Haven’t posted in a really long time.  Life has been busy as always and my adventures have been scaled back a bit due to an unfortunate bike adventure resulting in a broken clavicle.  Nonetheless here are a few pictures from a couple of my weekend projects.  On the left is a wheat/hefeweizen that I have been working on.  Basic rundown is 1/2 lb. 15 ºL Carmel Malts, 6 lbs. Wheat LME,  1.5 oz of 4.8 ? Mt. Hood Hops, and White Labs WLP320-American Hefeweizen yeast.  Should be pretty good, had a very active primary fermentation.  On the right is a raspberry braggot type recipe that I am fooling around with for Ruthi.  Consists of 3-1/2 lbs. Light LME, 1 lb. corn sugar/dextrose, and WLP720 Sweet Mead/WineYeast for primary fermentation.  Then today I added 3 lbs raspberry puree to the secondary fermentation.  It smells amazing right now so we’ll see what happens.  The process photos and the bottle picture are of  a West Coast American Pale Ale.  This recipe needs about another week to condition in the bottles and then should be ready to drink.  Here is what I did for this:

Fermentables:

US Caramel 40L Malt 8.00 oz 7.1 % 3.8 In Mash/Steeped
Extract – Light Liquid Malt Extract 6lb 8oz 92.9 % 4.2 Start Of Boil

Hops:
US Columbus(Tomahawk) 14.8 % 0.50 oz 25.9 Loose Whole Hops 60 Min From End
US Centennial 8.0 % 0.50 oz 7.6 Loose Pellet Hops 15 Min From End
US Cascade 7.5 % 0.50 oz 2.9 Loose Pellet Hops 5 Min From End
US Cascade 7.5 % 0.50 oz 0.0 Bagged Pellet Hops At turn off
US Centennial 8.0 % 1.50 oz 0.0 Loose Whole Hops Dry-Hopped

Yeast:
White Labs WLP001-California Ale

So I realized that I never finished talking about the cider that I made for Christmas.  It turned out pretty good.  Rather flat after a couple of weeks of conditioning then all of a sudden WHAM-O…super carbonated.  ABV turned out to be way higher than expected, probably around 12%.  Tasted more like a dry apple wine than a cider.  I learned a lot from this experiment and expect this year’s batch to be even better.