Making alcohol

Wolf had been wanting to start brewing beer for awhile now. I wanted to start with something simple first so a couple friends and I made some hard cider. We each bought roughly 14lbs of apples (enough to make one gallon of cider), juiced them on the juicer I inherited from my parents, pitched some yeast, and let it go. I bottled them about a month later adding sugar for carbonation and xylitol for sweetness. Cider is more like wine and the longer it sits the more mellow it gets so those bottles are tucked away aging.
The fresh apple juice was so delicious that I have bought apples just for the juice a couple times now. Around Thanksgiving I also bought a glass gallon jug of apple cider, pitched some yeast into it, and am letting that sit. I want to see which turns out better.

I really need to get better at taking notes (hence the blog) because I don't remember what yeast I used for each, when they were bottled, etc. Hopefully going forward this will help me.

Wolf found a great deal on brewing equipment ($30 for a $100+ kit plus 48 bottles!) so we tried our hand at that too. We started with an Amber (don't know why since they aren't my favorite). At bottling we tasted it and it had a sour taste. We thought we'd try again after letting it age a couple weeks. Again a sour taste. Luckily Wolf can usually eat or drink just about anything so he continued drinking them. Our next batch was a wheat beer. It tasted delicious out of primary fermentation but after the second fermentation it had a woody taste to it. We were worried something had turned the beer sour. Possibly our tubing since it was used before. Within the last couple weeks the beer actually tastes pretty good so we're hoping it just needed to age.

I put the wheat beer in the fridge today. I'll crack one open this weekend and see how it is.

Update: I tried a wheat beer that weekend. It was undrinkable! Really sour. I'm thinking something definitely spoiled that batch. :( Wheat beers are my favorite and it was so delicious after primary that this really bums me out. Hopefully our changes (see IPA post) have fixed this. Next we'll have to do another wheat beer and see if we do better.