Bottling Different Experiments: Dunkelweizen, Cyser, and Texas Black Persimmon Mead

The sweet taste of success, the rewards of patience, and the... sweet... very sweet... oh, my, that's some sweet... WTF SWEET!?!?

Black Texas Persimmon Mead finished fermenting, and I racked it off into sanitized mason jars for country wine goodness. Goodness, though... This wine is so thick and sweet that it's got the consistency of grenadine, and the thick sweetness of a sweet grenadine. 

It is black as pitch, black as midnight, black as fuligin and deep space and lightless worlds. It is ridiculously black, beyond black.

I will experiment using it as grenadine, then. It tastes like it would make a lovely grenadine substitute with hints of persimmony goodness over the pomegranate. As a wine, it is unbalanced, and for my next batch, next year, I will try to reduce the sugar and add citric acid to try and balance all that sweet!

I also bottled the Chocolate Rain Dunkelweizen this week. This, below, is a picture of the dregs of the bottling bucket. It came out supremely delicious. I await with much glee the carbonation in the bottle that I may savor the complex spice aromas in the delicious, malty, roasty brew. This is now my dunkelweizen recipe from now on. It nails everything I love about dark wheat beers, and produced an amazingly drinkable result, that I suspect will not last long once my friends taste the first bottle.

And Cyser! I couldn't get the siphon that I had into the mouth of the gallon jug, so I ended up... Well, we have a lot of Mason Jars. We use them a lot. I carefully poured off into these four jars. As you can see, the first jar on the left was the clearest, and it got cloudier as I poured off, until the last jar was very cloudy. Despite good settling, and a very estery, British yeast-y, bread-y flavor, pouring out just doesn't keep the dregs as stable as racking canes. So, I put all four of these jars into the fridge to settle them out, while cleaning and sanitizing the gallon jug from whence they had come. Then, I used a funnel and my siphon to get the good parts of the jars down into the gallon jug, while leaving behind the dregs. This definitely will taste very good, someday, but at its current age it is still very hot-tasting, with lots of alcohol notes. I've put it aside for a few months of aging, and expect to make amazing spiced cider come Christmas!

Finally, Oktoberfest continues to lager. A few more weeks, then. One more month, and then I will bottle it. Until then, be patient, and keep brewing!

Cooler weather has finally arrived. It seems like it might stick around a bit. I'm going to check the numbers on the budget after pay day and see if and when I can brew again. Have fun, everyone!