Hoochin' Apfelwein & Pineapple Beer

The parts of this article up to and including parts of the Log section were initially published on 28 January 2025. The Log section onwards was/will be updated on subsequent days.

Background

I have experimented with homebrewing in the past, but haven’t documented exactly what I did in detail. I am trying it out again and intend to document the process in more detail so that I can figure out what works and what doesn’t.

The first thing I ever tried to hooch was a 2 L bottle of “breakfast juice” with half a packet dry bread yeast in the container it came using a balloon airlock in late 2021. This turned out surprisingly well, tasting like a cheap white wine. Inspired by this success, I managed to get a brewing container for a very cheap price off Gumtree and started using proper wine yeast. Later in 2022 I fermented apple juice with sugar (à la EdWort’s Apfelwein, linked later in this post – turned out well), apple & mango juice, and cheap grape juice (tasted pretty bad). I don’t currently have the methods I used, nor did I properly record the results.

I didn’t do any brewing for a while until I received a Coopers DIY Beer Brew Kit as a present from my dad in late 2023. I brewed a batch of beer according to the recipe that the kit shipped with in February 2024 to decent results, but I don’t drink a lot of beer at home so even now I still have quite a few litres of that batch left over.

The brewing vessels have just been sitting idle since then so I figured I’d get back into it. I have an event coming up that I think it would be neat to have some homebrew at, so let’s try doing hard apple cider in the Apfelwein tradition and some pineapple beer!

Sanitation procedure

We need to sanitise both the secondhand and the Coopers DIY fermentation vessels before we brew anything in them.

Sanitation solution

The standard, professional homebrewing solution to sanitisation and sterilisation is Star San, but that stuff’s pricey! The DIY Coopers manual indicates that sanitation can be performed putting all of the brewing equipment in the vessel, adding 1/4 cup unscented household bleach, filling the vessel the rest of the way up with water, leaving it for 30 minutes then rinsing with hot water. I will use Domestos multipurpose cleaner (“thick bleach”).

I found out after doing the procedure below that Domestos is probably not the best option, as Bunnings (hardware store) sells unscented “Premium Bleach” for much cheaper and with a slightly higher NaOCl concentration (4.2% w/v, i.e. 42 g/L, compared to Domestos 30 g/L), so I’ll just use that for future runs.

Bleach concentration rambling

These instructions are a little open for interpretation—what kind of bleach is recommended? Do I fill the vessel all the way up to the top? They also somewhat contradict the indications on the back of the Domestos bottle, which give a recommended dilution for immersion sanitisation/sterilsation of food containers of 125 mL (1/2 cup) in 5 L; the Coopers instructions would yield less than one eighth of this concentration.

There is also the wrinkle of having to rinse the bleach solution off the equipment with hot water. Star San is a so-called rinseless/contact sanitiser that just needs to be in contact with the surface for one minute and should be left to air dry; homebrewing forums document approaches ranging from swishing the solution around every 30 seconds to using spray bottles. It would seem that a bleach dilution at the suggested concentration should be properly rinsed and not left to air dry. But is there a bleach concentration that is OK to air dry? (Rinsing a 23 L container with hot water is very annoying in a regular kitchen sink.)

From what I can tell, the "parts per million" unit as commonly used in homebrewing circles is a mass ratio, NOT a molar ratio, which is to say that 1 ppm is approximately equal to 1 mg/L. The figure of bleach having a concentration of the active ingredient of 50,000 ppm given in Beerliever's “Bleach: the cheapest and most effective no rinse sanitiser for home brewing beer” therefore corresponds to 50 g/L of sodium hypochlorite, which is within spitting distance of the Bunnings 42 g/L.

