Quince Ale
We drank a bottle of quince ale that I made about 10 days ago. I poured some brewing beer from another batch into a liter of quince drink I'd made from a syrup left over from making quince jam. I let it set in primary for a week and then racked into two 1-pint bottles. It didn't taste anything like quince jam usually tastes, but it was very good and we enjoyed it. It didn't feel like it had as much of the alcoholic content of the previous beers, but it had some alcohol in it.

Topic: Chocolate Oatmeal
I started a Chocolate Oatmeal Beer today. Recipe was:

2 quarts of water
200 grams brown sugar
200 mls on the liter measure of oatmeal flakes
teaspoon mixed spice
tablespoon of raisins
tablespoon of cocoa

I put the oatmeal in the blender and blended on high until it became a flour. Put it under the grill for a few minutes to lightly toast it. Burned a little bit on the edge. I put the brown sugar in some of the water and brought it to a boil with the spice and cocoa. The raisins I put in the blender with a little of the water to chop them up as much as possible. I put everything in containers and added some of the liquid from the bread beer.

I may get some molasses for making beer. I think it would be less expensive to use molasses and white sugar rather than brown sugar, which is white sugar with the molasses already mixed in.

Topic: Bread Beer

I smushed the soggy bread, added 1/2 kilogram (a little bit over half a pound) of dark brown sugar and another liter of water and poured it into a couple glass jars and put airlocks on them. I put a tablespoon of ground coffee into a cup of water, added a tablespoon of mixed spice, a couple orange peels and a banana peel, and a few pieces of pineapple rind, brought that to a boil, then cooled it and strained it into the bucket with the fermenting bread.

Topic: Barley Flour Beer
After I poured the batch of malt beer #3 into bottles, I then poured the barley flour fermenting liquid into the large plastic container that I had poured the malt beer out of. There was still a lot of yeast sediment at the bottom, although the barley flour beer was already bubbling away. I wonder why regular brewers say they have so much trouble with bacterial contamination? A good, strong yeast should be able to knock out any unfortunate bacteria that wandered into a yeast's meal of sugar. Perhaps specialty beer yeast is not as robust as bread yeast?

I strained the barley flour liquid through 4 layers of cheesecloth/muslin to remove the coffee grounds that were in it. It was a long and tedious process, and when I was through, I couldn't add the sediment to my bread dough as I had been doing because of the coffee grounds. I like the color the coffee add to it, but next time I'll make a dark cup of coffee to add to the blend rather than the ground coffee itself. It still looked rather thick, so I added another liter of water to it, making the sum total of water for this batch 4 liters.

Topic: Malt Extract
I poured malt beer batch #3 into bottles. I had left orange peels in it, so I had to filter them out. I can't remember if I did it on purpose or by mistake. The orange peels would have been to add bitterness to it, but I'm more and more coming to the opinion that I have no interest in adding bitterness to it. If it's too sweet, I'll cut down on the sugar. But so far, it's been fine, at least for me.

Topic: Oat Beer

We drank most of the liter of oat beer tonight. It tasted great when I tried it earlier in the day, and I wondered whether to keep it for 3 weeks like the instructions had said for bottle conditioning, or whether to go with "If it tastes great, drink it now". Finally, the fact that I will need the extra soda pop bottles when I bottle the malt extract beer either tomorrow or the day after made the decision. I kept a small amount of the oat beer in a small plastic bottle. In two weeks, I'll taste it and see how it would be if I'd waited longer. It was only a week in the primary fermentation and 3 days in the bottle conditioning (soda pop bottles with screw-on top). I have no way of measuring the alcohol, but it seems more than the same amount of commercial beer would have. It is also very filling, especially when we got down to the bottom of the bottle.

Topic: Bread Beer
I have read that Egyptian workers on the pyramids were paid with bread which they also used to make beer, so I decided to make a quart of beer out of stale bread. I filled up a bucket with pieces of bread, covered it with with water and added a splash from another fermenting beer for yeast.

Topic: Barley Flour Beer
I bottled the Barley Flour Beer. It looks and smell fine but I am uncomfortable with the idea of eating raw flour, which is what I started out with (barley flour). Next time I will roast the barley flour before starting to ferment it. I put the dregs into the bowl of bread dough I always have going. Btw, you want to know how to make great bread? Use the leftovers from beer brewing. It makes a beautiful, light bread that rises easily, even with heavy grains like whole wheat and rye.

Topic: Barley Flour Beer

I only have 3 liters of water fermenting with the barley flour now, because that's all I had room for in the bucket I'm using. I'll add more water later. The flour has dissolved completely, it is fermenting well and has a nice smell. It looks darker than the other brews, no doubt because of the Tablespoon of coffee I added. I'll have to fiter that out before bottling. I'll filter this brew when I pour it in the larger container and add the full amount of water.

Topic: Oat Beer
Bottled the liter of oat beer.

I found out that this stuff is called "extreme beer", although, after looking at some of the definitions of extreme beer, I think I would call "women's beer" a particular subset of extreme beer. It has no hops and is not brewed for high alcoholic content, although it does seem to have more alcohol than regular beer. Why it seems to have this bigger "kick" than regular beer, I don't know. It's nothing I've done intentionally, so I wouldn't know how to re-create it or remove it.

