Moniack Mead... a mini review........ part 2

Right ho, thinks me. It's time for the pH meter. Now I don't have much acid testing kit, because meads are fuckers too test. You can get a pH figure, but titration tests etc are usually out the window as they test for tartaric acid etc, in wines. Plus when making meads, any reader who makes their own, knows that we have to keep the pH in the middle sort of area of the 3.X pH range. Because if it drops below 3.0 pH the yeast can throw their toys out their pram and say bollocks, causing a stuck ferment - this seems especially important with traditional meads, because basically there's bog all to buffer the pH and it can swing quite wildly. Melomels, fruit meads in general, this seems to be less of an issue as the fruit can buffer the pH some and you're less likely  to have to reach for the potassium carbonate.

Ok, check the pH meter, fuck....... run out of calibration solution. Ok thinks me, last time I checked the tap water, it was 7.01 pH and while this pH meter is cheaper than the old one (old one measured in hundredths, this one only measures in tenths), I can use tap water, calibrate to neutral (7.0 pH) and it should be close enough.

So, calibrated with water, then into the mead, fuck! that can't be right. Ok so down the shed for some new batteries. Installed, fine. Rinsed test meter again, 7.0 pH for tap water - should only be a hundredth out, fine, that's close enough. Into the mead and.........

2 point fucking 6 ? No wonder it didn't taste cloyingly sweet. I can't say for certain, but one of the known ways for masking excess sweetness is acid, or sometimes tannin addition.

Not surprising it's not as sweet as the other commercial meads I'd previously tasted. I can't say which acid might have been used, but I have to presume that's how it's been done. Could be wrong, but I add acid all the time to reduce sweetness in my own meads.

Personally, I like to use the mix suggested in Ashton & Duncans book "Making Mead" when I do this. It's 2 parts malic acid to 1 part tartaric acid, but I try to add it incrementally so as not to over do it.

2.6 pH ? Amazing.

So what was my over all view ?

Well, I like the colour, there's nothing to suggest whether they just happened to use a dark coloured honey, whether it might have been wild flower, or varietal like heather which can be dark but not always, or even sourced some dark buckwheat to do that. Don't know, just that it's a nice colour.

The aroma wasn't what I'd call very strong. I've mentioned a possible reason for that above, yet it's common for home mead makers not to boil or heat honey very much at all currently, as it preserves more of the aromatics of the honey, whereas boiled honey/must, apparently gives a nicer, less rough, more rounded sort of taste.

The taste was good IMO, didn't seem too sweet, a smooth after taste if the mead is held in the mouth for a couple of moments. Nice "body", good legs in the glass (even though I had to put it into the bottom of a pint glass, as all the other wine glasses are packed away while the bloody builders are shitting up the house......)

I'd give it a "very good" grade, peeking over the edge of excellent. Maybe that'd be a "high" 4 out of 5, almost 4.5 out of 5.

Compared to what I'd paid for half bottles previously, the advertised £8.40 a bottle (on the website, without shipping) didn't seem too bad at all.

My only real critcism is the "corporate generic" appearance of the label and the wording. That gets a "could do better", but WTF, it doesn't affect the taste.......

Moniack Mead...a mini review........ part 1

So, one of the members over at Gotmead, being a Brit, who now lives in the US, wanted to know a bit about one of his favourite mead tipples.

It's called Moniack Mead.

Now this isn't one that I'd come across before, certainly not when I was trying a few commercially made meads about 4 or 5 years ago.

So the only guide I had to go on, was my own mini reviews. Before today, of the 4 commercial meads I'd tried, I found that they all tasted fine. Sweet, yes but cloyingly so (if you want to read what I said, which is only personal opinion, but I stand by it. They might have improved/changed, I can't say. They were pretty expensive at the time, but I felt I should taste some of the offerings available locally).

Now, after a few exchanged messages with Tony, he explained that as far as he was aware, it was made from Heather honey - which from my own experience, tends to be quite expensive. He ordered a bottle and arranged for it to be delivered to me (didn't matter whether it was a load of shit or not, I thought it was a nice gesture as I certainly wouldn't say no to a free bottle of mead, or any booze for that matter).

Once opened, I was surprised to find that the bottle was different to how I'd expected it to be. I suspect Tony hadn't had any for a few years and the bottle is nicely done, if a bit "generic corporate", in label design. There was no mention of heather honey, but some of the wording made me thing that it had been made elsewhere as it was "specially selected". A term you see when supermarkets buy in something made somewhere else, but sold under their label/branding. I have no way of knowing if that might be the case.