The use of non-SI units drives me up the wall (imperial and U.S. gallons differ by nearly a whole litre!) but various concentrations suggested include:

1 tsp bleach + 1 tsp vinegar (to balance pH) in 1 gallon water (from above article) (or just 1 tsp bleach in 1 gallon water, from “Should I Use Bleach to Sanitize My Equipment?”)
1 tbsp bleach in 1 gallon water (from Wikibooks brewing)

For 42 g/L sodium hypochlorite and assuming U.S. gallons, the above numbers will result in concentrations of approx. 56 ppm and 166 ppm respectively. Nominal chlorine concentrations of 80 to 200 ppm get thrown around a lot in those articles and elsewhere. Compare this to the recommended Domestos sterilisation dilution, which works out to be $0.125 L \times 30.0 g/L \div 5 L$ = 750 mg/L = 750 ppm, and also with the recommended Clorox dilution ratios for disinfection, which range from 1500 ppm to 2000 ppm. (From this, we can say that DIY Coopers seem to be targeting more of the 80-100 ppm range depending on the exact brand of bleach used.) Compare also the Food Standards Australia and New Zealand fact sheet on cleaning and sanitising, which indicates that 100 ppm (cold water) or 50 ppm (hot water) chlorine solutions are acceptable for the sanitisation of food-grade equipment.

There is the complication of the difference between the sodium hypochlorite concentrations and the actual "available chlorine" concentration, which I'm not going to bother with since I'm not a biochemist.

In some of the above articles, vinegar is added to the cleaning solution, as it supposedly increases the germicidal power of bleach by lowering the pH of the solution. The one source I can find on this is a press release by the American Society for Microbiology from 2006 (archive.org link). It seems plausible enough, but you would think this would be mentioned in a proper paper somewhere. And all the above bleach concentrations have to be downstream of some actual studies on disinfectants, right?

If I can be bothered, I might ask around about this (I think I have some chemistry-knowledgable friends?) and update you all.

Upshot: I'm just going to blindly follow the Coopers instructions and hope for the best.

Procedure as performed

Rinsed and washed vessels and lids with washing-up liquid and a soft sponge, then rinsed again. Lids and Krausen collar left outside on laundry rack to dry in sun. Added 1/4 cup Domestos, filled containers up 3/4 full with cold tap water with all the bottles and equipment inside. Had to deliberately fill all the bottles with water to make sure they stayed submerged. Left for 30 mins, then swished around to try and flush the parts that weren’t in contact with the solution, drained, rinsed with hot water (or at least as hot as the kitchen sink tap will get) and left outside to air dry on the laundry rack.

Oh, a word of warning: filling a container with 20 litres of water makes it HEAVY! Make sure you can still move it to a suitable site for it to be drained.

Subtle foreshadowing?

The second-hand fermentation vessel still smells vaguely floral/fruity, and the Coopers vessel still smells faintly of malt, so I don’t know if the bleach did its job properly. Fingers crossed everything works out OK.

Brewing

Yeast

I ordered a Lalvin yeast sample pack off Amazon a few days ago, which gives you twelve 5 g yeast sachets, two of each of the following: EC-1118, K1-V1116, Bourgovin RC212, QA23, ICV D47, and 71B (see Table 1). As mentioned in the notes below, EC-1118 is a staple in hooching circles because it works fast, keeps off-tastes low and has a high alcohol tolerance (up to 18% ABV if the conditions are right). In short, it’s hard to screw up using it. I’ve used it before to decent results. K1-V1116 seems like a good alternative if you want a more interesting flavour profile. I would like to try some of the other yeasts; I’d particularly like to run controlled experiments comparing the results from different strains on the same mixture. For future journal entries, maybe.

Strain	Max. ABV (%)	Recommended temp. range (°C)	Killer factor	Lag phase	Fermentation vigour	Flavour	Other notes
EC-1118	18	10 - 30	Yes	Short	High	Neutral	(1)
K1-V1116	18	10 - 35	Yes	Very short	High	Floral	(2)
Bourgovin RC212	16	18 - 30	No	Short	Low	Delicate	(3)
QA23	16	14 - 28	Yes	Average	High	Fruity	(4)
ICV D47 ("D47")	15	15 - 30	Yes	Short	Moderate	Aromatic
71B	14	15 - 30	No	Short	Moderate	Aromatic

Table 1: Comparison of Lalvin yeast strains.

