It's nearly been a week

So much has been happening. Last week was crappy and I really only had one day off. I've been feeling run down have been having trouble going to sleep. Which has put my body in the 'preparing for illness mode' and I hate that. I tended to my wines last week, adding KMS tablets to all my 1 gallons. Better safe than sorry. After I clean the kitchen up a bit and put in the AC, I'll rack all the wines into new jugs. The muscat is clearing up nicely. I was worried about what the heat was doing to it but i managed to keep the temp to 74 in the house for a good chunk of the time. Once the AC is going I'll be able to maintain more constant temperature.

This week I opened up a bottle of the Pinot Blanc. Not bad. I moved it into the office (much cooler than the kitchen/dining area. I was a little concerned with the cranberry-raspberry because they stayed upright a day longer than I had wanted and I didn't have an empty bottle box so they are scattered under the cupboards in the kitchen until I can get labels made. Might to that tonight at work.

Today I opened up a bottle of the first braggot I made. I know it's not really ready but I just couldn't wait the required two weeks for a first taste...I should have waited.

I was hopeful that the sweetness would mellow out the harshness of a highly alcoholic drink (this baby clocks in between 11-12% ABV) but that hope was short lived. Granted it does taste pretty good for being really, really young but after half a glass and the slightly woozy feeling that accompanied it, I know that it won't be ready for the fair. It'll definitely take at least a year to age out.

I will not be making anything with that much alcohol my next batch. I think something with an alcohol range between 6-8 would be good. I think anything higher I will have to make sure I have the room to store it for a year. This case will make it's way to the basement after I get home from work. I'll leave them inthe plastic containers until I'm sure there's no chance of exploding bottles.

My hopes for a showing at the fair have been dashed but that's ok because even from this early taste I can tell that in a year this will turn out wonderful.

No Mango but I did get the cranberry raspberry bottled

I ended up doing many things I hadn't planned on today. The first was getting up to go to the backyard and pick mulberries. Of course, there were no ripe ones. Those damn squirrels eat them and knock others to the ground. I hate squirrels.

The second was I ended up bottling the cranberry-raspberry because after i racked the muscat into the secondary 3 gallon I couldn't find a bung to fit. I had a universal bung but that didn't work. It kept popping out. So I had to scrounge up bottles, and then open up my new box of bordeaux bottles (I was saving those for something special, or at least a kit wine and not a fruit one). I had to get those washed and sanitized. In the end, I had about 14 bottles. the leftover I tried and it was much better than I expected it to be. The wine conditioner really helped. It's not drinkable right now but in about 6 months I'll try a bottle. I really need to get an accurate inventory, decent shelving for my work area, and bottle rack. Everything is so cluttered in the kitchen. If I just got off my butt and cleared out the dark cubby in my office I could store everything in there. It's cooler and out of the way.

I decided against starting the mango melomel until I bought a faucet adapter and picked up a few more pounds of mangoes from the market tomorrow. I'm going to try and go when my friend Katie goes so I can buy more and get a ride home. She's also interested in going berry picking but not for raspberries but since I want to try a chocolate blueberry port we might go do that later in the summer.

So far everything I have are all in secondary or bottled. Nothing on the horizon except a mead for Danielle and Jason's Wedding, another Braggot, and a beer kit. I'm still trying to decide what that will be.

And the bonehead Award of the year...

OK so even though I was pretty sure I was on top of my game, my current bottling experience has pretty much guaranteed that I will never miss a step like this one again.

I bottled the braggot. I got 18 bottles out of it. I added priming sugar...guess what i forgot to do with said priming sugar..oh yeah, boil it. That one HUGE important step...Dissolving said sugar in water...so I can pretty much kiss the chances of carbonation good-bye. Oh might get a little because it was still fermenting and had a 14 brix last time I checked but not beer worthy. I could have sworn my mind was in the game this morning. Did you know that priming sugar is non-fermentable when not dissolved in water first. Yeah, go figure.

I woke up. I ate breakfast. I even got a little work done. I did all this before I went into the kitchen and decided to bottle and stabilize my passion wine. Then I thought while I'm at it I should just stop doinking around and just do the braggot. I think I'm going to call it Dead Hoppy Foo Foo Braggot.

Mango Melomel

I am not a big fan of mangoes.

I am a little obsessed about making wine.

I have a problem with buying over 5lbs of fruit from a store.

I do not drive.

These and a few others are reasons why making wine from fruit poses a bit of a problem for me. I know that it's cheaper to pick your own fruit, but by me not being able to drive, I'm kind of at the mercy of friends who may or may not want to get up at 8am and drive to a farm in rural minnesota to spend a few hours picking fruit that will see no immediate gratification.

That said I found a deal on what looks to be about 4 pounds of mangoes, which are now currently sitting on my counter waiting for me to chop em up and put them in a nylon bad and soak them in hot honey water. Ok, well maybe they aren't dreaming about that. I'm sure the idea of some woman approaching them with a large knife and slicing them into small bits, isn't the goal of every mango.

Why mangoes, if I don't particularly like them? Because they were a good deal and fruit is fruit and by the time the process of making them taste like sweet alcoholic goodness rolls around, they really don't taste like mangoes at all. I can live with that.

