Update for all seasons gone by

 Changes.  Where to start... I guess the place to start, as always, is with Robin. Within a short time after my last update (just posted), Robin was diagnosed with cancer. Urachal adeno carcinoma. It's a sneaky bastard that has no cure. It affects a very small insignificant portion of the population that gets cancer and apparently not worth much research. 

We got lucky with an early diagnosis which, with limited resources for treatment, got us a couple years.

Robin died in the Fall of 2016 and I placed her ashes in The Grove of the Patriarchs in Mt. Rainier National Park. I visit there as often as I can.

Robin's death took a toll on me even to this day and I stopped any brewing and a lot of other things in my life. I'm finally getting my shit together and just started a new batch of mead. No spices, just a bit of vanilla. It's almost done perking and if my forgetful brain doesn't wander, I'll post a more frequent update.

Cheers to all who hold life dear! It truly is a beautiful thing.

David

Well...seven years later...

Almost a month later.  Hmmm... not too bad for regular posts these days.  I am finally getting around to perking off that rum wine into something a bit more potent.  I did the first three  of twelve gallons and got two quarts of 150 proof rocket fuel.  I will have to dial this one back a fair amount more than the last batches but such is the price for experiments.

The currant wine is coming along beautifully.  I racked off the two gallons and have a little less now, but it sure looks pretty.  I got a smackeral of a bit and it tasted darn good for this early on.  I am filled with hope.

Robin decided a while back to do some cherries packed in brandy and that one is a very good mix.  Today, she went for a vodka/cherry mix and did not even save me a dram of vodka. 
Shame on her!  In her defense, I had purchased a bottle of vodka a few weeks back expressly of that purpose but it looked so lonely on the shelf...  Today, I bought her a re-fill and we promptly preserved the cherries.

Dadgummit!  Here I was complaining about doing an entry once a month and what day is it??? Oh, SPRING!   July 9, 2013 to be exact.

Well, let's start off with a few updates since Fall.  Probably the saddest news is the loss of our bees.  We had an odd Winter and with the mix of weather changes, I believe the bees population got too low and we lost our queen at some point.  While we were unhappy about the loss, people need to understand that most commercial bee keepers may lose up to a third or more of their bees over winter.  There are a lot of reasons and unusual suspects for the underlying cause, but the result is the same. We did pull a gallon of honey off the hive, but it was not very tasty at all.  I spoke to Jim, our bee specialist and he advised us to "get deeper down."  He said that some bees will fill up the hive with whatever they can at the end of the year, but put in good stuff down closer to the hive.  As Spring came and other bees became active, we pretty much gave away the rest of the honey to the cause of other hives.  I'm not too disappointed on this as it went to viable colonies.

I did make up some peach wine, some pluot wine (the fruit is a plum that tastes a bit like an apricot).  The peach was a bit watery, but the pluot was light and not too bad.  While good experiments, I probably will not try those ones again and I'll drink just about anything.  The blueberry turned out fantastic.  It had almost a red wine taste to it with a decided blueberry taste on the tongue.  We are going to pick more blueberries this weekend to start another run.

Robin piped up again about wanting a still.  Well...we contacted Mile High Distilleries and purchased a 3 gallon reflux/pot still.  It is a real beaut and works wonderfully. We are using it currently as a pot still and have been playing around with rum.  We have done a couple gallons (after distillation) of rum.  Even with the pot still setup, it came out at 140 proof and hot enough to get a rocket in orbit.  To lower the octane, I put back in distilled water and got it to 100 proof after adding in a bit of molasses and some Jamaican rum essence.  The end result was tasted like Meyer's rum with a mule kick at the tail end.  We shared some samples and have a bunch of folks pestering us now and then for a smackeral more.  Right now, there is about 14 gallons of rum "wine" percolating and will be ready to distill in week or so. We will likely get about 3 gallons of rum, possibly a bit more after distillation and adjustments.

Here is a shot of Ol' Miss:

There are hoses on the right side that cool down the alcohol from vapor so that is drips out.  I hooked this up to a small outdoor shower motor that uses 4 D cell batteries and it works great on the stove.  However, if you look to the left, you can see a propane tank.  We have a two burner outdoor propane stove that we are going to try out shortly.

Here is a shot of 7 gallons of rum wine being transferred (I have 7 more that went into the emptied plastic container):

About a week ago, my sister Sharon called and said her currants were ready for picking.  We had some conflicts in scheduling and were unable to trot down to Mabton for the picking.  I was pretty sad about it, but guess who showed up yesterday with about 6 1/2 pounds of red currants?  Oh Yeah!  We pressed out almost a gallon of juice off of them and have just under 2 gallons of currant wine a perkin' in two small carboys.  I think we will get about 24 splits this year and I am excited!

