Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Limoncello step 2

What to do, what to do, what to do? It turns out that brewing, and distilling presents far more challenges in India (south india specifically) than it does in chicago or philadelphia. What's the difference? There are several. Among them, the heat, the lack of good equipment, the lack of good cleaning supplies, yeast, and oh yeah the HEAT.

So, first things first, cleaning...
Bleach and water, lots of water. Some scrubbing , ok, lots of scrubbing and rinsing.
You don't want bleach water, or indian tap water infiltrating your brew.

The equipment:
A big pot for boiling, and some fermenters. The fermenters are basically plastic carboys. Think Culligan water tanks. Just that, except the name, get this, is not Culligan, but "Shine." Could it be more perfect?

The ingredients: Jaggery (raw sugar), White Sugar, yeast, filtered water, pineapple juice, and lemons.
Some comment here. The yeast was hand carried from the United States. Getting good fermenting yeast here? Not sure where/how to do such a thing. It's Red Star Premiere de Cuvee (champagne yeast). Works wonders, I made a meade and a cyser from it.
lemons and pineapple juice are to give the yeast nutrient. Yeast can't just eat sugar. It needs some other food too.

The process:
Disolve all the sugar into water. Warm up yeast. Pitch yeast into room temperature water.
Here is the biggest problem!
In india...

Getting things cold...

Is really difficult!

My italian buddy was helping me out that day. We got everything set up, except the wort was nearly boiling temperature! I waited nearly 12 hours for it to cool down.
When I finally pitched the yeast, the wort was still slightly warmer than room temperature. That's not good. Room temperature, I should mention is 35 C = 95 F. After about 40 C yeast dies. Oh yeah, I should also mention, that fermentation is exothermic...

Ah F%@# the yeast died! Luckily I had a spare packet of yeast. I warmed it up, and pitched it. Now, my 38L of pre-hooch is getting eaten by enough yeast to devour 10 times that amount! But most of it is dead. HOW THE HELL DO YOU COOL THINGS DOWN IN INDIA!!?!?!?

So, I've got a boat load of liquid and I'm trying to make it into something that will distill easily. NOT SO EASY. But for now, step one has been achieved. There is a large quantity of beautiful brown sugary goodness becoming less sugary sitting in the middle of my apartment! Happy fermentation!

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