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Recipe
Recipe
This is a nano brew I sized so I could do primary in a 1.75 L liquor bottle, and secondary in a 32 oz mason jar.
Primary
Primary
4 cups water
4.2 ounces honey
2 tbsp dried butterfly pea blossoms
2 tbsp dried hibiscus
Laffort Spark yeast
Gravity & ABV
Gravity & ABV
OG 1.038
Target FG 1.000
Target ABV 5.31%
Nutrients
Nutrients
1g Fermaid O
1g Fermaid K
Front-loaded nutrients on this one because it's so small. BatchBuildr only goes down to 1 gal so this is probably more nutrients than it needs already, and I can't even measure less than 1 g on my scale so dividing it up into staggered additions didn't really make sense.
Timeline - Pitch to Bottle
Timeline - Pitch to Bottle
Pitched on 07/14/2020
Racked and stabilized 07/18/2020
Re-racked and back sweetened with ~3.5 ounces honey 07/20/2020
07/29/2020 Mixed into the Floral Blend
Process
Process
Fill measuring cup with 2 cups filtered water and start rehydrating yeast using a small portion of that water
Weigh out honey in a mason jar and add the remaining water
Heat 3 cups of water to a boil then turn heat to low and add dried pea blossoms / hibiscus
Cover and steep for 20 min (turn heat off completely after 5-7 min)
Add FermO and FermK to mason jar and mix vigorously
When floral tea is done steeping, strain or filter out the blossoms
Funnel both the tea and the honey/water must into the fermenter
Mix vigorously before checking OG and must temperature
When temp is 105F or lower you can pitch yeast
Weighing out the honey
Hibiscus and pea blossoms
Steeping the floral tea
Brew color before pitch
Retrospective
Retrospective
Process Improvement
Process Improvement
I oversized the tea slightly so I could account for evaporation during boiling and steeping, but 3 cups was more than needed. Could probably get away with like 1/2 cup less if not more.
Holy moly, this fermentation was crazy active. Less than an hour after pitch it had flooded its airlock and was overflowing. I'm not sure if I went too heavy on the pitch amount, on the nutrients, or what - but I left more than 40% headspace in the container, so it seems like there should have been enough room.
Honestly I probably overpitched the Spark yeast, but it's been expired for a couple months now and I wasn't sure if it was still viable. I used a hefty amount in the rehydration cup thinking "hopefully some of these guys are still alive" only to have it bubble over the cup (which was only 10% full). I guess that yeast is still kicking!
Recipe Improvements
Recipe Improvements
This tasted a lot like a rosé to me! If you like that kind of flavor profile, you might actually want to try this. Though I noticed it is important to go lighter on the hibiscus, when I tried to scale this up in a bigger batch, I used too much of it, and mostly just got hibiscus flavors instead of the softer and more nuanced rosé flavor profile.
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