Another name that can be applied to it is "ancient ale", though my beer-drinking partner calls it "African beer". We in Western societies think this skill is "ancient" because made beer this way for a thousand years, but in Africa, it's just "beer", and it's still made by women. They make it for their families, and also sell it in taverns called "shabeens".

Topic: Malt Extract
I poured the fermenting liquid from batch #2 of malt beer into plastic bottles with screw-on tops. It is very opaque and murky-looking. No wonder women called it "food" when they made beer -- you'd have a hard time passing this stuff off as liquid.

Topic: Bottling
I have re-thought my position on using glass bottles. Now that I realize that I have to leave the brew in the bottles for 3 weeks or more to condition them, I have decided to exclusively use plastic soda pop bottles. The first time I use them, I will clean and sterilize them with bleach; after that, I'll just clean them with hot soapy water and thorough rinsing out between drinking the beer from one and then going on to re-ise it for the next batch of beer. Although, truth to tell, I don't see much reason in even removing the sediment left at the bottom of any bottle if I'm going to just pour more beer to be bottle-condtioned right back into it.

Topic: Rice Beer (Saki)
A friend just gave me a bag of rice flour, so now I suppose I'll have to learn out to make beer out of that, too.

Topic: Malt Extract
I started malt extract beer batch #3, same recipe as #2

I looked at the label on the malt extract and it says it is for "Culinary Use Only". The health food store sells it as a substitute for sugar, apparently. It doesn't even say that it is barley malt -- I just happen to know that it is. I'd like to compare it to malt extract that is labelled and sold for making beer, if I ever get to a store that sells it as such.

Topic: Barley Flour Beer
I got a 500 gram bag of barley flour at the health food store (about 1 1/10 pounds in weight) at a cost of #.76 (about $1.32 at today's conversion rate) for 500 grams. So, now I wonder, with sugar at #.75 -- could I make beer with barley flour and sugar, instead of the malt extract (#1.09 for a pound which produces a half gallon of beer.)?

I put:

] the 500 grams of barley flour (about 1 liter on a liquid measuring jug), mixed with
] 2 liters of warm water and some yeast from another bottle of beer already made into a plastic bucket. I covered it with a plastic shopping bag, secured with string. I will have a better airlock when I transfer it to the large plastic container that is still holding the fermenting malt extract beer.

Then, I put in a saucepan and brought to a boil:

] 1 liter of water
] 1/2 kilo white sugar (1.1 pound or 500 mls on the liter measure, cost #.35 or US$.53).
] 250 grams (tad over half a pound) of brown sugar (cost #.50 or US$.75).
] 1 Tablespoon carob powder (minimal cost -- I'll round up the final cost to include the small bits.)
] 1 Tablespoon of mixed spice ( " )
] 1 Tablespoon of ground coffee ( " )

I added the sugar water to the barley flour water in the bucket. I made sure it was not too hot, and then I added some more yeast sediment. After I bottle the malt extract beer in the large plastic container, the container will have a lot of yeast at the bottom of it. I'll pour the barley flour liquid in that and add more water then.

Topic: Oat Beer
I looked at the oat beer and it is completely flat, with no promise of fizzing yet to come. And it's still too thick and too sweet. So I decided to chalk that one up to experience and bottle it for wine -- it should make an excellent wine -- and start another batch of oat beer.

For Oat Beer batch #2, I used:

] 1 liter water
] 200 mls (on the liter measuring jug) of sugar
] 200 mls (on the liter measuring jug) of oatmeal flakes
] handful of raisins
] generous splash of sediment (several ounces) of yeast and beer from the last batch of malt beer.

I mixed half the water with the sugar and put it in a saucepan to boil.

(You don't have to boil the sugar with the water, but it keeps it in solution better so you don't have to stir it as much to keep the sugar from settling.)

I put the oatmeal flakes into a blender and turned them to powder, then added some of the rest of the water and a handful or raisins and blended that into a puree. Mixed the sugar water with the oats and raisins water, checked to make sure it wasn't too hot, and added the yeast from a previous batch, stirred it up and covered it with an airlock of plastic sheet held securely by a thick rubber band.

Topic: Yeast
Question: can you get yeast from bread that's already cooked?


You can't get yeast that will make other bread, beer or wine etc. There's yeast in yeast bread, but it's dead and no longer active.

If you put a half-empty bottle of fruit juice in the fridge and then forget about it and open it 2 weeks later and it's fizzy, that is because of yeast in the drink and you could use the liquid to start something that needed yeast.

You could also put some cooked bread in a jar, cover it with warm water and then it will probably start to ferment from airborne yeast --- this is usually easier to do in the warmer months, especially late summer and early autumn when there is more yeast floating around in the air because of fruits and veg that are growing outside.

Bruised apples that have been hanging around for a while and you see a little foam around the bruise have yeast in the foam/bruised area.

The green fuzzy stuff on jam is a kind of yeast -- it's actually a fungus, a bunch of yeast living together. You might be able to get them to come back to yeast if you keep them somewhere warm with water and sugar.

Topic: Ginger Ale
Hopefully, tonight we will have "lashings of ginger beer" with our supper. I put a liter of ginger ale into a glass bottle with a screw-on top two days ago, with a tablespoon of sugar to prime it. Later, I'll set it outside for it to cool. I'll have to think of some other way to cool it down to "cellar temperature" when spring gets here and it's warm outside. The fridge is difficult because there's no room except in the door, and I don't want to be swinging it back and forth when I open and close the door.