I have a recipe that called for 3 pounds of currant that made one gallon of currant wine.  Here is a shot of the double batch on the scale--too pretty!:

I started these in the currant press--next photo:

 While pretty, it is not as efficient as I would have liked.  Last year, I think I must have been stronger, or perhaps did a smaller amount of berries.  I found much of the berries did not get a good crush.  What to do, what to do?  My sister Sharon (my blessing) loaned us out a juicer that will make the strongest of fruit shake in their skins.  Here is Bertha augering out the juice:

The little red plug on the right is the pulp and seeds compacted down.  I don't know you ever watched Mike Rowe in his show "Dirty Jobs," but he saw an auger device like this on a farm and likened it to "a mechanical butt-hole."  Ah well, I do love the guy anyway--he has a warped sense of humor.

Once done, here is the juice with the plugs beside.  It's pretty amazing how little fluid was in the plugs to the right.  Any remaining bits in the juice get separated in the distilling and racking process.  I am well pleased:

The bowl above holds a little over a gallon of fluid.   Right now, the juice is sweet, but very tart.  This went into a plastic carboy with 13 pints of warm water, 3 1/2 pounds of sugar, a teaspoon of pectic enzyme, 2 teaspoons of yeast nutrient, and my old standby yeast--Lalvin EC-1118 champagne yeast.  After mixing it in a large plastic carboy, I filled two 1 gallon carboys with the mix, topped them with air traps and waited for the bubbling.  By the evening, I got a healthy perk going on.  Whoo hoo!

On other news, Robin went out and purchased me a trailer.  We have been talking about making a teardrop camper.  I have plans I purchased from Kevin Hauser (Kuffel Creek) years ago and now am in the process of building one.  The trailer frame is done as is the flooring, rough wiring, water tank, and spare tire.  It is ready for the walls and will be one of my Summer projects.

We've been busy cleaning up around here and while finding the back of the barn, I ran into an old friend.  It was the 11 1/2 strip built canoe I finished a few years ago.  It had a bit of fiberglass on the bottom that had pulled away from the cedar and I never got around to fixing it.  Here is a picture of me testing out the results of the repair and updated varnish:

I got thinking about Mac McCarthy who wrote the book I used to make this canoe.  I looked up his website to let him know that I still had the canoe, but found he passed away in 2009.   I am glad that his work lives on.  Check out the site if you can at: http://www.feathercanoes.com/ it has great information and items on the site along with a memorial page for Mac.

This is a good spot to stop for the moment.  You now have the updated pics.;  I will do best efforts to do a post on the rum run.  It is quite a bit different than just bottling and Robin has designs on mixing some fruit in the rum this time.  We shall see.  Take care and until next time--regards,

This once a month blogging is getting on my nerves!  I need to get into a more regular schedule.  If for no other reason than to clear my brain.  This actually does not take much effort as there is not a great amount of activity upstairs, but it does help keep things tidy in the grey matter.

It is mid September and we are winding down the year.  Oddly enough, the wine making appears to be kicking up in small batches.  I believe it was inspired by uncorking a split of the currant wine.  Robin and I pulled one out late in August.  It was a sparkling beauty that had a perfect blend of sweetness and stars in the glass.  It took us some effort not to knock down the remaining eleven splits immediately.  We brought out one of our precious reserves to the folks house at a gathering and the family there got a sip or two of this and I may need to lock our doors to protect us from "visits" to check on our welfare (wine)...  These bottles will definitely go out in Christmas gift baskets for family and friends.

On a side note, Robin and I have been talking seriously about our bees.  We expect to extract somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 pounds of honey this year as our bees have been prolific.  Last year and the year before, I did it the very basic way of uncapping the frames and pressing out the gold with the back of a spoon.  This was labor intensive and made the foundation un-useable for the following season.  Each foundation runs about a dollar a sheet and with a ten frame box and extracting about four boxes lies the math lesson that indicates an actual extractor saves money over time.  Robin took the hit on this one and purchased us a two frame extractor for our little, but spendy hobby.  We love the bees and are eager to see what they will share this year.  October 1st is our planned extraction date and we will post some pictures of the process.

