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.
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.
I think he's saying the dryer pieces themselves are stackable for storage when not in use, not that you should stack multiple carboys on top of each other using them.
Looks fantastic!
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!