Several years ago, I (Roger) started home brewing – principally cider and mead, but some beer and wine, as well. Brewing is a fairly space and time consuming activity, so when considering the possibility of moving to a full-time RV lifestyle it was clear that I’d either have to give up this hobby or make some adjustments to the basic brewing methods to make it more “mobile friendly.” Here is the story of my first attempt at adapting brewing to the mobile lifestyle.
A very quick overview of brewing may be helpful for those not very familiar with the process. All brewing is essentially the conversion of sugar into alcohol via the activity of yeast. Making cider, for example, could be as simple as get some apple juice (that’s the sugar), add yeast, and wait awhile. Mead is similarly simple: mix honey with water, add yeast, and wait awhile. Of course, neither is quite that simple in practice, but those are the essential steps. Beer gets a little more involved because you first have to convert the starches locked up in grains into sugars (or buy an extract from a supplier who has already done that part), then boil the resulting “wort” for awhile with some hops and possibly some additional grains, and finally cool it down. Once those steps are done, then you are back to “add yeast and wait awhile.” Suffice it to say that beer requires more extensive equipment and time, while cider and mead are much simpler. I have some ideas on mobile brewing for beer, as well, but I’ll save those for another post. Wine is a whole other set of issues that I won’t be going into.
For both cider and mead, I have a basic recipe that I have repeated many times and am quite comfortable with. I decided that the best approach for this experiment was to stick to my basic recipes with as few changes as possible to accommodate the mobile environment. I decided to give this a try during our recent trip to New Mexico. We had settled in Red River, NM for a week and this felt like the perfect time to give Mobile Brewing a try.
Before I get into the blow-by-blow of the experiment, it’s worth discussing the changes or compromises I expected to make in order to accomplish successful mobile brews. First and foremost is volume. At our stick-and-bricks home, I have plenty of space and keeping around several five-gallon carboys (fermentation vessels) of “in-progress” brews is not a problem. In an RV (even a large one), this is not really feasible. While there are lots of folks doing interesting things with 1-gallon brews, that doesn’t really fit my style, so I decided to aim for the 2.5 to 3 gallon batch size. As it happens, I mostly use 2.5 gallon kegs to serve my brews, so this is a batch size I already use regularly. The next compromise is the type of brew or recipe. In general, I think it will be best to keep to simple recipes and my cider and mead fit the bill. The final adjustment is to leave out any extensive monitoring or temperature regulation. While these steps can improve the quality of the final product, with a simple recipe, they are not as important (as long as we avoid any extremes). Thus, my plan was to brew a 2.5 gallon batch each of a cider and a mead, using my familiar recipes and limited equipment.
I had prepared for this by bringing along two 3-gallon “Better Bottle” plastic carboys, some basic equipment, and ingredients for my standard cider and mead recipes. As it happens, we visited The Honey Salon in Santa Fe and bought some local mesquite honey (much darker and richer than the mesquite honey I had tried previously), so it seemed right to try my mobile mead experiment with this local honey (if a little less true to the scientific method 🙂 ). My cider recipe usually completes fermentation in 4-5 days and is drinkable a few days after that. My mead recipe is also fairly quick (for mead), fermenting in about a week and drinkable in 1 to 2 months.
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started by sanitizing my gear (the most important step in any brewing process). I simplified this by using a spray bottle with the sanitizer instead of immersion as is often used in brewing. Then I began the cider: measure out 12 oz. of dark brown sugar and add to the carboy. Then I added 1 gallon of store brand apple juice, capped the carboy and shook it to dissolve the sugar. I then added a teaspoon each of pectic enzyme and Fermaid-K. The first aids clarity in fruit-based brews and the second is nutrition for the yeast. Then I added a second gallon of juice, 2 cans of apple juice concentrate, and shook some more. The final steps are to add the yeast (Safale S-04) and cap it with an airlock (allows CO2 to escape). For you experienced brewers out there, this has an original gravity of 1.074 and should be about 7-8% alcohol when done.
Next up was the mead. The New Mexican mesquite honey was completely crystallized, so I had to warm it a bit to let it flow (the Instant Pot to the rescue), but then I added 7.7# of honey (that’s about ⅔ of a gallon) to the carboy, and about 1.8 gallons of spring water (gets to the target volume of 2.5 gallons). I added a combination of 3 yeast nutrients and then shook like crazy (not only does that dissolve the honey, but it also adds oxygen for healthy yeast growth). Finally, I added the yeast (Wyeast 1388) and capped with an airlock. Note: This mead recipe comes from a brewing friend of mine named Bray Denard. Visit his website if you want to learn about quick mead techniques and the yeast nutrient schedule I used. The original gravity was 1.110 and the completed product should be about 12.5% to 13.5% alcohol.
We were in the mountains in June, so temperatures ranged from lows in the 50’s to highs in the 80’s (Fahrenheit). We were not using heat or air conditioning, but nonetheless, the indoor temperature mostly stayed between 65° and 75° – decent temperatures for the yeast. In less than 24 hours, both the mead and cider were bubbling away with yeast happily converting sugar into CO2 and alcohol.
Now comes the waiting. After about 4 days, the cider had completed fermentation, so I was able to “rack” it (transfer to another vessel to get it off the yeast) and put it in the fridge while we were still parked in Red River. I secured the mead with a seat belt when we pulled up stakes. Both brews were otherwise untouched for the next week or so until we got home. Once back home, I transferred them to kegs for storage and eventual serving.
Well, so how did they taste? I have to admit that both were a little different from my regular brews, though I believe the reasons for that are unrelated to the RV brewing conditions. The cider was not as good as usual, but it was, in fact, similar to some of my most recent attempts. The flavor and quality of my ciders had “drifted” over the last several months as I made various tweaks to the recipe. This one actually convinced me to revert back to a version of my recipe from about a year ago (mostly a different yeast). The mead also was a step away from my usual and in this case I think it had to do with the honey I used as well as some small recipe changes. The Mesquite honey I bought in Santa Fe has a much stronger “honey” flavor than most and this really came through in the mead. The end result was also sweeter than I usually make my meads. However, diluting the mead with water and carbonating it (creating what is known as a hydromel style mead) made a really wonderful drink. The strong honey flavor came through even in dilution and the sweetness was moderated. This mead was so good that the first keg (half of the original) only lasted a few weeks. The second keg is just waiting for tap space now!
Despite the lackluster cider, I would call the mobile brewing experiment a success. The methods were adaptable to a smaller space and the recipe and technique compromises mostly worked well. The main lessons I learned would be to stick to well known recipes and ingredients, but then again, playing with recipes is part of the fun of homebrewing! With these two experiences behind me, I’m now working on beer recipes and methods for RV brewing. Look for an upcoming post on that, as well as a discussion about “packaging” (bottles, kegs, etc.) in an RV.
–Roger