Batch 009: Plan 9 from Outer Space
Xenia’s batch, Patrick here writing it up. This is a … cyser? pyment? metheglin? Anyway, it contains apple, grape, and berry juice as well as honey. It’s a pale to medium red color, and it’s fermenting like crazy. Xenia hopes it’ll wind up being a dry cider. Or whatever you want to call it. She’s playing with ale yeast again, too.
We're going to call this recipe Plan 9 from Outer Space.
Ingredients in this batch
- 1 quart apple/zinfandel grape juice and 1 quart apple juice from Jack Creek Farms, Templeton, California. Sold frozen, kept frozen during the six weeks it was in storage
- 8 oz. blueberry honey from Santa Barbara Blueberries, which is, ironically, in Gaviota, California.
- 7 oz. of honey from our friend Chris Taylor.
- ½ of a 35-gram packet of White Labs WLP001 California Ale Yeast (the other half was used in batch 006)
- 1 tsp. Valley Brewers yeast nutrient.
- 1 tsp. Valley Brewers yeast energizer.
- water to one gallon total must volume
Yield:
- 1 x 500 mL bottle;
- 6⅓ x 12 mL bottle; and
- One hydrometer flash (about ⅔ cup) for measuring.
Total: approx. 102 fl. oz., or about ¾ gallon.
Defrosted the juice in warm water. Rehydrated the yeast per directions; poured the honey, nutrient, and energizer into the carboy, then the water; agitated for five minutes to mix the must and to oxygenate. Pitched the yeast when the must hit 75°F and popped on a fermentation lock.
Original gravity: 1.081.
Final gravity: 1.000.
Estimated ABV: 11%
Observations
- 2016-06-16T05:48:00: There's foam in the carboy.
- 2016-06-16T11:15:00: There's also krausen backing up into the fermentation lock, which I emptied and sanitized, then poured out a bit of must to give the yeast some more room to breathe.
- 2016-06-17T17:12:00: There's krausen backing up into the fermentation lock again. Again, I emptied and sanitized the lock, but this time I cropped a bit of the yeast and dropped it into batch 010.
- 2016-06-18T03:15:00: Took some more yeast the carboy again for batch 010.
- 2016-06-18T04:28:00: There's krausen backing up into the fermentation lock again.
Bottling
Bottling occurred on 9 July 2016, yielding about ¾ gallon of cider. Or pyment. Or whatever you want to call this thing.