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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • Last weekend I brewed some NEIPAish beer (pretty rare for me to make anything resembling an IPA but my sister and family are coming for a visit and they’re hop heads) using azacca and strata hops, ten gallons of that so I’ll put it in two kegs and dry hop them each differently, I haven’t decided on what so any suggestions are welcome. Fermented with Ebbegarden kveik.

    I also brewed a hoppy grape ale, loads of Hallertauer Blanc at the end of boil and then fermented with Lallemand/Escarpment Pomona yeast and added moscato wine pomace to the primary ferment. I pressed the beer off the pomace a couple days ago as it seemed like fermentation was slowing down. I like to press these beers off the pomace while there is still yeast activity so that the yeast will take up any oxygen introduced by pressing.




  • I have fermenting a split batch of wild “tripel” both with the same wild yeast culture that is very belgiany, instead of candi sugar, one batch has a kilo of honey from my bee hive and the other has a kilo of palm sugar I got at the asian grocery store. Additionally I also have (from the same mash as the tripel) a split batch of saison to test out two new wild yeast cultures, one harvested from my bee hive (comb, honey and worker bees in the starter), and the other from Juniper berries my wife collected on Granddad’s Bluff near LaCrosse, WI when she was there visiting relatives earlier this year. They’re all fermenting away together at 75F/24C, initially it was quite sulfury smelling but that has tapered off in the last day or so. Hopefully they turn out well.






  • Birch sap does contain sugar but not a lot. You have to boil 100L of sap down to get 1L of birch syrup (while for maple syrup you only need to boil 60L down to get 1L).

    Fermenting the sap directly you’re not going to get much of anything, probably less than 0.5% abv if you don’t add any other sugars. I know you said you are going to add sugar, but I do wonder if you’ll be tasting much flavor from the sap at all if you don’t concentrate the sap.


  • For super cheap pseudo temp control, you could build a swamp cooler, basically put your carboy into a tub of water with a t-shirt or some cloth around it to soak water up around the entire thing and then blow a fan on it to create evaporative cooling.

    Another option would be to use kveik yeast and then you don’t really need to worry about ferment temp (other than maybe being too cold).