Thundercloud Wine?

Our street is lined with Thundercloud plum trees. Some of them even bear fruit. My next door neighbor's tree is a heavy fruit bearer. Each year the neighborhood kids congregate to pick most of the low hanging plums....usually long before they are ripe. However this year they missed one large area.

I asked my neighbor if it would be OK if I pick them and attempt to make some wine. He doesn't do anything with them so was happy to oblige. I have a huge container of generic honey that I need to use up. I prefer my bees' honey for eating but this generic stuff is fine for mead making. For those who don't know mead is wine made from honey instead of sugar. And melomel is a fruit mead. Here is the recipe I am using, in case anyone else has access to Thundercloud plums. I can't promise the wine will be any good, though, as this is my first attempt at this wine flavor.

Thundercloud Plum Melomel

· 4# pitted plums (about 5# unpitted)
· 2 # honey
· 1/2 tsp. acid blend
· 1/2 tsp. pectic enzyme
· 1 tsp. nutrient
· 1 campden tablet, crushed
· package wine yeast (or 1/4 tsp in starter)

Wine begun 7-30-13.

Step 1: Pick and wash plums. Break them open with your fingers. Don't remove pits yet. Place into a must bag. Squeeze out as much juice as you can into the primary fermenter. This will also free up the pits. Remove pits from must bag.

Step 2: Add all remaining ingredients except the yeast. Add enough water to make one gallon. Make sure to allow for the weight of the must bag.

Step 3: Take the specific gravity. You are aiming for a beginning SG of 1.090. Mine was spot on.
Step 4: Top with a kitchen towel or cotton cloth and secure with a rubber band. Let sit for 24 hours. This gives the campden tablet time to kill off any wild yeasts that were present on the plum skins, and then gas off. You don't want it to kill your wine yeast.

Meanwhile prepare a yeast starter.
Yeast starter: 1/4 cup warm water, 1 tsp. sugar, 1/4 tsp. wine yeast, 1/4 tsp. yeast nutrient. Cover loosely and let sit until ready to pitch. This will give your yeast a big head start.

Step 5: After 24 hours pitch the yeast into the juice mixture and replace the cloth cover.
Step 6: Stir daily and squeeze juice from the bag. On the 3rd day check the SG. if it is 1.040 or above, rack to the secondary fermenter and attach airlock. While in the secondary it is important to keep the wine out of the light. Cover it with a thick towel or store it in a dark cupboard or closet.
Step 7: Rack again in 3 to 4 weeks. Then rack every 2 months, as needed, until there is no more sediment.

If you don't rack this often, nothing bad will happen. It's best not to have the wine sit on the lees (sediment) for too long but wine does OK if you ignore it. Just check the airlock often and replace the liquid (water or sanitizer) if it gets low.

Step 8: Bottle. I usually keep my wine in the secondary for 9 to 12 months before bottling.

I like to back sweeten my fruit wines at bottling. I add a cup of sugar (or honey) per gallon of wine, give or take. Dissolve the honey or sugar in water before adding. If you sweeten your wine you will also need to add a stabilizer or it might begin fermenting again and you'll have a mess when the corks pop or the bottles explode. Add 1/2 tsp. of stabilizer when you sweeten, then bottle. 

Homemade From My Garden

   The garden is all finished for this year. I need to get out there and pull up the plant carcasses and toss them into the recycling container. These are the last two items made with this year's bounty. First up is the raspberry melomel that I've started. This contains honey and raspberries from my backyard. I am hoping to enter the resultant mead in the Fair next fall. Is this a blue ribbon winner in the making? I hope so.

   Yesterday I made the last batch of spaghetti sauce for 2012. The tomatoes cooperated and got ripe just in the nick of time.

Skinned and chopped tomatoes.

In the crock pot with all the other ingredients.

10 hours later we have delicious sauce.

   I am spoiled by my homemade spaghetti sauce. The store bought stuff pales in comparison.

   Now to starting planning and dreaming about next year's garden and honey crop. Meanwhile, I have lots of sewing projects to keep me busy.

Old School Cooking

Who needs Marie Callender? Or Banquet, with their gluey dough and chicken sponge? We make pot pies the old fashioned way, with butter, lard, and real chicken. Whenever we get a roasted Costco chicken I always save the last little bits and freeze them in order to make a chicken pot pie at a later date. Today I was at a loss as to what to fix the husbeast for his supper. Then I remembered that chicken in the freezer. The lard used in this pie crust was some that I had rendered using a bunch of pork fat from the local butcher. No hydrogenated lard here. Today's crust turned out nice and flaky.

