First Cyser

I have loved honey every since I was a little kid. When I started home brewing I began looking at ways to incorporate it into my recipes. I was familiar with mead already, in fact I have 5 gallons in my basement that are aging right now, but I wanted something that didn't take a year to make.  I decided to make a cyser with some ingredients I could pick up at the grocery store. Here is the recipe I am using. I didn't do a lot of research, but instead aimed for a target original gravity using just apple cider and honey.I also looked The Big Cider Making Post on Reddit for some basic guidelines.

Recipe

• 4.5 gallons apple cider 
• 4 pounds of clover honey
• yeast nutrient
• pectic enzyme
• 4 cups of fresh raspberries
• Lalvin D47 yeast

OG- 1.080

First I cleaned and sanitized everything. I put roughly half of a gallon of the cider in a stock pot and warmed it to 90 degrees. I then added the honey, yeast nutrient, and pectic enzyme. I used this to simply mix the honey in well. I then added everything to the carboy and took a gravity reading. I was right where I wanted to be. I shook the carboy for 5 minutes to aerate and pitched the re hydrated yeast. I also set up a blow-off tube. I recently learned why a blow-off tube is important. I hope to never repeat that mistake. I am actually a little nervous with the amount of head space I have in the carboy right now. I put this in my basement where I expect it to ferment in the mid 60s.

I hope this goes well. I really enjoy cider and hope I cant get some of my friends who are not big beer drinkers to try something new.

A quick history up to this point.

On black Friday 2013 I was browsing the subreddit /r/beer and one of the submissions pointed me to Northern Brewer's Essential Starter Kit which was one of their deals for the day. I quickly told my wife this is what I wanted for Christmas and ordered it. Part of their deal at the time included the Dead Ringer IPA and Irish Red Ale extract kits.  I had never home brewed before but I decided it sounded fun. I also have a friend who was pretty serious about the hobby and I had sampled his homebrew on several occasions and loved it.

I received the kit a week or so later and immediately went to work. I started with the Irish Red Ale. After steeping my grains for the recommended amount of time my kitchen started to smell amazing. Even my wife commented on it, which surprised me because she isn't much of a beer drinker herself.  Things went well enough and a few days later my airlock was bubbling rapidly. The next weekend I went to my local homebrew shop and purchased another fermenting bucket just so I could start my next batch of beer. I was too excited to wait for my first batch to finish.  When it came time to bottle I was surprised to see how many bottles it takes to hold 5 gallons of beer. I now had quite a supply of beer to drink, but that didn't stop me from wanting to brew more. I gave a way a few bottles, drank a few, and even dumped a few. A month or so after bottle conditioning, my Irish Red went downhill quickly. It developed a terrible aftertaste. I have come to learn this is commonly known as "home brew twang" and is relatively common with extract kits.

The next beer I brewed was from Austin Home Brew and is called Greenbelt Double IPA. DIPAs are my goto beer so I though I should try one out. I just put this into bottles last night, after trying to clear is with gelatin and cold crashing for the first time. I tasted it before priming it with corn sugar for bottle conditioning and was really pleased. It was bitter, but not overly so, and had pleasant hop aroma. I hope after a few weeks in bottles it tastes just as good. I will add another blog post in a month or so with the results.

Thanks for reading. I hope to continually update this with each new brew and brewing related event I experience. If you are a reading this and have a homebrew blog of your own please drop me a line and let me know where it's at. I am trying to read and learn as much as I can.