The other thing is that I have a hard time having empty primaries sitting around. Though my 6.5 gallon one is currently the home of my muscat, I have 3 one gallon primaries that are begging to be filled with something other than sanitizing solution.

Mango Mango Mango Melomel
4lbs of ripe mangoes
3lbs of honey
1tsp pectic enzyme
1.5 tsp acid blend
1 tsp yeast nutrient
1tsp yeast energizer
1/2 tsp tannin
Montrachet or CHampagne yeast
1 tsp pectic enzyme

I feel like once everything has cleared

I can go ahead and start bottling that one grape wine and maybe think about stabilizing the passion tea wine and back sweetening it. I did add a little tannin. I'm torn between wanting to bulk age some of the wine and free up a jug or two for that 4 gallon of Muscat that's going. I've yet to have a finished bottle of wine (non kit wine) because everything is still in carboys or jugs waiting to hit their stages. The good thing about this is that I'll have plenty of wine come the fall and winter but really nothing but kit wines for this summer.

Considering, I don't know where I will be next year, it isn't a good idea to have a lot of wine just sitting around because then I'll have to move it when I move it.

No Port in a Storm

Well I won't be making that elderberry into a port style wine. It didn't have enough umph from the get go to do well. I should have started out with a high brix of about 32 and I wasn't close to that. Then arrested the fermentation with the addition of brandy before it went to dry, to keep some residual sweetness. I know this now so I will try again as soon as I have a free carboy and jug.

Guess that will have to be a Christmas gift for the special folks in my life and not a birthday gift for Brian. I broke down and bought a that brew kit from Brewster Brown that guy who makes and sells immersion wortchillers. All of his stuff is really affordable, so I'll probably be buying from him more. I mean the wort chiller doesn't look nearly as professional and lightly coiled as the ones I see on Midwest or other sites but it's a hell of a lot less expensive and I'm more for the affordable right now. I'm doing this for fun and out of my own apartment, so it's not like I can invest lots of money and time into this.

What sucks most about this particular hobby of mine is that I feel like I'm the only black woman out there who makes wine and that can feel isolating. Of course I should be used to the feeling of isolation, I am one of a handful of black women in my Ph.D. program. Luckily, as a whole there are more women of color in my program. I went ahead and joined the MN HOmebrewers guild and will probably have to gear myself up to go to the meetings where I will most likely be the only person of color there. Yeah. I wish any of my other wines that weren't kits were ready to drink, so I could at least feel good about that accomplishment.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed on the braggot being bottle ready soon.

Eruption!

So I was reading how bentonite can be used to clear mead on the Joy of Mead website. So I took out the sack mead I was working on and added 1/4 tsp of bentonite and stirred. All of a sudden it just erupted into a fizzing mess,barely contained by the kitchen sink. I barely had enough time to pick it up by the neck and move it. I only lost about an inch worth of space, but it did tell me one thing: Something is alive and still kicking in this mead. Hopefully, there's enough life that won't be stunted by the addition, and I can go ahead and prime/bottle ferment this next week. Who knows I might get more life out of this one than I expect to get out of the braggot. I'm going to have to try the ol flashlight through the jug to test how clear it is because it's hard to tell because it's so dark.

The muscat (pictured above) is fermenting nicely. I stirred it just a bit today and probably won't stir it again until I think it's almost done fermenting. A good week should be enough if the weather holds like it is.

I went to the farmers market this morning and picked up a box of large mangoes for like 6 bucks, there were like 8 in the box. I don't know if that's a good deal or not, but I think because mangoes are kind of expensive, it must be a good deal. Anyway, I have to swing by the store tomorrow morning and get some freezer bags and the mangoes aren't completely ripe, so I popped them in the fridge. I'll cut them up and add them to the bags and toss them in the freezer and next week when I go back t the market I'll pick up some more. I also found a place that had 12# of basswood honey for 35.00. I was all set to buy it but I was a little suspicious. I had just been to the vendor from Ames Farms, and they said they didn't have basswood yet and what they did have was from last year, and that 12# was going to be pretty expensive. Plus when I looked at the honey, it looked just like the picture from the Honey.com website. The honey from this other place had a kind of reddish hue not a milky white. I wasn't going to spend 35.00 on something I wasn't absolutely sure was basswood.

Today is suppose to be 85 and I think it might have already reached by the time I'd left work at 7am. Well at least when I wake up again tonight to go to work it'll a lot cooler. I debated on taking my pappa-san chair onto the porch, grabbing a trashy novel or one of my wine books, cracking open a beer, New Glarus' 'Organic Revolution' and just kicking back until 4pm when it's time to go to sleep. Instead, I'm in my office with the lights off, because it's damn cooler that way, looking up books for school, updating my wine notes and blog. Sounds like a productive afternoon for an aspiring academic.