Never throw out your leftover pie crust bits. Break them into pieces, toss them with some sugar and cinnamon, and bake them. Keep a close watch so they don't burn. Kids love these pie crust treats. We no longer have kids at home. Oh, darn, I guess we'll have to eat them ourselves. Yummy! If you do have grandkids, and want them to get some of these, be sure and hide them from grandpa. 

What else is happening on the Willoughby homestead? Well, I have 3 gallons of plum melomel fermenting in the kitchen.

It is bubbling away in the primary fermenter.

I accidentally knocked this bunch of tomatoes off the plant the other day. I have tied it up and hung it in the basement. We'll see if they ripen down there.

Oh, and the canna is getting ready for round 2 of blooming.

I plan on going into the hives later today and will check to see if the girls have made any more honey or if they are ready to be tucked in for the winter. Tomorrow I will be volunteering at the bee booth at the Puyallup Fair. I'll be there from 10am until 2pm. Stop in and say hello.

Recently Bottled Wines

   The following wines are all bottled, labeled and tucked away in the cellar. First up is the one I am most proud of. It is also the one that was the most frustrating to create. I made 3 gallons of this wine using 5 pounds of blueberries which I picked right here in Tacoma, WA, at our local Blueberry Park. There you will find acres full of all different varieties of blueberries. Which reminds me, I really should try to get over there next week and pick some for this year.

   This particular wine took forever to ferment. I am not even joking. It kept going, and going. At one point I thought the ferment was stuck so added some energizer. It got going really good and then trickled back to a slow crawl once again. I didn't keep track of exactly how long but know it took well over 6 months to stop actively fermenting. However each time I racked and sampled it, it tasted great. I just left it to do its thing. After one full year I was sure that it must finally be finished. The hydrometer bottomed out and the wine is very dry. I usually don't care for dry fruit wines but this one is an exception. It is delicious with no back sweetening. I got 15 bottles from 3 gallons. Here are 5 of them so you can see how clear the wine finished.

I bottled this Raspberry Apple wine at the same time. This is from fruit out of my garden. I got 5 bottles from one gallon. I did back sweeten it but only minimally. I am calling it semi-dry.

Making Mead

The apple harvest wouldn't be complete without starting a cyser mead. Yesterday I decided to use up all the remaining apples from my tree. These were the smaller, uglier apples. I didn't want them to go to waste. I pulled out all my wine making books and concocted a recipe. Most apple wine/mead recipes call for 9 lbs of apples. I only had 5 pounds. That would make a very weak gallon of wine. Luckily I had some frozen apple/raspberry juice in the freezer. To the chopped apples and frozen juice I added 2.5 pounds of honey (no, not from my bees). Because of the raspberry juice this will not be a true cyser but more of a cyser/melomel hybrid. It smells divine. I'll pitch the yeast later this evening. I have to give the campden tablet time to kill off any undesirable bacteria and yeasts and then gas off.

More Wine Labels

Here are the Raspberry Apple and Wassail wines, ready to head to the cellar. It is fun and easy to make your own wine labels. Let's face it, if I didn't label them I'd soon forget what they were. I look around the internet for a suitable picture then build my label around that. Of course, if I were in the wine selling business I would need to come up with my own original artwork. These are for my own personal use. I hope to sell a few jars of my honey and will design my own labels for that.  

Bottled Some Wine

This past Saturday I bottled 3 gallons of my homemade wine. Strawberry Kiwi, Raspberry Apple and Wassail. I get 5 bottles from each gallon. The Strawberry Kiwi bottles look gorgeous. Nothing is prettier than country wines in clear glass bottles.

Unfortunately I am running low on clear bottles so was forced to bottle the other 2 wines in green bottles. Not nearly as pretty. You can tell the wine is clear, but that's about it.

You can't appreciate the colors. Now to apply  labels to the Raspberry Apple and Wassail wines and tuck them away into the wine cellar.

What is it?

Can you guess what this is? 

