You Brew Your Own Beer? Graff Bottle Day

Primed this batch with apple juice

You Grow Your Own Food? Harvest 7-7-12 and some processing

Got a good squash harvest. Decided we had enough to can a quart of pickles. Found enough time to brew up a Graff.

Squash, basil, and raspberries.

Refrigerator pickles

Graff, mildly hopped and malted cider

Homebrew Hero

omebrew hero she is! Sarah scored an amazing find on Freecycle today. Seven 5-gallon glass carboys, a bottle tree, and an Italian Champagne Floor Corker! FREE!

Graff

raff is a yummy hard cider-ish drink. The name comes from Stephen King’s Dark Tower novel series. They talk about a drink that is appley but beery too. I found the recipe on homebrewtalk.com, tried it once, and here I am making it again. It has more body and flavor than apfelwein though the two are similar. Here are the ingredients:

• 0.5# Crystal Malt (60L)
• 1.0 oz Torrified Wheat
• 4 Gallons of apple juice, ascorbic acid is ok as a preservative
• 1 Gallon water
• 1# amber dme
• 1# light dme
• 0.5 oz ~6% alpha hops
  

Steep the grains in 0.75 gallons of water @ 155F for 30 minutes. Sparge with 0.25 gallons of water @170F.

Stir in the dme and bring to a boil. Boil for 30 minutes with the hops in.

After you cool it all down in the sink with ice water, put it in the fermenter. I pour half of a apple juice jug in then shake the remaining juice up as much as I can to aerate it. OG for this batch was 1.064

After pitching rehydrated S-05 yeast in, it goes into a water bath in the basement. That’s an aquarium heater in there and a blowoff because graff is pretty vigorous.