MuteDog

A number of years back someone posted the idea of pumpkin gin to the homebrewing subreddit. Supposedly some senator arguing against prohibition in the early 1900s claimed you could just hollow out a pumpkin, fill it up with sugar and you'd end up with booze. So I gave it a try. One pumpkin I filled up with apple juice and another I filled with brown sugar. The apple juice pumpkin actually fermented and I got a somewhat drinkable hard cider out of the deal. the sugar one just turned to sludge and grew mold.

Another thing I tried was to make my own amylase producing mold using millet and rice cakes and ginger root to inoculate it. They grew mold (some of it white, some of it green) and I used them to inoculate some steamed rice that sort of fermented. It went sour of course, and it ended up tasting a lot like lemon juice, so I must have gotten some citric acid producing mold in the mix as well.

You could probably grow horehound or costmary in pots on a porch or deck, I grow them in my garden but I don't think their root system is too huge and they don't get big like mugwort or gigantic like hops. Obviously coriander works in pots, so that's another option.

yeah, you can back sweeten it, whether it tastes bad for other reasons is really going to depend on what sort of flavors the wild yeast and bacteria produced. Good luck!

I've been using wild yeast for various beers, wines, etc since 2012

I've made tepache a few times and it will go alcoholic if you leave it too long. if the abv is 2-3+% then it's likely safe to consume (if you're overly concerned you can also check to confirm that the pH is below 4). However there probably won't be any residual sugar and it may not taste all that great.

I made moscato wine from my grapes a couple of weeks ago and then a second wine that fermented on the skins that I pressed last weekend.

My apples have been harvested so I will probably grind and press those either this week sometime or next weekend to make hard cider.

I finally finished picking all the hops (Glacier and Mt Hood/Tettnang) off the bines that I harvested 3 weeks ago, I'm don't have any plans for any sort of fresh hop beer or anything but I would like to maybe brew something soon. I was thinking about a high (50+%) wheat saison while using chopped up wheat straw in the mash for a filter aid and fermenting with some of my wild yeast cultures.

Yeah, I'm on Mastodon as @Mutedog@mastodon.social

I made a wit cider with coriander and orange peel that was excellent.

Elderflowers are also a nice add to cider, boil them briefly in a bit of the apple juice to help release the flavor.

I grow mugwort and alecost to use for making gruit. Mugwort gives a mild bitterness and has a sort of generic herbal flavor. Alecost (aka Costmary) has a really distinct aroma that's difficult to describe, maybe floral, minty and cinnamon? but not quite. It can also be quite bitter (at least when chewing it) so I've been a little gun shy on using it for a long time in the boil, but at FO/whirlpool it's quite nice.

My FIL often has efficiency issues with his AiO system and a friend of mine had similar issues to the point where he built himself a cooler mash tun to use with his. I don't know what the issue is, but you can pretty easily solve it by purchasing an extra pound of base malt for a few bucks. At the homebrew scale this isn't breaking the bank (like it would be a commercial brewery making 100s of bbls).

Wait, how do I get the $400 per month health insurance?

You can dump the oxidized portion, or add some vinegar mother and try to make it into wine vinegar. I'd just let that stuff go and enjoy the bottles that turned out well.

Take an actual gravity sample with degassed beer using a hydrometer. Your RAPT pill may have krausen crud stuck to it throwing off the reading. My conclusion for these sorts of devices is that they're useful for monitoring temp and letting you know when your fermentation is completed but the measurement of FG is probably inaccurate.