Back to the actual work.  I bottled five gallons of the oldest metheglin last week and moved around my last five gallons of metheglin and the five gallons of blueberry wine that's been a perkin'.  I usually pull off a bit to taste where things are looking at each transfer.  The mead is doing well as expected.  The blueberry is quite interesting.  It has a dry finish and there are tannins in there along with a nice blueberry tang going on.  I am not sure how the wine is supposed to taste or how it will mellow, but I find it a nice dry red-type wine at the moment. 

Our pear trees yielded quite a batch of pears this year.  We were wondering what to do with them when Robin piped up that we have available carboys.   I thought to try a one gallon batch and it is looking very nice after a couple days of perking.  It is next to the raspberry-grape batch.  Yes, a raspberry-grape blend!  We had a bunch of himrod grapes this year and I decided to crush the lot for some wine.  Robin and I also pulled off a cup or so of raspberries.  Not enough for a batch alone, so we added them to the grapes.  It is very pretty, but not the bright mix of the currant wine.  We shall see on the flavor soon enough.

A stop by at Johnson's Orchard brought home about 20 pounds of peaches.  You can see where this is going.  Today, I will try a hand at a peach-raisin wine.  I understand that peaches alone don't give enough body to a wine, so it should be fortified a bit.  The same was the case for the pear wine.  I got a couple boxes of golden raisins and only used one on the pears, so I am going to use the other box with the peaches.  I will share what this produces.

Oh, I guess I should give a bottle yield so far.  It seems we are currently holding about eighty bottles of mostly 750 ml of metheglin wine and ten splits of the currant wine.  That is mostly why I am slowing down a bit on production.  What to do with that amount.  I did get carried away with wanting to do 50 gallons this year and met about half that goal along with the fruit wines that are cropping up.  We are having fun playing around though and plan to do more of this next year.

Wine making is a pretty easy process outright and often produces some very good product if you are patient.  Once you get going, the biggest expense seems to be the bottles if you buy new as I have tended to do so far.  I did build a wine case for the rack that Robin bought me and it will hold about 60 bottles.  Robin also purchased a small wine refrigerator to hold our currant wine.

I am now off to prepare some peaches and cut up some raisins.  I will try to get some pics on the next posting.

Outside is the calling of a large flock of birds.  The music would be more enticing if they were not starlings.  Sigh.  Yet it is a beautiful day and I have been going on regular bicycle rides that so far are on the four mile treks and I am looking forward to today's journey.  What will be my path today?  How about you?

It's been a month since my last update and time to give the old loins some girding.  It is big switcheroo day as I am on the process of moving batches of metheglin and blueberry wine from carboy to carboy.  This is always a special day for me as I get to sample the batches as they are transferred.  I got to lay up 24 bottles of one of my best batches of metheglin to date.  This batch has a subtle spice blend and a fair bit of heat in the ol' tum tum at the end.  I will look forward to the aging process of this run!

The second carboy transfer went without a hitch and had a half gallon in the tail end for reserve and um...testing.  This is going to be one of those days.  All for science and glory.  Such is commitment to one's craft.  I believe that is a tear of joy in my eye.  Batch two has a bit of vitner's sweetener added to the tail end.  I think I mentioned that the second and third batch had this done to test out the possibilities.  Oh, such a difference that made!  This batch has a bit more deeper color to it as I steeped a few more tea bags to this batch.   It has something of a darker amber shade to it and the spices came out very nicely.  Along with the sweetener, this is a batch to be reckoned with.  No secrets will die with me.  Perhaps a time-tested liver, but no secrets, my friends!  I got about an 8 ounce bottle of sweetener and added half to this batch and half to batch number three.  This batch has just a hint more sweet than I would want, but the blend is so nice, that I feel more forgiving with each sip.  It brings back the sweetness of the honey that I am inclined to look for in future batches.  This will be a desert metheglin for sure and one with a driver's warning on it.  You will float like a bee after a glass or two of this run!

Batch three was even darker than batch two.  I went back to Twining's Earl Grey and am very glad I did.  I've been timing my steep times and using a bit longer steep for the teas.  About five minutes steep.  This has produce a few shades darker metheglin than batch two.  But the flavor is pretty consistent with batch two as it is sweetened with a pronounced spice end that I have decided is a good thing.  Both batches will be great Christmas gifts and ready to drink at the time of corking.  They are ready now in my estimation.  Somehow, the lawn looks less appealing at the moment...