Data in the table were sourced from the original Lalvin strain datasheets.
“Killer factor” (a.k.a. “competitive killer factor”) refers to the yeast’s ability to outcompete other strains of yeasts that may be present in the mixture it’s active in. If the yeast does not have the killer factor, it may be outcompeted by (or possibly end up in equilibrium with) wild yeasts if the mixture has not been completely sterilised.

Notes:

Datasheet mentions “robust and reliable fermentation kinetics”, i.e. this yeast is a beast. It’s notorious on /r/prisonhooch for being able to ferment almost anything cleanly, at the cost of losing out on more delicate flavours.
Robust. Good at low temperatures (< 16°C), can produce floral esters.
Recommended for pinot noir. Promotes colour and tannin stabilisation.
Recommended for Savignon Blanc.

Recipes

We have two vessels to brew in, so we can do two different recipes concurrently. Since I’m just getting back into brewing after a hiatus, I’d like to do (1) something safe, and (2) something I haven’t done before but is still likely to end up being tasty. Respectively, these are hard still apple cider (Apfelwein), and pineapple beer with ginger (bastard tepache).

Aside: Golden Circle juice products seem to have a slightly higher sugar concentration (by about 10 g/L) than most other similar juice products. This would seem to me to indicate higher quality juice, although I question the precision of the nutritional label given the natural variability of sugars in apples grown in different seasons, in different climates and locations, etc.

Apfelwein

We’ll make 12 L of this stuff using an all-Australian mix of 50% Aldi cloudy apple juice (“Pick’d”, refrigerated) and 50% clear Golden Circle apple juice. The cloudy apple juice is more expensive, which I hope translates to tasting better, but who knows? At approx 102 g/L sugar (looking at the label), if we don’t add any extra sugar we should get about 6% ABV dry (using the 17 g/L per percent ABV rule of thumb). The original EdWort recipe adds 907 g sugar to a 23 L batch which would bump up the ABV to about 8%.

Although I would like to use up the remaining 500 g of the DIY Coopers Brewing Sugar that’s been sitting in the pantry for a while, I don’t want the risk the fermentation taking too long, so I’ll save it for another time.

I want this to be neutral, dry, easy drinking, which makes EC-1118 a pretty good candidate, at least with respect to the “neutral” point, which is good because it’s going to give us a better shot of finishing in time for an event I’m hosting in two weeks. Sadly, I won’t really have time to properly do secondary fermentation (carbonation) if that’s the case, but hopefully it’ll still be fine anyway. EdWort recommends bottling after at least four weeks, but that’s with Montrachet wine yeast and a higher sugar percentage, so I don’t know. I’m pretty sure I remember getting decent results within two weeks with a similar recipe? (This is why I’m trying to keep better records!)

All in all, this is going to be dead simple, just apple juice and yeast. I just sprinkled the EC-1118 packet directly into the apple juice since rehydration is for chumps, pitched at around 4:30pm on Saturday 25 January.

Pineapple Beer (tepache)

I’m not planning on doing real tepache, which is traditionally made using the wild yeasts on the pineapple skin itself. Instead, I’m basically just going to add yeast to pineapple juice and maybe some other spices and sugar.

With plain pineapple juice, we again expect 6% ABV, but I’ve heard that pineapple ferments like mad so I’m willing to risk adding sugar to this one. Let’s do another 12 14 L at approx. 8% ABV :-)

Weirdly, tepache/pineapple beer recipes I come across online don’t ferment straight pineapple juice, but instead typically add blended pineapple (or just the core and skins of (a) pineapple(s)) to a lot of water and sugar. For example, this pineapple beer Instructable stretches out four pineapples (totalling approximately 2.4 kg) to make approx 23 L of beer. Posts by 2stupid and hoaxater on /r/prisonhooch give similar recipe outlines. Based on this, here’s what I’m throwing together:

4 L pineapple juice (mix of 2 L Golden Circle brand, 1 L Aldi brand, 1 L fancy H2Coco brand)
two 432g cans Dole crushed pineapple in syrup
10 L boiled water
1.5 kg plus two heaped tablespoons Coles brand brown sugar (dissolved in the water as it is boiled)
a knob and a half of ginger (boiled in the water/juice) (I used about 90g)

I’ll try out K1-V1116 on this one instead – hopefully it adds to the flavour. Again, just sprinkled it directly into the mixture.

