot back and forth between the sink tubs and stirred the brew every once and a while to have it come in contact with the cool sides of the pot. 

Once this was finished, I poured it into the primary bucket and added some water.  MAKE SURE you test the specific gravity before you add the water and WHILE you add the water too.  This kit is supposed to yeild about 5 gallons, but my brew was just about to fall outside of the right SG range at a bit over 4 gallons.  So, if I were to keep adding another gallon, I would have ruined the flavor of the beer and possibly greatly reduced the alcohol content or worse.

I estimate this batch will yield 43 bottles if my terrible math skills are somewhat accurate.

The beer has been sitting in my primary for 6 days.  I have to decide whether or not to use a 2 stage fermentation where I would place the beer in a glass carboy (like a wine's secondary fermentation) to clear up.  I have been reading that this step is not really necessary if you use quality yeasts.  I think I am going to do it to clear it up a little.

Limecello, 2nd batch

Long time, no post.  I have been busy with school lately, I'm in my last semester of graduate school and have a lot going on right now.

Anyways, the first batch of limecello tasted so good that I wanted to make some more, I am making a double batch.  20 limes this time.  I want to make it better too.  There was some bitter flavor in the first batch so I am trying to find a way to get rid of it. 

I figured the bitter flavor could have come from one of two things: Wax on the outside of the lime or pith was on the zest. 

I got the limes on sale but it is hard to find any organic limes in this area, especially this time of year, and they are often sprayed with wax.

I soaked the limes in soapy water and scrubbed them with a vegetable / potato scrubber and rinsed them really well.  Hopefully that eliminates any possibility of wax altering the flavor and screwing things up.

  I also scored a new zester from Target.  It does a pretty good job of taking only the outer layer of the peel and not getting too deep into the flesh.  This should have greatly reduced the amount of pith that might get put in the brew.


The zest shavings are extremely fine and the color of the brew turned dark green in the matter hours rather than days like the last batch. 


The stuff is so dark right now you cant see light through it.  It should be ready to be mixed with the simple syrup as early as Friday. 

Bottling the Kiwi Melon Pinot Grigio

Finally, bottling day.  It is an exciting time but also comes with a lot of work.

You should only bottle totally clear wine.   If it is still cloudy or has little bits floating around it in, let it sit for a while longer.  You can filter your wine once its cleared up, but there is a possibility that you will alter the taste when doing so.  I decided not to filter this batch.

Here is a before and after of the wine to show the clarity.

Before, looks like OJ

After, clear as glass

Since the wine was cleared up well, it was time to start the cleaning and sanitizing once again.  I needed to clean, sanitize, and rinse the:
6 gallon fermentor
bottling wand
spigot
racking tubing
30 bottles
30 corks
I collect as many wine and even champagne bottles as I can and try to get them off of friends as well, so its like recycling and it saves me money.  If your in a pinch for bottles, hit up big lots, or a dollar store and sometimes you can find sparkling ciders or other stuff to salvage the bottle at a cheap price.  These boxes are from a liquor store and can even form a makeshift cardboard wine cabnet if you lay them on the side.

Cleaning all the bottles takes a bit of time, especially because of the labels.  I think some wineries make their labels huge, colorful, and covered in glue because they can only sell a bottle because the label looks cool...not because it tastes good.

So what I do is fill a sink with soapy water and soak the bottles that still have labels on them.  This gets the cleaning part done at the same time.  I scrape the label off with a plastic scraper or a butter knife.  And to get that film off under the paper, I use rubbing alcohol.
The thread of a normal water sprayer bottle and the bottles of rubbing alcohol are usually the same, so here is my tricked out alcohol sprayer ------------->



 Don't forget to rinse the bottles well after cleaning and after sanitizing.

Once everything was cleaned and rinsed, sanitized and rinsed, I put the carboy up on the table and started siphoning.  I like to siphon back into the fermentor because it has a tap or a spigot that is controllable, my bottle wand fits in the tap, and I can focus on not getting the lees (white gunk) in the bottles.

<--- This pic shows the carboy towards the end of the siphoning.  You want to avoid getting that crap at the bottom in your bottles.  Pay attention when siphoning, because you will suck up the stuff on the bottom when the tube is about an inch above it.

I lost my siphon just after this point, and the wine left in the tube flushed back into the carboy, stirring up all the nasty gunk.  I couldn't siphon any more out because I didn't want that stuff in the bottles.  So I estimate I lost about 1 to 1 1/2 bottles from that.

Its all easy after your done with the siphoning.  Just start filling up bottles and corking them.  These labels came free at the shop where I bought the kit.  Sometimes I just use some tape and a marker.  I wrote the date I bottled on each bottle.

In the end I got 27 bottles.  Well, 26...I drank one bottle while bottling.

This stuff turned out better than I expected.  It is the first fruit flavored wine I have done.  It is rather sweet and you can clearly taste the kiwi and the melon.  It finishes with a slight crispness that you get with Pinot Grigio.  I think the flavor of the pinot will come through more with time.  But this stuff is so tasty it may not last very long.