Anyway, here's what it looked like in the bottle.......

So not the best of photo's but enough that you can see it's a nice colour, a reddish amber of medium sort of darkness (actually looks better in daylight, but I had to put a piece of white paper behind it so the colour of the liquid wasn't blanked out completely by the flash).

Ok, so looks fine. Like the greedy git I am, pop the cap and take a sniff.

Nothing remarkable there. Like a traditional mead sort of smell, not in your face aromatics, but given some of the stuff I've read recently and what I'll say further in, I'm wondering if they boil or at least heat the must during the early stages of making......

Next, the taste....

A decent flavour, not, seemingly, as mega sweet and cloying as the other commercial meads I'd tasted (and I guessed wrongly, more later). Nice, enjoyable. I decided it would likely fall in the the "dessert" mead a.k.a. after dinner, category.

Ok thought me, time to get the hydrometer out. So with a test quantity (eventually I did drink it - well you would, wouldn't you, free mead and all that). The test picture looked like this......

Now, again, not the best photograph. I had to lean the hydrometer slightly, but hopefully it's clear enough so that you can see it was measuring 1.036......

Which is higher than I thought it would be, given that it was sweet but not cloyingly so like my previous tastes of commercial mead were. I thought it might tip the scale in the mid .020's or so.

Yet it tasted good, sweet but not........ etc etc.

Before I forget (nutrients etc, for meads)........

 One of the members over at Homebrewtalk, by the name of Jeffjm (full credit there sir, a bloody good article), posted this link on a thread where another member had asked about "Mead Books" worthy of reading........

https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/attachments/0000/1256/NDzym05_MasterMead.pdf

I've downloaded a copy to read and even though I've only read the first page and a half, it makes for excellent reading.

I do hope it will continue to be available to others.

I think (not checked) it's from Zymrugy mag........

Nightmare on the mead making front.....

Had a few minor victories recently. One of the members over at Gotmead kindly sent me a small strip of Fleischmanns bread yeast, so that I can have a got at a benchmark batch of Joe's Ancient Orange (it's not a UK brand so is unavailable here).

But the nightmare is, that about 6 to 9 months ago, my partner Clare, decided that she wanted the kitchen changed. Ok thinks me, shouldn't be a problem. She gets the ball rolling and gets plans, permissions, etc sorted and arranges the money to pay for it, etc etc. Again, fine.

She starts moving stuff around (she's a serial organiser/planner) in good time, etc etc.

As the start date for the work approaches, I start to worry. Moving 3 rooms worth of crap into the rest of the house and the shed, is starting to make things a bit cramped.

We get a bit closer to the start of the work and it's starting to dawn on me that I'm pretty much gonna be screwed for the 3 months or so of the works.

At the time of writing this, the old rear house extension bit has been demolished, the footings have been dug, re-inforced and the concrete has been poured. The brick layer is due in on monday morning.

The hassle really dawned this past week. The footings were due to be poured on the wednesday, but the concrete pump arrived and then promptly broke down, so the concrete had to be sent away  and the pump went back to the depot etc. So as the builders had nothing to do, they literally sawed the back third off the kitchen and boarded it up, along with the back 1/3rd of the dining room (both these rooms are being knocked into one anyway). This is all so that they can put the steels in for the roof supports of the new, bigger extension bit.

I suspect you get the picture. If I can actually do anything during the building time, I'll be very lucky. I've got to try and find room to do a bit of racking etc, as some of the batches I've got settling, ageing, steeping etc, need to be racked to reduce down the amount of space they take up.

God forbid, I'm even likely gonna have to put anything that isn't turning out Ok down the bloody drain - which I don't want to do as I'm a great believer that you can normally salvage any batches that come out rubbish, even if it's only to recover the alcohol to be able to use it for something else.......

I'll post again once I know how things are progressing etc.

For the time being, my home brew is "aaarrrrggggghhhhhh".......

Meads and meanings.........

Recently been trying to answer a few Q's over at Gotmead, Homebrewtalk, Winemakingtalk and even Jimsbeerkit - well the mead questions anyway.....

I've come to realise that there's a few problems, what with having no real standards, and even the language can be an issue.

I mean, what are the actual reasons that you make meads ? what're your motivations ?

