Cyser - Apple Mead - Updated Super Simple Cyser for 2021

what do apples and honey have to do with each other the super simple sizer 2021 edition that's what yeah we're going to make another sizer and we're just making a really really simple one this time we are going to be adding some apples in conditioning face so that won't be in this video it'll be in the next video following this one that you'll see in just a couple of days and we're going to do something a little different based on the progress we've made in our brewing concoctions so you'll have to wait for that in the next video but in this video we're actually going to put things together so don't don't leave because that sounded like the end of a video don't do that so what i want to do though is get a fermenter stick it on my scale all right i'm using honey from bev's bees it's my new favorite kind of honey and i probably should have heated it up before i started but i like to show people things that they might actually do themselves that's my story and i'm sticking to it so how much do i have in here i don't know probably about a pound i know it's like three four pounds for one of these jars so this is how much honey i'm using today because that's not unusual to have just a little bit left in the bottom of a jar so that's what we're going to use today so what i want to do is just pour it in and i'm just going to pour it right in through the funnel up top i do have my scale going though so i can see how much there is i am going to stand up though so i can monitor what's going on up there so brian doesn't accidentally overfill i don't think there's even enough to overfill so if you have honey that has started to be a little bit cantankerous and solidify ever so slightly in the bottom of your jar making pouring even more difficult just go to your sink run some hot water over the jar and that'll loosen it up all right if after putting it under hot water for like five minutes it's just a little bit more runny than it was before don't worry we have a solution for that too patience is a virtue but one that we do not have we're filming i am not have patience especially when filming i need it to work now so i'm going to open up some of our apple juice and this is just aldi apple juice it's nothing fancy but it's good stuff it tastes nice and i'm going to pour you can't see about halfway into the jar so brian is going to read you the ingredients of said apple juice just to let you know what is in it but more particularly what is not in it and the ingredients are apple juice from concentrate which is water and apple juice concentrate they actually have to tell you that i don't know why ascorbic acid which in parentheses says vitamin c that's it and that's just to maintain color what's not in here is any preservatives there's no ites or ate like sulfites sorbates things like that those would actually help prevent fermentation now i know some people have done it with juices that had those things just know it could fermentation or it could stall them or it could work just fine i tend to try to get juices that don't have them but anyway what i have done spilled this jar halfway with apple juice it had that stubborn honey in the bottom i'm going to shake the bejesus out of it and it's almost working now just something of note just because honey is crystallizing doesn't mean it's gone bad honey doesn't actually spoil so it just means that there's less water content in it than there was before normally adding some water running it under some heat will usually break it up i know bev's honey tends to run a little higher gravity than most honeys most is 0.035 per pound in a gallon of must hers usually is like 0.404 to 0.045 it's almost as good as sugar so i'm not surprised that this is crystallizing just a little bit the only problem with us adding the juice at this point is that we aren't going to be able to tell you exactly how much honey we added to this must it's about a pound although i can calculate it based off of what the gravity of the juice juices which i will do in a moment as soon as i get this honey out of the jar when in doubt try try again so i'm gonna pour this in that'll help dissolve some of the honey that's stuck into here too and i'm gonna take some more of this juice before i got most of it out so we'll just get the rest with this and this isn't a bad thing you see all that foam that is just adding oxygen to the must which is something we want we definitely want oxygen so i'm kind of doing two birds with one stone here no this is not my intent when we started filming this i did not think we were gonna have to do this this is just one of those things that this is what happens how do you solve that problem so we're showing you things don't always go as planned actually our video is almost never yeah scripting what scripting we don't need a script we just need to actually do stuff and oh wow look at all these 15 things that we didn't think of that are happening and let's deal with it for the sake of expediency we're not going to worry about that last tablespoon that's stuck to the bottom of this jar we'll get it out later use it for something else probably tea but i no longer need a scale now i'm going to guess