Hard Strawberry Breeze in the bottle.

I've gotten around to bottling the Hard Strawberry Breeze.  Does this drink have a celebrity name yet? If not, we should name the chilled version a "Lucille Ball".  It's a little bit red, can smack you around, and convinces you to do silly things.  Sound right?  "I think I'll have a Hard Lucille Ball with my key-lime pie please."  Way better than drinking a Hard Arnold Palmer.

I wasn't sure how much priming sugar to add, and I don't exactly have a scale to measure the priming sugar by weight.  However, most recipes I read recommend 3/4 cup of priming sugar for 5 gallons.  I'm using a 1 gallon batch, so I ended up boiling 1/5 of 3/4 of a cup (3/20 of a cup) of priming sugar.  Which turns out to be almost 2.5 Tablespoons.  Does that sound right?  The carbonation calculators I tried all measured in weight.  (sad, sad, face)

I guess I'll know in a couple of weeks whether 2.5 Tablespoons is enough to carbonate these Lucies.

By the way, you might be interested in knowing how I back sweetened, since the fermented mixture is terrible.  I actually boiled and added 3 cups of granulated baking Splenda.  The big fluffy kind that resembles snow flakes.  At one cup it definitely wasn't sweet enough, and at 3 cups, the girlfriend finally gave me the nod of approval.  Due to all the excess mass from the extra sugar and water, I almost ended up with a full 12 pack (one bottle short).  As another side note about the back sweetening, Splenda definitely has a lower gravity than sugar.  The recipe fermented down to almost 1.000 even.  3 cups of splenda only added 0.010 to the scale.  Granted, I added about a cup of water to each cup of sugar for boiling, so maybe that helped the gravity even out too.

I'll let you know how this tasty stuff turns out in a week or two.

American Wheat, and the coming Strawberry Breeze experiment

The current brew

So I've cooked up the American Wheat kit and thrown it in a primary fermenter.  I've moved away from using a plastic bucket as my primary fermenter, to a 6.5gal carboy for three good reasons:

1. I can watch the fermentation process to see how it's progressing.
2. When racking to secondary I can more easily see when the yeast cake has settled, and it's easier to avoid racking it.
3. The plastic buckets absorb some of the odor from previous brews.  Good for wines and 'alcopops', bad for beers.

Admittedly, I doubt #3 actually has an impact on the beer, but I'd rather my equipment smelled fruity than malty.



And on the subject of fruity...

Strawberry Breeze concentrate

I'm going to attempt to brew Welch's Strawberry Breeze into a drinkable chick beer for the girlfriend.  Looking at the ingredients, there's apparently a whole lot more "breeze" (and corn syrup) than "strawberry" in this thing.  Strawberry is what she wants though, and this is the only frozen concentrate with strawberry that Walmart had to offer.

Previous experiments with mango and pineapple have given me a good idea how to proceed.  However, I'm still looking to tweak the process/recipe.  Pineapple Experiment #2 had a strange off flavor that I've narrowed down to either the yeast (brown ale yeast), or the cooking/sterilizing process.  Probably a side effect from being caramelized during cooking, but now I'm curious... can you get DMS from cooking fruit juice?  Maybe I should avoid the cooking process this time and hope for the best?

Another small problem that turned up with Pineapple Experiment #2 was some unwanted post-fermentation.  I used potassium sorbate at the end of the process, but there must have been some yeast still active, because the brew was quite pressurized and dry after a couple of weeks in storage.  So as a foot note, make absolutely sure your yeast is dormant before back-sweetening your chick beer!