Homebrewing: does UV light only cause problems with hops?
4I got a little homebrewing kit as a gift, but I had no interest in making the kind of beer it came with materials for, so I made up my own recipe for a sparkling ginger wine.
Now it’s time to bottle it, and I’m unsure how important the tint of the bottles is- everything I read says to use brown bottles to avoid skunking beer, but my brew has no hops. Can I use green or clear bottles without worrying or should I stick to brown?
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UV light degrades alpha acids found in hops which causes the skunk flavor. It can actually create very similar compounds to that of a real skunks spray.
So long as you haven’t used any hops, you’ll be fine.
Sounds tasty!
@brhfl Honestly, from what I tried while bottling it today, it tastes like ginger and alcohol. Not great, but I’m calling it a success for my first attempt- ginger flavor is good, there’s definitely booze in it, and I think I avoided getting any nasties growing in there.
Next step is to figure out what to add to make it taste like something other than burning.
@Pantheist If it’s anything like beer fermentation, you may have fermented at too high a temperature. If there’s still active yeast in there, let it sit in the dark for an extra month or two and they’ll slowly clean up the hotter alcohols (also known as fusel oils). I’ve never fermented wine though so your mileage will definitely vary
@Pantheist - I agree with @guyfromhawthorn , let it sit for a while. I made a cherry clove cider a few years back. Tried some shortly after it was bottled, and it tasted like horrible red wine filtered through a gym sock. So, I shoved it into a box on a shelf and forgot about it. A few years later, I decide to try a bottle just for shits and giggles. Lo and behold, it’s not only drinkable, but tasty!
Your mileage may vary, but don’t give up hope!
@guyfromhawthorn @QuietDelusions Wine might not be the best descriptor for what I made, but I’m not sure what else to call it. It’s just a couple pounds of sugar, a little lemon juice, a couple pounds of fresh grated ginger, some red star premier cuvee yeast, and a gallon of water.
It wasn’t very warm (mid-high 60s), but it did finish fermenting at just over a week, so maybe it did go too fast? I’m thinking it’s also possible that I just didn’t think the recipe through too well- it’s about 16% alcohol, ginger, and nothing else so of course it doesn’t taste great…
@Pantheist I’ve got a gallon fermentation container, I might try something like this.
I’d let it age a bit more, 1 week is a quick turn around. There’s still some biology going on after active fermentation – it may even take a few months to get it good.
Did you take any gravity readings?
@Kevin I’ll save one for a few months to see what happens, but I need most of the bottles to keep going on new batches.
I didn’t take readings- I just used charts for alcohol content, and waited until it had stopped bubbling at all for a couple days before tasting and deciding there probably wasn’t any more sugar. It’s in bottles with some mango nectar for priming, so if they explode I’ll know the sugar wasn’t all converted.
I don’t have a hydrometer, but if you’re interested I’ll take some next batch- it will just be with a scale since I don’t have a hydrometer, but I figure better than nothing. For what it’s worth, I’m going to make the next batch with brown sugar and mango nectar to try to get a few more undertones. With just white sugar and ginger it’s all heat.
@Pantheist Even though your yeast selection has a tolerance up to 14% – I’m not sure how confident you can be without encouraging healthy yeast growth. Aerating your liquid or adding in some yeast nutrients goes a long way.
I did a ginger beer once, and i soaked some ginger bit in honey for about a week. Then put the honey in finished beer and allowed that to age for a week. There wasn’t much heat and it came out pretty herbal. It wasn’t too bad. I’d like to see how it would turn out if the honey fermented out.
@Kevin It’s (at least advertised) as having a tolerance up to 18%. It’s the same strain as EC-1118. I did aerate it, and I checked the nutrients in ginger root on the FDA website to make sure it would get everything it needed.
I like my gingery stuff hot- that’s why I used a little bit of homemade syrup but mostly raw ginger. It’s just missing any kind of body right now.
@Kevin I’m definitely going to have to take a specific gravity next time. The fruit wine I’m making now has been going for weeks with the same yeast, a similar amount of total sugar, and it’s still not done.
@Seeds make sure to encourage yeast growth with nutrients and things like that
Do not expose your wine to excessive light. Sunlight or other forms of bright light age the wine too soon, leaving you with poor quality tastings. Ideally, wine should be stored in a dark, cool environment. The dark glass bottles can protect the wine from the way UV rays negatively affect wine. Be extra careful when the wine is in clear or light glass bottles. The lighter glass allows for more intensive exposure to the UV light, leaving it more vulnerable to the heat. Overall, the darker the bottle and the room, the better.
Don’t allow natural sunlight in the cellar and be wary of the kind of lights you choose; no fluorescent because they create the UV rays that are so dangerous for the wine. Too much exposure to light causes imbalance. It breaks down the chemicals and molecules that allow the wine to age so delicately. The aging process can be accelerated and cause the wine to taste no good when it’s time to crack open the bottle.
Light provides heat, which you want to avoid in your wine storage space. If you put lights in your cellar or storage space, make sure that they are not so intense that they change the consistently cool temperatures. Store the wine no lower than 40 degrees Fahrenheit and no higher than 68 degrees. Keep the constant temperatures by maintaining proper lighting that will not fluctuate.
So, back to the original question, how much light is bad light when storing wine? The answer is nearly any light, really. Sunlight, fluorescent light, UV light emitted from even refrigerators when storing white wines, are all bad for wine quality. Prevent any problems by staying aware of the lights you’re currently using or are about to use.
@connorbush but the main takeaway is Relax. Don’t worry. And have a homebrew
@connorbush All of your advice could apply to wine or vampires, whichever you are storing in the cellar.
Although, it sounds like you might be making more of a cider or gruit.
Gruit (alternately grut or gruyt) is an old-fashioned herb mixture used for bittering and flavoring beer, popular before the extensive use of hops. Gruit or grut ale may also refer to the beverage produced using gruit.
I’ve not been able to find any research that indicates light exposure resulting in off-or bad cider; however, it might mess with your fermentation if it fluctuates the temperature too much.
Glad to have some home brewers out here in the land of Mediocre.
@connorbush I haven’t had time since the second kid came along, but I have my hopes that once they’re old enough they can help!
I’ve used clear bottles for ciders before. It’s not that big a deal. Just don’t keep em on the patio and you’ll be fine.
A dozen or so years ago I visited the lab at Miller for work. They had a gas spectrometer or some other fancy piece of equipment. I was told, though, that there are people, “super smellers”, maybe, than can detect that skunk smell at lower concentrations than the machine can, so there were two little nose pipes/straws sticking out of the machine.
Maybe he was pulling my leg, but I don’t think so.
They also had a complete 40 liter brewery in the lab just for testing.
@craigthom I’d guess he was serious about that. As a super smeller/taster myself (so was my dad and the rest of the family thought the two of us were nuts), I once smelled a single apple tree, in bloom, around 7 or 8 miles away on the far end of the lake we were paddling, in a head wind, all day towards. People thought I was nuts until we got to the apple tree.