it's about a pound though maybe just a touch under and now what i want to do is get a reading on our juice that way i know subtract what i get as my original gravity from the juice and that tells me the gravity of the honey doesn't really tell me how much because like i said bev's honey is a little bit hotter than your typical honey see if i could do this without spilling it all over might be neater than using the master baster look at that not a drop all right so fat see again the things that happened so i'm just gonna pour some of that how much i poured too much we just want it to be able to float most juices are in the 10 50 to 10 55 range this one is 1.048 okay so right in that ring do we want to take a note on that along with our other notes do we have yet to start taking one very important aspect of home brewing whether it's wine mead cider or beer is taking notes i have been accused of not being very good at taking notes and it's true so i don't know we're writing what this is which is super simple sizer i'm going to put the date we're going to put the date which is may 11th 2021 and i'm going to put the juice i'm going to use almost a gallon of juice whatever fits in here somebody's going to ask me exactly how much it's whatever displaced the honey less than a gallon is all we all we did so it's probably like 0.8 gallons if you really want to be specific um so it's apple juice and i'm going to notate it's 1.048 on the gravity of the apple juice which is kind of important to know and i'm going to say bev's honey i'm going to do that little about symbol because i don't really know how much it is one pound i'm going to be using 71b as our yeast today because well we don't call it 71 beast for nothing but i wanted to make sure that it came out really right for this one i know it's a 14 abv yeast so this should come out somewhere in the 12 to 13 percent when you're working with bev's honey you want to always underestimate just a little bit so i just wanted to uh have a little bit of wiggle room there anyway that is my note so now that we know all that i can add in more of our apple juice keep in mind i still have a bunch of honey in the bottom of this thing don't worry i haven't forgotten okay so that's one uh one half gallon of our apple juice in there but for the ease of mixing we are going to locate our thumb saver bung and shake the bejesus out of this now by thumb saver bun which he means is we have a solid stopper it doesn't have a hole because if the ones with the hole and you put your thumb on and you hold it long enough it kind of hurts your thumb a little bit so this is the thumb saver bunk yeah it's it's it's an old joke sorry but as she said now is the time to shake the bejesus out now you might be wondering why we only fill it halfway to shake it up because it's a lot easier to shake this versus when it's full there's not as much to move around plus it's a little bit lighter so it's not as hard to do and i'm just going to literally shake the bejesus out of it by now you probably know my rule about mixing you shake it until you think you're done when you see no more honey on the bottom and then you go two more minutes well i did that while derek put some cats away because they were starting to make noise and now i am ready to add more apple juice if i can get the bung back up now that we have that all mixed up i'm going to add more juice now this is when i have to decide how far up i'm going to go also known as just how greedy do i want to be ideally we want to get past the curve of the neck here somewhere in this region but sometimes brian likes to push the envelope now in primary i could have just fermented it halfway up it wouldn't really matter but that would mean you're going through all this effort and not getting the full product out of it so i want to get like you know as much as i can but i have all that phone and you know if it goes up into the airlock i lose the product anyway so i gotta be a little careful but see right just past the corner that's probably about where i'm gonna go because all that foam that concerns me so how much apple juice do they leave in here still a pretty good amount um still that much of a half gallon so like a third of that half gallon so a sixth of a gallon didn't get in here so we are not making a full gallon we're making a little bit less but the next step is to take another reading now you might be wondering what's with all these readings well i like to know what's going on i want to know what my brew is doing so i took a reading on the apple juice alone to know what the apple juice component gave me as a gravity now i have the honey and apple juice together so i can pretty much calculate how much that came from honey that is 1.104 for an original gravity so if i get out my calculator that teachers in school told me i never have with me that is 1.104 minus 1.048 that gives me 0.056 for like a pound of honey now i'm hoping maybe it was a little bit more than a pound but i don't think it was strong honey good stuff um she does sell it but she is under cottage law she said this to someone so she would have to meet you in person which means you have to come to sarasota florida don't think she's gonna drive to la