Wednesday, November 30, 2011

It was bound to happen

Ugh, what a awful week already.  So my truck wouldn't start on Tuesday so yeah for not work, boo for repair shop bills.  That is pretty sucky, but in more serious and sad news, I have finally actually failed in my attempt to produce booze.  This isn't just I missed the style or some such, I messed up so much that the cider is so acidic no yeast can survive the environment.  I was trying to make a more interesteing flavor in my hard cider and mixed in about 3/4lb of Acid blend.  I've since learned that it should have been about 3 tablespoons for the size of batch that I am working on.  So I over did it by about 50-90 time too much acid.  This stuff is tart, like rot your teeth sour patch tart.  I started with a 3 gallon batch and then upped it to 5 with more cider, then took it to over 8 with brown sugar and water.  The water is so base it doesn't register on my ph strips and the cider is so acid it just reads the lowest reading after diluting it as much as I have.  I think 1/2 a gallon of what I have in 5 gallons might still be too acidic.

It's a sad day for me but, the every dollar at this point is good money after bad.  For grins I might have gone to buy another huge thing of brown sugar and make a sugar wash to add 1/2 a gallon of this stuff to just to see if I can get any mileage out of it, but with a car in the shop I think my hobbies are on hiatus for some time.

7 comments:

  1. Anonymous5:34 AM

    Interesting news!

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  2. @naturalone, My test strips only go down to 2.8, after adding all the stuff I added it was still reading 2.8, so as far as I can tell I'm on the bottom end of the scale. I'm going to try some calcium Carbonate to see if I can get it into the 3 range. It's not supposed to mess with flavor and will drop acid levels.

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  3. Ugh that sucks. I hate it when experimenting with things don't work out. :(

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  4. Anonymous12:25 PM

    That really sucks. :/ Facebook Twitter

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  5. Dang sorry to hear hope you have a better day tomorrow!

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  6. Anonymous2:43 PM

    :'(

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