Here's a hint: It's in my fiber studio. I'll let you think about it for a minute. Yesterday was a busy one. While the husband took our youngest to see the latest installment of 'Sherlock Holmes', I stayed home to catch up on some chores. It's amazing how quickly the dishes pile up, even though there are only 2 people to cook for. And then there's the laundry. There is a lot less of it, now that the kids have moved out on their own. We had a little bit of sun so I hung my shirts out in the yard. That apple tree gets a lot of use as a drying rack.

Of course the shirts didn't get completely dry but it was still nice to be out in the fresh air. I also had a large amount of beer bottles to clean. (I truly am the chief cook and bottle washer). The guest bath tub comes in handy for this task. I am very particular about the cleanliness of my bottles. I first soak them in bleach water, then wash them with PBW. Right before bottling they are disinfected in an Idophor bath.

There's no fabric to show off, today, but I did get a package containing the following items. These will be used in weaving.

I have been wanting a McMorran Yarn Balance for years but never found one in my local shops. I also bought a warping paddle and an OOP warping book from this same Craigslist seller. OK, are you ready to guess what that first picture was of? Did you guess "spinning wheel cozy"?

Singha says you are WRONG. It's a cat tent. And yes, it is very cozy.

Raspberry Melomel

I finally got to bottle a mead! 

I proudly present to you, Raspberry Melomel.

Yes, I'm still mourning that cyser mead tragedy. Sniff. True to form I couldn't get this melomel mead bottled without at least a mini disaster. There should be 5 bottles ready to join the wine cellar. As I was corking the wine I noticed that one of the bottles had some unappetizing looking hard water scale on the inside. Even though the bottle was scrubbed and sanitized that was not something I'd want to present to guests. The wine from that bottle now resides in the decanter and I'll have to drink it now (oh, darn). I do lightly back sweeten my fruit wines so it isn't that bad. But I know it will be really awesome in about 6 months.

I also powered though and racked all 11 gallons of my remaining fermenting wines. Now to ignore them for another few months. Wine making is perfect for a lazy gal like me. Put 'em in the closet and forget 'em.

Green Apple Gewurtztraminer

Today I finally found the time to bottle my Green Apple Gewurtz wine. That's the lovely thing about wine. It is very patient. This one has been waiting almost a month for me to bottle it. And is none the worse for the wait. I got 27 bottles for the cellar and 2 carafes for the immediate future.

I sampled some this evening and it is very good. I got it all bottled and then realized I didn't have labels for it. I had to whip something up quickly. Now I'll have new wine to share with my knitting group on Friday.

Organizing The Brew Room

It didn't take me long to convert the girls' old bedroom to the new brew room. Today I'll get some carpet cleaner and see if I can get the carpet back to being blue. I had to use incense to exorcise the teenage "gym sock" smell.

Blueberry Wine

This past Sunday I ventured out to gather blueberries. The bushes were quite picked over but I was determined. After close to 3 hours of picking I came away with 5 lbs. of berries. Being out in a field, in the hot sun, listening to the chatter of other pickers gave me a flashback to the 70's when I would pick raspberries, strawberries and cucumbers to earn money for school clothes. All that was missing was a transistor radio blaring 'Live and Let Die' and 'The Morning After'.

5lbs. of berries is enough to make 2 gallons of wine. But my smallest carboy holds 3 gallons. I need to stretch these berries a little further so am adding 12 ounces of white grape juice concentrate. This won't effect the wine's color but will add depth to the flavor.

Speaking of color, in order to get the best color from the blueberries I dissolved the sugar in 2 quarts of boiling water then added the must bags (I had to use 2) and used a potato masher to squish the berries. Heat changes the blueberry juice from green to lovely purple.

And here is the wine, next to 6 gallons of Green Apple Gewurztraminer (from a kit). I need more primary fermentors. I want to start some blackberry wine.

Whole Lotta Fermenting Going On

Fermented foods and drinks are good for our bodies and they are also incredibly fun and easy to produce. Yogurt and Kombucha are 2 of my favorites. Even wine and beer have health benefits but too much of ANY thing can be bad for you. Personally, when I'm feeling stressed, I'd rather have a glass of my favorite homemade beverage than pop a Prozac. I am quite proud of the fact that I am 52 years old, in relatively good health and take absolutely NO medications. My knee joints were acting up but that has been cured by drinking a bottle of Kombucha each day. Come to think of it, I haven't been sick in a very long time. Even my seasonal allergies have been less severe.