Now for the update of the day.  The blueberry fortified!  Oh my, oh my!  I popped the top of the plastic carboy and stuck my nose in this (I am very scent oriented and should have been a cat.  My wife says I am a dog and I am still working that one out...)  This one grabbed my nasal passages and held them for ransom for a moment.  I was ecstatic about our currant wine, but I think this blueberry run will give the currant a run for it's money.  Such a dark color of purple and the waft of blueberries!  A test is in order I am sure.  It is in the transfusion process as I type and I have to take breaks by the moment to run over and gander upon it. 

I slaked off a dram of the blueberry and it packs a heat.  Not the sweet metheglin, dearie.  This one is quite a bit drier than the honey wines.  I must contemplate whether to sweeten this batch or leave it as is.  I am inclined to leave as is at the moment as it has a very blueberry nose to it with tannins on the buds and a slightly bitter finish.  This one is exotic and I believe I like it.

Here is a line up of batches two, three, and the blueberry:

This day could only be better if my sweet wife was here at the moment.  She is currently doing that bit of drudgery that we quaintly call in this household, a job.  I shall do my part by holding down the fort and ensuring that there is a bit of a taste left for her when she comes home.  There will be a physics lesson for me today as I must calculate the exact amount of that taste, but I shall persevere.

Hey,  the grass in the picture does not look that long.  Hmmm...

Take care folks.  Get out and see the world, take the bee by the stinger or at least reach for the berry!

It's now July.  July the 18th to be precise.  I thought for a bit I had the metheglin version of writer's block.  I did not start a new batch of metheglin at the start of the month as was my plan and I am now having thoughts of whether 50 gallons is realistic.  It is not difficult to produce compared to other wines I can attest...

About two weeks ago, my sister gave Robin a jingle.  Part of their conversation steered to their gardens.  Sharon (my sister) and her husband Steve have a really cool garden in their backyard.  Raspberries, strawberries, grapes, and red currants to name a few of the items they grow.  It was the currants that perked Robin's interest.  She told me that we were heading down to pick currants.

Now, we have a few very young currant bushes that did produce a small amount of berries this year so I wasn't too sure that the trip was going to be one of those "wow" trips.  Seeing my sister is a delight anyway, so I wasn't going to be too put out if we got a cup of berries for the run down the valley.

We stopped along the way at Snipes Brewery in Sunnyside, Washington.  This is a microbrewery with a restaurant.  The chef (yep, chef!) made up some great food and we picked up a growler of Dos Barrachos for Sharon and Steve.  Dos Barrachos is a specialty beer there and Barracho is Spanish for drunk, I hear.  Very tasty stuff and I can imagine that a growler could get a couple folks pretty tipsy.

When we got to my sister's homestead, she showed us her little currant bush.  It has been there for thirty years, so you may be able to imagine that it offered up a bit more than a cup or so of berries.  Eight pounds of extremely beautiful red currants!  I'll scare up a picture of the berries and insert one here as Robin took a few photos of them. (Update 07/21/2012:  Here is a lovely pictures of some gorgeous currants tucked in a mesh bag just prior to the crush:)

Robin told me when we got home that I was going to do up a recipe that took three pounds of currants and we whipped up a batch.  (One more update 07/21/2012-Robin snapped a picture of the press that we got from my folks.  It was in the yard and rusting out.  We cleaned it up and restored it)

Here is a picture of it starting about two weeks ago and one from today:

It looks very pretty on the right, don't you think?  I almost wish we had had enough to do five gallons, but that is for another day and leads me into our next project...

Last Friday, we got an e-mail from the folks at Blueberry Hill.  This is a berry patch over in Moxee, Washington and we visited these folks last year and got on their mailing list.  Robin, Conor, and I decided to pick a few berries there.  I grabbed thirty dollars and was pretty sure that would cover the tab.  They give out some buckets with a line on them.  I guess I did not remember how much that line meant.  Robin kept asking if we had enough before we hit the line, but we were only there for about 45 minutes.  There were some very large berries and the picking was easy as there were loads of them on the bushes.  U-pick blueberries run $1.90 a pound.  We got thirty and a half pounds at the weigh in... Fortunately, Robin keeps an emergency stash that she pulls out in these types of situations and $60 later, we headed home with an incredible amount of berries and a bit of confusion on what to do with them all. 

Sharon loaned us a juicer that we used to extract a pound or so of the remaining currants into juice.  It is a heavy duty model that could probably pull water out of rocks.  I did want to try our grape press on the blueberries first.  That was not a very bright idea.  Blueberries have a thick juice compared to the lovely currant.  It was almost slimy coming out of the mesh bag and was not coming out too fast.  We decided to run it through the juicer.  This was a much better option.  The down side of this method was cleaning the screen every cup as the skins on the blueberries can clog up the screen pretty quick.  We ran about 25 pounds through the extractor.  15 of it was to go into five gallons of blueberry wine!  Whoo hoo!.  The remainder went into jam and the last of the berries went on ice cream and blueberry pies.  We pigged on berries for next day or so.

