Yeast
Now that I've poured the beer into the bottle and stoppered it (what is the correct word for this when it isn't made of cork?)and I have an empty 1-liter jar, I've decided to make some light ale/beer -- that which you would call like root beer or ginger ale, as it was made before it was made pumping carbon dioxide into it -- by fermenting it until the yeast had done the pumping in of the carbon dioxide. I suppose everyone knows this, but, for any who don't: put yeast in sugar (or starch, a close relative of sugar) and they will eat the sugar and excrete alcohol and carbon dioxide. That's how we make bread, wine and beer. With the bread, the excreted carbon dioxide puffs up the dough and the excreted alcohol is cooked away by the heat as it is baked. With wine, the excreted alcohol is kept and the excreted carbon dioxide is allowed to escape, and with beer, the alcohol is also kept, of course, and the carbon dioxide is trapped during the final stage of fermentation.
So, anyway, I decided I will make a bottle of raspberry ale first - what you would call raspberry soda pop except that it will be made as it was in old days by fermentation rather than by modern methods of carbonation. I got a liter of frozen raspberries from the freezer -- frozen individually as we had grown them ourselves -- and after they thawed, they occupied about half the liter measure. I'm sure you could use store-boughten frozen raspberries. Anyway, I added about a half-liter/pint to them, boiled them for awhile and then put them through the blender. Now I'm straining them through a jelly bag, which in this case is the sleeve of a flannel nightgown with the end sewn shut on one side. You can also use 4 layers of cheesecloth/muslin, which is what I used to use to strain jelly before I made the flannel jelly bag. When the liquid has drained thru I will add some amount of sugar the quantity of which I have not as yet decided on but I plan to meditate on it while the raspberry juice is draining.
Updated: Thu, Mar 9 2006 9:26 PM GMT
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