Is it what I call the "airy fairy" shit ? That you like dressing up like some idiot extra from a historical drama ? Is it that there are not standards so you are pretty free to make what you want and how you want ? Is it the "sciencey" stuff and the route to making the "perfect" mead ? Or something else.

For example, mead makers from the US are far more likely to want to try making something with some relatively strange, almost "outlandish" ingredients. Well that's fine, it's their brews so obviously, their choice. Likewise, there also seems a greater number of the US based makers who want to use some sort of weird nomenclature for giving their brew a strange name (Thors bloody cauldron dregs ? or other foolish naming). Again, their brew etc etc......

Personally, I find it hard to understand my own motivations. While I understand that there shouldn't really be any set standards per se, maybe we should, as a mead making community, work out a "best practice" ?

After all, it's open to debate whether it was wines, beers, ciders or meads that were the first alcoholic drinks, but I do suspect it was more likely to be something that would ferment reasonably readily. Which would suggest wines and ciders, purely because honey doesn't ferment so readily as the juice of grape or apple does it. We have to water it down so that it has a sugars concentration that resembles fruit juice.......

I doubt it would be beers, because the process of making even the most basic of beer recipes is quite convoluted.......

Now equally, I don't "run" with the idea of giving too much credence to the mythical nonsense that some like to accredit to meads. I prefer to take the rather "bald" methods, techniques and ingredients, as it's easier to follow and get your head round what a certain ingredient might do.

For instance, the honey itself. The penchant for varietals that seems to emanate from the US, seems to have come from the reasonably modern "factory farming" methods preferred there, along with the more modern techniques used in apiary management and the very usage of the bees natural desire to collect the nectar for their hive while carrying out the incidental pollination of crops - especially crops that are grown in areas of relative mono-culture, which according to the quality of the land, local climate and crop type that best suits the first two requirements, a good example being Florida and oranges/orange blossom or a couple of different ones in California etc etc.

No one really knows how meads were originally made, the peoples famed for drinking meads didn't really record that in a way that we can follow. Sure there are some archaic documents that give us some idea, but a lot of those contain methods/technique that has been discredited as not being necessary.

Equally, modern business practices, mean that there has been a lot of blending of honey harvested from many locations, with a view to making it "consistent", so that it has the longest possible shelf life and stays in the form it's been processed into, to maximise the profit margins of the "producers" or sellers. With us ending up with a bland, characterless honey.

There seems to be little argument, that the "best quality" for a honey that is going to be fermented, is that it's raw and unprocessed, because that type will retain the greatest amount of "character", whether that be a certain flavour, colour or aroma. It doesn't even have to have been filtered to remove any hive or apiary debris, as that comes out during the making of the mead.

Then there's the yeast we use. Commonly, the yeast comes from the wine making world, though there's those who like to use a beer yeast for different reasons/justification. Fine, if it works then go with it. Hell, there's even the fabled JAO recipe, that uses bread yeast, which also works. The only yeast type I take issue with are so called "mead yeasts". Not because they don't work, generally they do, but because there is no way in hell that the companies that supply yeasts called that, can know exactly what kind of yeast were originally used to make mead. In fact, it's unlikely that there would have been a specific type, because the peoples weren't advanced enough to understand yeasts and yeast strains/isolations like we do now (and yes, that can also change i.e. we learn even more about yeasts......)

So I suggest that to label a couple of strains in such a way, is little more than marketing and the desire to sell more yeast.

Even if we only took the range of wine yeasts sold and focused solely on those, there's the difference of opinion as to what is best. An example of that, is that new mead makers often ask at a Home Brew Supplier, who in turn, don't really know much about mead making, but make many generalisations about mead and the making, and then just suggest a reasonably capable champagne type isolate.

The issue that I have with champagne yeasts, isn't that they're bad, they're not, but they do seem to have a habit of blowing a lot of the aromatics straight out of the airlock, along with some of the more volatile flavouring compounds. Champagne yeasts do, quite successfully, what they have been found capable of i.e. fermenting a reasonably bland white wine, dry. Then because they have the ability to ferment to a higher level of alcohol, than the grapes would be capable of producing, that they can then be used further, to make that wine into a sparkling wine. Hell it wasn't even the French who first discovered this ability, it was found here, but it was the legendary "Dom Perignon" who seems to have refined the process (or was it, as has often been found, that while the "West" claims to have invented something, only for it later to be found/proved, that it was first developed by the Chinese ?).

