Näf-Woods Homebrew Lab Opens Up

I am proud to announce the opening of the Näf-Woods Homebrew Lab. The Lab will focus on developing new recipes, techniques and a variety of other tasks.

First Experiment
The first project sent to our lab comes from my girlfriend Kati. She asked that the lab develop a hard cider recipe. As you may recall by reading this post, in January this brewery produced a cider. The cider turned out ok, but it definitely needed more apple flavor. I determined that three 1-gallon growlers would allow me to use 1/2 gallon recipes. This worked perfect as most ciders and juices come in 64 oz. containers. As was the case last time, there was no boil, I put juice in the fermenter and added yeast. This time I added some corn sugar to up the alcohol content. There were three different batches, one had apple cider, the second had pure apple juice and the last one was pure apple juice with thawed red rasberries. I used a champagne yeast found at the wine store. I created a yeast started with apple juice and the hydrated yeast. The batches have been transferred to the secondary fermenter. In the secondary I added some apple enhancer flavoring and some isinglass for clarification. The secondary will take two weeks. Check back later in June after the bottle conditioning for more updates.

If you have an experiment for the Näf-Woods Homebrew Lab please send it via email.