I found a great recipe for a fortified blueberry wine that suggests using the skins and leaving of the blueberries in a mesh bag along with about a pound of raisins for the tannins.  I left the bag in the bucket for a couple days and pulled it out this morning.  Here is the bucket:

You can't see the beautiful blue color, but I will update a picture when I rack it off into a carboy.

Soon I will get back to the metheglin.  But...the apricots are beginning to drop.  Hmmm....What do you think?

It's been a hair over two weeks since I paid any attention to the metheglin.  That is, beyond looking at it every time we cross paths or when I give it the occasional stir.  Today, I added another teaspoon each of Fermaid-K and nutrient along with another 2 1/2 pounds of honey.  This was given a good stirring of about 3 or 4 minutes and back on went the lid and air trap.

A couple hours later and a bit of perk has commenced as expected.  I do hold my breath until this happens and I know that outside of any calamity there should be a perk, but it is the waiting that harries me.

When I bottled my first 24 bottles, I decided to try the shrink wrap ends on the bottles.  These come in packages of 25 and look pretty nice.  There are no directions, but I heard you just run a hairdryer over them to get the shrinkage going.  This is similar to the heat shrink rolls I used on radio controlled gliders in the past and was pretty confident in what to do.

That is...until I looked it over.  I heated the crap out of that plastic and it still looks gawdawful!  I can't even think of a good Charlie Sheen-ism to describe this hot mess.  Grrr....  Well, when it rains, grab an umbrella.  Which, by the way, we have been blessed with an abundance these days.  I decided to go back to the wax ends.  They look very nice but unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, do not prevent a perky metheglin from blowing its cork.  This batch should be a still metheglin and I am crossing my fingers for now.  I do very much love a little sparkle in my metheglin but I did end what I think was the fermentation run and put a squirt of inert gas in each bottle to clear out any bit of O2 that may have been left.

In order to put the wax on the tips, Robin and I went shopping.  We stopped at the local URM store which specializes in bulk type restaurant food and supplies ans I picked up an aluminum measuring container.  It is tall and not too round so it should hold the water and wax at a good level to use on the bottles.  Here is a pic of it on the stove:

The wax comes in beads so they melt easier.  I got the wax from a local ACE Hardware store that I frequent to gawk at the brewing supplies.  It took about 10 minutes on medium heat to melt the wax and then I took it off the burner.  You don't want it to boil as it will get a lot of air bubbles in the wax and that doesn't work too well on your bottles.  There are a couple web videos you can look up to see how the technique is done.  Basically, you want to dip the tip straight down in the melted wax to the level you want and slowly turn it as you draw it out.  Re-dip if you want a bit thicker wax.  Keep turning the bottle as the wax dries to reduce the drip lines in the wax.  If you did a good job, set it aside.  Keep working through your bottles and then you can address any bad ones by peeling off the wax on those ones, re-melting it, and doing the process over.

A tip in nice tips: use a knife (I use a tongue depressor or popsicle stick that I got from a hobby store) and get a bit of wax from the pot.  Us this wax to cover the cork and make the tip level with the lip of the bottle.  This will give you a nice end at the top of the wax:

Much snappier than the shrink wrap fiasco.  You can polish the wax later on with a soft cloth.  I do that and it gets out the slight runs and brings out a bit of a shine to it.  Back in the box went the two dozen bottles.  Not to get thos labels printed...  I'm thinking of getting these done at the local bindery.  I talked to a guy there a while back.  I didn't get a price on the labels, but (famous last words) they shouldn't be too expensive.

Outside of this, the bees have not been overly active outside due to the weather.  I have gone out a few times to re-fill the sugar water to keep up their comb drawing efforts.  They go through a fair amount of sugar these days as the weather has kept them indoors quite a bit.  The colony is growing and I added a shallow box a week or so back.  When I add the next box, I am putting in a queen excluder .  It looks kind of like a fine cooking rack.  The wires are spaced just enough to allow the workers through, but the queen can't get her abdomen through.  The next boxes are for the family, not the hive.  We hope to get at least three boxes full this year.   Based on the hive activity, I think this should be very attainable for our girls.

I do believe a short nap is in order.  This is my last weekend on graveyards for a bit and I become a day walker for a month or so.  Take care, folks.  The couch is calling!