Either way, it does seem that the only reason for the high price of champagne, being market manipulation (certainly not any wonderful taste experience).

Personally, I prefer the yeasts that have been found to make good brews, by other mead makers. Like the late Brother Adam, of Buckfast Abbey and bee breeding (and mead making) fame.

Bro Adams writings on mead making are limited, when compared to his bee breeding works, yet there is enough information for us to benefit from his knowledge and experience.

Example ? Well, if you read some of the stuff available, he mentions using comb and capping "washings" to make his meads, likewise, he said about using "Maury" yeast to make his meads. He doesn't seem to have published much on his specific techniques other than that it was the washings and yeast, which were kept in barrels to ferment and age for something like 7 years or so. Whether that's entirely correct, I don't know. Were his meads just "show meads" ? or were other ingredients used ? The fabled "Maury" yeast ? Where did it really come from ?

As far as I can find out, the currently available "Maury" yeast is lalvins D21, but as that was isolated after Brother Adams death, there's no real way of knowing. When the Abbey replied to my query, they were very kind in pointing out that when Bro Adam could no longer obtain the Maury yeast he mentioned in his writings, he changed to using "Montpellier" strain yeast. So given that Buckfast is here in the UK, he most likely used the locally (UK) packaged version of the Montpellier strain, which would have been Gervins Varietal "E", which isn't now available from Gervin (part of the Muntons group now). Yet it is still available and it's available in home brew sized packs too.... it's the excellent Lalvin K1-V1116. Which IMO, is a far better yeast to recommend to the new mead maker than the champagne EC-1118 yeast.

I certainly find it makes a far better mead.......


TBC.........

Stupid naming conventions/nomenclature !

When I'm looking through the various forums, trying to see if anyone has posted a thread that explains a problem they're having or just a question they're looking to find an answer for? Call me old fashioned (hell even that phrase sounds dated), but if you posted a question of "Why is X happening" ? Or "Made a whatever batch, but it's doing Y" ? Then I'm likely to answer it if I can offer something to point you in the right direction or maybe suggest how to work out what might be going on.

If you post "Stonehenge, the Mystery Brew", I'm not even gonna read your post. I don't want to read about new age weirdness. I want to try and be of help if I can, I like to try and be helpful. There's too much shit around where people or organisations want to charge for or sell knowledge. I'm very "open source" with my attitude toward knowledge. But if you start with naming your brews, with idiotic names, then fuck it, I can't be bothered to read through a load of "fairy story mumbo jumbo" to try and understand what the problem might be.

There's a few people over at Gotmead, that like to do that, presumably because they like to demonstrate their "right on", hippy credentials. Sorry, I just find that all too damn pretentious. Just tell me the type of brew you're trying to make and if I have something to add, I'll happily do so.

Call it something fucking stupid and bollocks, I won't even bother to read the post. I don't believe in all the so called mystical crap. There's no such thing as a fucking Druid, there might have been but they were likely just religious shamen types and the Romans wasted them all 2 millenia ago, with just historical and cultural references to them. There is no "magic". All the stuff that those wankers come up with at Stonehenge at the summer and winter solstices is just a lot of shit. All thought up by the pretentious pricks who take part in such nonsense.

So just ask me about meads but use sensible, practical descriptions of what you are doing/making and what you want to know, then no snags, if I can help, I will. Ask me about the other kind of shit and I'll likely just walk........

Hydrometer queries etc.........

This post is just a reminder thing for any other, probably new mead maker who may come across my ramblings.

It's prompted by a few recent posts over at Gotmead. A newer mead maker was asking about final gravities and the possibilities of sweetening a brew, yet the persons post was a little confusing with the numbers that were quoted.

A brewing hydrometer measures original gravity for solutions that contain sugars, in the range commonly found in the making of alcoholic beverages.

There's a number of different scales that they can be calibrated too, though it seems generally the best/easiest one to use, is that of original gravity. They sometimes have a %ABV scale and colour bands with numbers and other bits like "bottle at this point" etc.

IMO, there's only one necessary scale that you need to think about using. Yes, I've mentioned it already, the original gravity scale.

Here is a picture that shows a hydrometer being used. I found it at "Grapestompers". It shows a hydrometer in liquid, but more importantly, it shows the original gravity scale.

