The Koehler Brewery – Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia, quam rara sunt.

I’ve been reading the Home Brew Talk forums a lot recently. Everyone there loves making an Apfelwein recipe from Ed Wort (’apple wine’ in German in case you are extraordinarily bad with languages). Anytime someone has an empty carboy around and little or no time to brew, they whip up a batch of Apfelwein. The recipe is super simple and very quick, making it perfect for just such an occassion. Here’s the recipe and a 370 page thread discussing everyone’s experiences, questions, and comments about all the variations people have tried.

And people have made a lot of apfelwein- over 7500 gallons to date.

Yesterday I was lamenting the fact that I haven’t had time to brew recently – I haven’t posted to the blog in a long long time – and decided to go ahead and make some Apfelwein in one of the empty carboys I had lying around. Kroger had gallon jugs of 100% apple juice on sale and I had more than enough dextrose on hand for the recipe – all those extract beer kits I bought over the last couple of years all include a 4 oz pack of dextrose for bottling sugar that I have never used because I keg all my beer and force carbonate. I picked up a couple of packets of Montrachet yeast at the LHBS and got to work making 6 gallons.

The whole brewing process took maybe 15 minutes, including sanitation and clean up.

I stuck the fermenter behind the couch and Stephanie and I headed over to a Geoff and Alison’s house for some hanging around and baby entertainment. When we got home a few hours later, the whole downstairs smelled like sulfur/rotten eggs. Delightful. They warned me about this on the forums.

I went to work today and left Stephanie at home with the fermenting Apfelwein. Here are some of her thoughts submitted to me via IM over the course of the day:

11:00am

me:  hey – how does the house smell?
Stephanie:  horrible, the house smells really bad
we have to stay upstairs, the smell makes the baby mad
me:  lol – really? definitely no more apple wine then i guess
Stephanie:  i’m downstars now and i’m gonna pass out it smells so bad
me:  hahaha
Stephanie:  no one likes you

1:00pm

Stephanie:  it stinks down here!
me: still stinky?
Stephanie:  stinky, im hiding upstairs

3:00pm

Stephanie:  anyways, it stinks down here
/flail
me:  i can’t believe it’s still smelly
im going to need to move it outside or something
i didnt really notice it this morning
Stephanie:  well you need yr sniffer replaced
me: probably – it’s all stuffed up today
Stephanie:  yeah
Stephanie:  everytime i breath i love you a little less
good thing yr so cute
Stephanie:  ok i’m abandoning ship and going back upstairs

So things are going well I think.

I have another empty carboy somewhere or other…

In other brewing news, I’m brewing with Colin the last weekend of August – 3 batches in 3 days. Should be awesome.