and deliver honey or anything like that um and i'm pouring this back in because everything we're using has been sanitized in now many people don't believe in pouring it back in okay they think you have to throw that away or this that all this stuff was sanitized and when i say sanitized i mean we have a bucket the red bucket of sanitization sitting right over there i can see it but you cannot it has star sand sanitizer fluid in it a couple of gallons of it and we're just dunking things in there as we go everything is basically stored in there until it comes out people ask us all the time do we reuse our star sand and things like that no once it starts to get cloudy it's no good by the time we've made two or three or four videos like we do in a day it's done we dump it and make fresh next time around just in case there's any confusion the star sand sanitizer liquid is a diluted solution with the proportionate amount of star sand to water ratio yeah probably should have said that okay so next up pitch your yeast to do that it's really simple first this is one of the things i like the loud about the laven yeasts you can open it with your hands you don't need scissors to cut them open so many other yeast packages yeah red star doesn't i love their yeast but man why why do that make it easy for people okay and i'm just gonna carefully pour this in i am using a whole packet i've kind of just you know what i use a whole packet anymore i don't really care you can use a half packet in a gallon if you really want to um i don't really bother measuring it down anymore but you can if you want to we have found that using a whole packet it seems to start up a little bit quicker maybe gives a little bit more of a vigorous fermentation so for our purposes it actually seems to give a little bit of an advantage however it's not absolutely necessary all right so now that all of everything is in there yeast included i'm just going to give this a final shake and this is really just to make sure everything's well blended i'm not going to get a lot of oxygen in there see how there's not just not a lot of room and you want to kind of make sure your yeast is not all stuck to the neck of the fermenter they like to do that i got most of it and then we take an airlock and a stopper and stick it in there if your stoppers don't fit well you can always just take a piece of rubber band or something like that a piece of masking tape whatever you got to do the next and most important step is to take your note and attach it to the bottle but since the masking tape has been moved on me while we were filming i will do that when we're done but the next thing you're going to see is when this actually starts fermentation and we will be showing you that video momentarily so it's been like an hour maybe a little bit more than an hour an hour 10 minutes or so and wait for it wait for it wait there it is see it's already going there's not a lot to see otherwise but let me let me just give you the uh the overview like we always do so yeah as you can see the airlock activity is there it's not super super active yet but it's getting there and as we go down inside you can see a lot of foam on the side but i don't see tiny bubbles coming up yet but i think it's only a matter of time give it maybe another hour or two and this is going to be very very active what you can see which i'm not sure if brian's filming was able to show is that we can see the little yeast particles in suspension and they're moving ever so slowly they're doing the overlapping that's generally what happens at the very beginning of fermentation and it's just coming alive that's a good sign yeah yeah um now that i'm looking i can see little tiny bits of bubbles coming up into the foam newer bubbles so yeah it's definitely started which is really cool but just something to know it can take up to three days to get to this point so don't freak out if after a day it's not working someone told me that they started up a brew and it wasn't doing this after one day so they dumped it then they asked me what to do before you dump it ask us trust me we'll get to you before it's anything serious that could be bad but never dump in one day it's possible your yeast was dead which means just more yeast and then it'll start up it's also possible they just hadn't woken up yet maybe your temperatures weren't exactly the same as ours maybe you used a different yeast maybe you used a different honey there's all kinds of reasons never dump it unless there's a reason to dump it and not starting yet isn't a reason at all but anyway what are we gonna do with this now we're gonna let it sit yeah this one's 1.104 yeah it might go for a few weeks so probably like two three weeks before we start seeing a little bit less activity in that airlock and then we'll take a reading on that but uh we'll show you that in the next video if you like this video though look up there's another video up there you might like that one too

Channel: City Steading Brews

Views: 43,221

Keywords: cyser, cyser mead, cyser 2021, how to make cyser, cyser apple mead, apple mead, Super simple cyser

Id: wGXpICoXBOg

Length: 16min 13sec (973 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 22 2021