Irish Red Ale: A Change of Pace for the Winemaker

I love wine, that surely goes without saying, but I also enjoy a good beer. My girlfriend's father has been brewing beer for a little over a year now, and he's met with great success. His ales and stouts and cervezas have been wonderful, and he now almost exclusively provides beer for family gatherings and as a parting gift each time we visit. It's enough to tempt the winemaker to try his hand at beer.

And that's exactly what happened. I had been tossing the idea around for some time when groupon in our area was an all-you-need beer kit (that's a daily deal website with deep discounts on--usually--local goods). I selected the Irish red ale as my beer to brew, and soon I was on my way! You can see the finished product here; it was so unfortunate, in order to take the picture I had to pour this glass and sip it while writing this post!

The kit contained yeast, priming sugar, liquid malt extract, a pound of grains, aroma hops, and bittering hops. All in all I spent a good amount of time sanitizing, and then about three hours brewing. I let the beer sit for a while after fermenting to clear, then racked it, added the priming sugar, and bottled it. Altogether a very simple experience, and very rewarding. The older the beer gets, the better it tastes, but to someone who is used to waiting months before tasting wine, beer is a nearly instantaneous reward!

I'm on my second batch of beer right now, but that's not all I've been up to!

Meddyglyn

Meddyglyn or metheglin is a type of mead of Welsh origin. It takes your basic mead and adds any number of various herbs and spices to produce a cheery drink that goes down smooth. It can definitely be enjoyed any time of the year, but makes an especially nice holiday drink. The amount of honey in the recipe can be 2.2 lbs per gallon; 3 lbs per gallon, or 5 lbs per gallon for a sweeter meddyglyn. This corresponds to the "light mead" and "medium mead" recipes on the site already, and the 5 lb corresponds to a strong, sweet mead.





Honey
Water to one gallon
1 tsp. yeast nutrient
1/4 Tsp. tannins
orange peel
1 cinnamon stick
1/4 tsp. whole or course ground nutmeg
2 cloves
1/4 vanilla bean





Add honey and water to a pot. Heat over low heat until the honey is dissolved. Then bring to a swift boil. Foam will come to the top. Scoop off as much of the foam as possible (this keeps sediment out of the bottles later on). Cool the mixture to about 70 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Add in nutrient and tannins. Place the mixture into the primary fermenter, add the yeast.

After about two weeks or when the fermentation seems to stop, rack to secondary fermenter if you're using one, if not go the the next step.

Boil a small saucepan of water. Cut the orange peel up into slices, and boil for five minutes. This gets rid of bitterness. If you have any concerns about bacteria on the vanilla bean or cinnamon stick, you can also boil these for a few minutes with the orange peel. Remove from water with tongs, and add directly to the fermenter. Also add in the other spices. Allow to steep in the mead, which is now becoming meddyglyn. I let mine sit for ten days to two weeks before removing the cinnamon and orange peel, but you can play with this. The longer it sits, the more pronounced the flavor of the spices.

Bottle and enjoy!

Note: Any of the spices can be optional, but I would NOT skip the orange peel, the cinnamon stick, or the nutmeg, but that's my personal taste. This is an awesome recipe to play around with.

Related Recipes: light mead, medium mead, sweet mead, apple cider, pear cider

Light Mead

Ramble: This incredibly simple recipe is for a very nice, light, dry mead. I've recently made a batch, and it came out wonderfully! It is truly spectacular, I like it much better than the medium mead, which I also like a lot! It has a very refreshing taste that would make it a perfect summer drink, and the one that i made has a nutty finish and a bit of warming quality that simultaneously make it an ideal fall or winter drink, a quality I often find that adding the tannins brings out. Here goes:



Recipe:

about 2.2 lbs. wildflower honey
1/4 tsp. tannins
1 tsp. yeast nutrient
wine yeast (recommending red star pasteur champagne or lalvin K1-V1116, or red star côtes des blancs)



Add honey to a stockpot, bring to 1 gallon with water. Warm over low heat until all honey is dissolved. Bring to a swift boil. This will bring a foam to the top of the mixture, scoop off as much of this foam as possible. This step helps your mead to clear very nicely, but also to ensure that sediment doesn't form over time on the bottom of your bottled mead, as happens without this step. If you would rather skip the boiling step, that's an option, and no harm is done.