You can see that the top, is numbered 0.990, with the numbers increasing as the scale goes down the shaft of the hydrometer. That is because the higher the sugar level present in the liquid, the higher the hydrometer floats in the liquid.

So a new ferment, or ideally, a must mixed for fermentation, irrespective of whether it's grape juice or honey/water, will make the hydrometer act in the same way. The lower the device floats, the lower the amount of fermentable sugars present.

Which is what makes it suitable to be able to measure the levels of fermentable sugars and once the yeast is in the brew, where it's got to on the fermentation i.e. as the alcohol is produced by the yeast munching the sugars, the device sinks further into the sample, giving a different reading.

Water on its own would normally measure 1.000 - and there will usually be an indicator of temperature, whether it's shown in Celsius or Fahrenheit, just depends on where it was made to be marketed or even the age of the device (ones for the UK market are now calibrated in Celsius, but older ones may show Fahrenheit, as would (most likely) one made for the US market). The temperature is shown for accurate readings i.e. if it says 20C, then measuring water to get an accurate reading of 1.000, the sample water should be at 20C etc.

Before I forget, I'm gonna link the Grapestompers guide to using a hydrometer. I haven't read it all, I just found it when I was looking for images to illustrate this point.

Now one thing that I've noticed, is that some new mead (and wine) makers get a hydrometer that's been calibrated and then has 3 different scales printed on (well "in" really) it. Here's a link to a very good set of pictures of one of those, the third picture at the bottom can be enlarged to show the printed scale laid out flat.

These are fine, but they can cause confusion, and while the image shows one that has gravity, percentage alcohol and brix scales, the only scale necessary is the gravity one. There are uses for the %ABV scale and brix, but I've found the gravity scale the most useful because you can see the numbers and those numbers or at least the amount that they drop during a ferment, correspond directly to the % alcohol, even if you "step feed" a ferment, where you start it at one point e.g. 1.100, then you let it ferment to say 1.020, then you add more fermentable sugars (honey generally with meads) and the reading goes back up to 1.040, then you repeat that process, say 2 times before you just let the ferment finish, that is a drop of 80 points, but with 2 step feeds that allowed for an increase of 20 points each time, so that would give a total drop of 120 points, then the third step feed back to 1.040 and then allowing it to finish, lets use 1.000 as the final gravity, that adds a further 40 points to the total drop, so a total of 160 points (which is rather unlikely given the ability of wine yeasts - but this is just a hypothetical example anyway), by using the Alcohol Calculation Chart posted by Lockwood over at wines at home (link to a number of charts he's posted, but the one we're interested in is the alcohol calculation one - and you'll need something that can display a .xls file to view it), we can work out that after the initial 80 point drop, the batch has a %ABV of about 10.8%, then after the first step feed to 1.040 that drops back down to 1.020, it would have a strength of 13.5% ABV a total drop of 100 points, this being repeated increases the total drop to 120 points or 16.3% ABV and after the final feed back up to 1.040 which is then allowed to drop to the final gravity of 1.000, that makes the total drop 160 points or 21.7% ABV.

As far as I can work out, those figures are pretty accurate as to how the drop in gravity points equates to %ABV. Plus it's worth pointing out, that modern wine yeasts generally can be obtained that will ferment or "tolerate" 18% ABV, there are a few yeasts on the market that are advertised as being capable or tolerant to 21 or even 23% ABV. I can't vouch for those, I haven't used them, but I frequently use yeasts that will ferment to 18%.

I'm hoping that that explains why I prefer the single, gravity scale, hydrometers are the easiest to follow.

Of course, it's never all "going to be plain sailing". If you've used something in the batch that has fermentable sugars in it, that can't be easily measured, like fruit for example, then there's always likely to be some discrepancy to the numbers. It can only be a reasonably accurate measurement when all the fermentable sugars can be dissolved in solution, and that solution measured. There are various charts around the net that list the approximate gravity of juices or fruit, I can't say how reliable these are or might be - a few juices can be tested, like apple juice, orange juice and grape juice, as long as you remember that any pulp or other solid matter in the juice can skew the reading one way or another. A bit like dropping a hydrometer into your sample and finding that bubbles attach themselves to the side of the glass. You can usually just spin the glass shaft with your fingers and that removes the bubbles or if there is a lot of effervescence in the test sample, then you need to let it stand for a while for the bubbles to rise/escape.