Today as an act of procrastination (and the fact that I have two computer screens) I wasted a bit of my morning going from the one screen that had my dissertation on it to the other screen which had open windows forFacebook, MyYahoo, and my wine forum. Thank goodness I'm good at multitaksing or this would not be a workable setup. Anyway....back to procrastination. I decided that I wasn't going to get anything done after reaching a wall. I have a three page goal for the day. They don't have to be quality but they do have to be 3 full pages of something written. I hopped off my pilates ball and trudged to the kitchen where I grabbed my 6.5 fermenter and started a cleaner and some sanitizer.

I grabbed the cans of Alexanders concentrates and thgouth maybe I'll try that fortified wine idea.

I did not know that a Muscat was not a red grape variety. It is a white. I played with the idea of trying to make a fortified white wine and promptly threw that idea out of the window...cause I just don't have the courage to screw up semi-expensive concentrates. At 3 gallons I had a brix of
25 but added more water to get it to 4 gallons and sugar to get a brix of about 21. So I"m looking at a wine with a potential alcohol of about 12%. Most of the wines I've made have all been around the 11-13% alcohol range.

Dissertation Libation
2-46oz cans Alexanders Muscat
4tsp bentonite
3tsp yeast nutrient
2tsp acid blend
Lalvin EC-1118
Water for 4 gallons
OG is 1.088/Brix 21

Pinot Blanc! Bottle!

today we bottled the Pinot Blanc. I really shouldn't be trying to update my blog after I've been drinking. We bottled about 26 bottles...28 bottles worth because I had like 2 pony's filled (1.5 liters) as well as 24 regular wine bottles and one weirdly shaped 375ml bottle. We ended up with about a glass worth of wine left in the bucket after we were all done.

My friend aimee put the labels on the bottles. As you can see on the right, I had to resort using the clear bottles.

Currently, I'm sitting in my living room a little intoxicated because I started mixing the merlot wth the strawberry soda and find that it's really good. I've made it through half a bottle of wine on my own. I'm thinking about moving onto the pizza and ice cream. Who thought that this post would devolve into an intoxicated rambling.

We went to Midwest today and I picked up a few airlocks, some wyeast to make another braggot but I need more malt because I think I'll make a larger batch. I'm fine tuning the recipe in my head but I don't want to put it into play until after I bottle the cranberry-raspberry so I can have an extra carboy available to rack and bulk age. It looks like time is the only thing that helps meads and I'm afraid to start these amazing meads because I'm not sure what or where I will be in a year.

I have 12 pounds of clover honey waiting to be made into a nice sweet mead. I want to use a basswood honey for this braggot and a lighter malt but I think I'll wait until I get a big brew kettle and wortchiller.

Feeling a little antsy

Wednesday I'm suppose to do some major bottling with my friend Aimee of the Pinot Blanc. I also need to get some supplies from Midwest, that are just too heavy to try to lug on a bus from NOrthern Brewer and which I don't want to pay shipping. So many things have reached the point where I can do a lot of stuff with them all in one day if I had another pair of hands. Luckily, my other friend Brian said he could spare a few hours to come over and bottle some of the smaller stuff.

The sack mead is finally fermented to dry but it hasn't cleared andI think I'm going to rack it again in hopes that will help with the clearing before I add any fining agents. I gave it a taste and it's not too sweet but it tastes highly alcoholic, which it is. So that bad boy will probably have to sit for a year, but I should be able to bottle it sooner than that.

The elderberry fermented to dry as well and I'm going to double check through some of my books and online whether or not it needs to age a couple months before I try to port it with brandy. I've been studying the Pearson's Square to make sure I understood it before I tried to test it out. I'll have to sorbate and metabisulphite it and backsweeten before adding the brandy.
I'm thinking of giving a bottle to a friend for his birthday since he holds homemade wine in such high regard. One other bottle was already claimed by friend Ilene before it had even finished in the primary. I'm keeping the last 2 for myself.

I might need to invest in small 375ml bottles for leftover wine that doesn't fill a full 750ml bottle and then I can give them away as gifts or take them some place and let folks try my wine but not feel like they have to drink a whole bottle.

Mental list: More wine books. Upgrade my kits to include stuff for wine (that'll be in my July budget since I can't afford it for June. Bottle Pinot Blanc, rack and let clear the sack mead and the elderberry. Make a batch of simple syrup. That sounds like enough for this week.

Steel CAge: 3 Yeasts Enter...1 is Victorious!

This is the racked elderberr/pyment/grape concoction I threw together from the leftover wines, all with different yeasts. As you can see I have some serious fermentation going on here.

Once this settles down I will rack it again into something else and maybe add some oak chips to it. I figure with the way it's going I won't need to think about it for at least a week. I'm planning on a marathon bottling session with some friends next week as well. I want to get that cran-raspberry bottled and cellared for the summer before the weather starts to get too warm for extended periods of time.

I have a growing book list...I'm sure that I with the writing of my dissertation and the reading of new material I won't have time to read for pleasure about wine. That really does suck because I've had no luck with any responses about starting a home winemakers group here in the Twin Cities and I've posted on both Northern Brewer's site and the Midwest site.

I wish I had time to start going to the MN HOme brewer's meetings this summer but with all the work I have to get done I just can't justify the outside time. So it's kit wines for the summer and hopefully some cider when the apples are ripe and ready.