Allow the mixture to come down to 80 degrees Fahrenheit (about 26 degrees Celsius), but not below sixty degrees. Add in your yeast nutrient (I wouldn't recommend skipping this step if you can avoid it, because honey does not supply a lot of the nutrients that the yeast require, and as we all know, happy yeast make happy wine). Add in your tannins (for a nifty trick to get your tannins into the must better, check out the post "Tannin Tip"). Rack to primary fermenter, then add your yeast. Personally, i used pasteur champagne, which is not actually a champagne base yeast, and it was wonderful. Though it is not a champagne yeast, I like some carbonation in my mead, and this did the trick beautifully. Apply airlock and allow to ferment.

Tips:
Fermentation will likely last at least ten days, but give plenty of time, especially if fermenting below 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Bottle and cork for a flat mead!

For a sparkling mead (which I prefer), add about one and a half teaspoons of sugar to each 750mL bottle before filling, then fill and cork! I would store these in a bucket or bin with a lid on top until certain that all carbonation has ceased. Though I only ever had a problem once with corks popping (when i first started making wine and added way too much sugar to some apple cider), it is better to be safe than sorry and a bucket or bin makes for easy clean up! With this amount of sugar (1.5 tsp.) I have never had a problem! Enjoy!

Related Recipes: meddyglyn, medium mead, sweet mead, apple cider, pear cider

Tannin Tip

Having tannins on hand can be extremely beneficial. I avoided them when I first started making wine because I didn't like the idea of adding anything "unnatural" to my wine. Instead I tried using black tea and raisins in the must to get what seemed like "more natural" tannins. Then I tried using some tannin powder, and what a difference! I have been very happy with the results, so I would recommend that any winemaker give them a try.

One problem I noticed the first time I used the tannins is that they like to stick together. A week after I put them into a one gallon batch of wine that I had in a clear fermenter, I noticed they were all in a little glommed up bunch on the bottom! So here's my tip for adding tannins to your wine:

Measure out your tannins into a cup first, add a little bit of water to suspend them, and stir like crazy! You'll have to be very careful that they don't sneak onto the back of the spoon and stick there, they like to do that. They're sneaky.

Once you've got it all mixed up, then add it to your mead, cider, hillbilly wine, peach wine, pear wine, meddyglyn, or whatever else you fancy. It's an easy way to maximize the potential of the tannins.

Until next time...

The Winemaker

Summer Hiatus Is Over!

I have not been writing for a while, for quite a long while, and I feel an explanation is merited. A number of things have played a roll in my absence: primarily, it was summer. Summer is hot, and wine fermented at eighty-five degrees just isn't the same as those cool, rich fall brews. (Though believe me, I am back in full swing now!) So, I have not made much wine over the summer. Reason two: it was summer, and I didn't feel like writing. I know, it sounds like I was lazy, but no, really quite the opposite, I was too busy! Reason three: I went on vacation. Yes, just recently I returned from Costa Rica, where I tried Vino de Mora (a blackberry wine that is reminiscent of dimetapp), trekked through the jungle, swam in coral reefs... all that good stuff. But things are quickly getting back to the grind, and the wine has been flowing!

Here's a quick review of the summer's winemaking activities: In May I made two and a half more gallons of Peach wine, which last night was sampled to my delight. In June I played around a bit and picked up some Motts unfiltered all natural apple juice, just for fun. It seems like apple cider is difficult to mess up, because it turned out wonderfully. I used lavlin K1V 1116 to ferment it. What a pleasant surprise! It quickly disappeared. Then, to my shame, I was shopping at Wal Mart one evening. And I did something even more shameful than shopping at Wal Mart: I grabbed a few cans of their store-brand frozen, concentrated apple juice. Hold the stones, please! Then I fermented it, thinking that surely, apple cider can be messed up. Knowing full well that this was a set up for failure, I did throw in some yeast nutrient, some tannins, and a tiny bit of citric acid.

Two days ago I bottled my peach wine. I bottled two gallons of pumpkin wine. I bottled the shameful apple cider. And though it's only a few months old, I actually think it's enjoyable.

Don't be angry, I am atoning for this erratic summer behavior. I just began fermenting, today, a nice, local, New-York State wildflower-honey mead, light, should be dry, with an alcohol content of about 10%. See, I am back in the swing of things.

I'll post about this later, but you also ought to know that I'm branching out a bit: I've got five gallons of an Irish Red Ale brewing as I write! It smells wonderful, like bakeries! I'm very excited to be brewing some beer. I think that in November, or perhaps even October I'll do a wheat beer.

I'm also going to begin a batch of proper apple cider from proper fresh pressed apples in the next ten to twelve days.

Yes the winemaker is back, and he is writing in his notebook...