I only used 2 L pineapple juice and 60 g ginger initially. This mix was sweet and pleasant but only very vaguely pineapple/gingery. Needed to wait for it to cool down before adding yeast, like 2-3 hours, and it was still slightly above lukewarm when I pitched the yeast at approx. midnight on the night of Saturday 25 January.

The next day (26 January) I boiled approx. 30g extra ginger in 750mL pineapple juice and added two tablespoons brown sugar for a couple minutes, then added that mixture (once cooled slightly) and the remaining 1.25 L pineapple juice to the vessel.

Log

Real brewers would take density (“gravity”) readings of the brews with a hydrometer throughout the fermentation, mainly to determine the final ABV, or at least the Original Gravity (OG) and the Final Gravity (FG). I actually do have a DIY Coopers hydrometer, but I didn’t take OG readings. I’ll take FG readings once fermentation is done and figure out the approximate OG readings by mixing small batches of the original brew mixtures (i.e. apple juice and diluted + sugared pineapple juice) when I get around to it.

Sunday 26 January: Signs of fermentation in the pineapple beer.
Monday 27 January: Continued fermentation; signs of light fermentation in the Apfelwein (thermometer reading approx. 29 degrees Celsius).
Tuesday 28 January: Very hot day, forecast to reach 40 degrees Celsius, which was concerning (could stress the yeast out). A makeshift cooling solution was employed: old T-shirts were stretched over the vessel and sprayed with cold water from a spray bottle until saturated. This had the effect of cooling the Apfelwein down to about 27 degrees temporarily. See Figure 1.
Wednesday 29 January: Much cooler today. Vessel temperature approx. 23°C. Apfelwein not visibly bubbling; may have mostly finished up primary (plausible within 4-5 days given high temp, strong yeast and relatively low ABV); we’ll leave it to ferment on the lees, maybe it will clear up a bit. Will take a hydrometer reading tomorrow. Pineapple beer airlock still bubbling, but the actual fermentation could have finished if we consider that the CO₂ produced will take a while to escape when the flow rate is limited by the airlock. Again, will take hydrometer reading tomorrow/tonight. Will check if this reading is stable over the next few days.

Some time passed before I managed to write the next few days up.

A 23 L brewing vessel wearing a wet T-shirt. — Figure 1: Evaporative cooling setup.

Thursday 30 January: Don’t remember the temperature. Took a hydrometer reading of the tepache and it was very dry, I think 1.001 or 0.999 or something. I should have written it down. I tasted it; it was alcoholic, sour, and harsh; difficult drinking, but not vomit-inducing. The pineapple flavour sans sugar leaves mostly sourness, and the very small amount of ginger leaves a not-entirely-pleasant hint of cinnamon. At this point, I wasn’t sure it’d be worth bottling.
Tuesday 4 February: Finally got around to checking on the Apfelwein. About 28°C according to the vessel thermometer. Took a sample; smelled bad. Smelled really bad. Not in a rotten or vinegary way, but horribly wrong nonetheless, like synthetic fabric offgassing, masking a vaguely floral or fruity aroma. It tasted like how watching ants swarm a dead cockroach feels. I retched after taking a whiff. Taking a sip proved that this was actual poison that my body would not allow inside of it. Did not bother taking a hydrometer reading. Will have to do a postmortem on why this happened; my guess is bad air exchange from sitting inside a hot garage filled with motorcycles and chemicals for working on motorcycles, but I’m not sure. I think I tried the tepache later and it had actually improved; more tart than sour, less harsh. Will bottle this at least.
Friday 7 February: Bottled the tepache to chill in the fridge. Refer to tasting notes below.

Cost analysis

TODO

Tasting notes

TODO