Damn I hope this makes as much sense to any reader, as it does to me.......

Quick mead ?

When you read posts from new mead makers around the forums, the question that often comes up, is which is the quickest mead to make ?

Given that young meads can often taste like piss, that's not the easiest question to answer, because while a young mead can indeed taste hideous, the transformations that are wrought by ageing are amazing.

Taste a young brew, finished fermenting, cleared and then racked to bulk age and you can get just "alcohol hot" with some vague indescribable "what's left after the sugars have gone" sort of thing. Yet bulk age for 6 months or more and if you're really lucky, it might come good that quickly, it may need longer to become good, but the 6 months will demonstrate the changes that are happening in the bulk ageing stage.

Bulk ageing is actually a home brewers compromise. It allows us to produce a batch where all of the bottles produced from that batch will taste the same i.e. consistent. It prevents different characteristics developing from differences in heat, humidity, etc, which might occur if the batch was bottled prior to ageing. Of course, it would seem that commercial wine producers can indeed, "bottle age" their wines, but equally that is because they have access to temperature and humidity controlled storage for consistency, which we home brewers don't have or can't afford, generally speaking.

So here's a link to Gotmead main sites list of (apparently) "quick" meads.

Now I can't really recommend them particularly as "quick" meads, because apart from the Joes Ancient Orange recipe, I haven't tried making any of them.

The "JAO" recipe is pretty quick for a mead, it takes IRO 3 months. Joe himself, states that it's drinkable once it's clear. Indeed it is, but if you age it for 3 to 6 months as well, IMO, it improves immeasurably.....

Oh, and JAO is best made as close to the original recipe as possible. Of course, there are some issues that crop up over and over again. Like the yeast. He suggests using the Fleischmanns bread yeast, which is fine, but not a bit of good to me as Fleischmanns is a US brand. But having tried the recipe with local equivalents like Allinsons, Hovis, and even both Tesco and Co-op own brand, they all work fine. So I'm thinking that as long as you keep your batch basically the same i.e. the honey to water ratio, "normal" bread yeast, the orange, raisins and spices, then you should get a decent brew that conforms to the criteria set down by Joe.

The rest of the recipes, you'll just have to try for yourself........

Bochet part 3......

Well, the bochet seems to have fermented ok. I was very lapse with it.The master plan was to use the stirrer and make it my first stir plate attempt, but for reasons I don't yet understand,  the fucking stirrer kept throwing the stir bar off the magnetic field. I even sent off for a longer bar to see if that would work but it didn't.  So I lost interest in it a bit and forgot to add nutrient and stuff like that.

Anyway,  it seems to have fermented ok and it's even cleared pretty much. I haven't tested it recently but when I did the other week it was at about 1.004 and now its racked out of the 5 litre erhlenmeyer flask into a DJ it still tasted a bit weird. Plus there was about a half litre of air space so I just topped it up with a sour mash whisky as it was to hand.

I'm not fussed how it's come out as I'm more interested in getting a working stir plate for some other traditional batches. I can focus on sorting out yeasts etc for now, as the D21 I did have had given up the ghost and wasnt starting at all.

A quick rant !

I like to try and be helpful around the mead making forums. Often in respect of stuff that newer mead makers ask, and especially when it comes to getting ingredients that might have local equivalents.

Equally, we (as in us lot this side of the pond) have to often "make do" as the stuff you see mentioned on the mead forums where there's a high proportion of American mead makers, just isn't easily available.

There's a lot of info out there. It may be that it's been posted by one of us UK based mead makers, so it's easier to ask the "why's and wherefore's". Even if it's been posted by one of the US based mead makers, it might just need a bit of a pointer to set someone in the right direction.

They just need to have a bit of a search, and read the fucking guidance. Hell ask a few questions, there's plenty of people who will explain why if they do X, they won't get Y, they'll go straight past Z and end up back at D.

High gravity/strength is fine, just don't put all the fucking honey in a batch at once. It will cause problems stressing the yeast and possibly resulting in off flavours that may either take years to mellow, or even not at all. It's easy to make a batch that needs to meet certain criteria, but it's likely that if it's suggested that it's made in a certain way, then there's a fucking reason for it.

Don't try and re-invent the wheel, you'll just end up looking like a cunt who can't even make basic recipes. Plus you'll stress yourself out trying to work out "what went wrong"......

Ok, I'll get off my soap box.........