I have been trying to steer the husbeast in the direction of healthier eating (and drinking). He does drink some Kombucha each day and he really loves yogurt. I try to keep it on hand to send to work in his lunch. But sometimes I don't have the time to heat the milk and then watch it as it cools. Which is why I am excited about my "new to me" yogurt maker that I found on Craigslist yesterday ($15).

All the reviews were good and I was especially intrigued by the fact that you don't need to heat the milk if it's already been pasteurized. That would cut out a LOT of time. This is the first batch, made last night. I'll let you know how it turns out.

This yogurt maker was NOS (new old stock) meaning it had not been used but is no longer in production. It has been replaced with the Euro Cuisine brand. Same company, just called by a different name. Maybe because Girmi sounds too much like "germy" and no one wants to eat germy yogurt. It's going to be tough trying to find replacement glass jars for this but I'll keep looking. The new Euro Cuisine jars are a different size & shape and I'm not sure they will work.

I started another gallon of wine. This one will be Strawberry Kiwi, using strawberries from my garden. And I found a use for all those Mr. Beer bottles I've been hoarding. I ran out of Grolsch bottles for storing my booch. I was going to use my sparkling cider bottles but the stoppers I bought don't fit. I'm not overly thrilled about bottling in plastic but it's better then nothing. And here is a picture of my latest Kombucha, green tea with strawberry (using berries from my garden). It's as delicious as it looks.

Imagining A Wassail Wine

When I think of Christmas I always remember my grandmother's wassail punch. And pfefernuese cookies. But mostly the punch. It would be in a huge pot on the stove and the whole house would smell wonderful. She made this every year. But when I asked for the recipe, before she passed away, she couldn't remember. I want to try to recreate those holiday smells and flavors in a special wine. Here are the cast of characters.

I remember that the punch contained cranberry juice, oranges, cinnamon and cloves. I am using a frozen apple cranberry juice as my base. I like frozen juices because they don't contain preservatives. Make sure it is 100% juice, though. I have 3 organic oranges from my previous Full Circle delivery, some cinnamon sticks (that husbeast bought to add to a beer but never used), whole cloves and chopped raisins. Why raisins? I love the body and color that raisins add to wine. Also in the picture are yeast nutrient, pectic enzyme and Campden tablets. And a straining bag for the must. The white bucket is one of my primary fermentors.

The most time consuming part was preparing the oranges. First I used a zester to remove the rind from all 3 oranges. This will go into the must bag, along with the chopped raisins and the orange pulp. Once the zest was removed I peeled the oranges, removed the white pith (it's bitter), and put the orange sections through my juicer. I can't remember if I introduced you to my "new-to-me" juicer? This is one of my best ever thrift store finds. An ACME Supreme Juicerator for $19.99. These go for $200 new. Especially with the stainless steel bowl and basket. I was pretty darned excited when I saw it on the shelf at Bargain World.

And it works perfectly. It extracts every last bit of juice leaving a nice dry pulp. This is the juice from my 3 oranges.

That wassail wine is now waiting overnight for the Campden tablet to gas off and kill any yeasts that are present on any of the ingredients. I also started a 2 gallon batch of my raspberry apple wine. They are hanging out in the kitchen, covered with towels.

I have some yeast starter going and will pitch the yeast late this afternoon, after the Campden is finished doing its thing. You can't tell by the next  picture but the yeast is bubbling away, multiplying for me. When I pitch it there will be many more yeast cells than if I just pitched the dry yeast in on top. We want to give the wine a good strong start.

This is the all purpose wine yeast I use. Buying it in bulk saves a LOT of money over buying the individual foil packets. I store this in the freezer and it should last a long time. 

Goodbye Cyser Mead....

...though I never.....knew you at all... 

(sung to Elton John's 'Candle In The Wind')

I am in mourning. You will be truly missed. Cut down so young. In the prime of life. The guilt I feel is crushing. Farewell, my beloved.

Yes, it's true. The apple cyser mead, that I had been lovingly coddling since December 12, 2010, is no more. I had neglected to check on it in the nearly month and a half since my retirement. The happy day finally arrived when it was due to be bottled. When I went to fetch it from the bulk aging closet I found, to my absolute HORROR, that the water had evaporated from the airlock and my precious mead had been left unprotected for God knows how long. Pouring that golden nectar down the drain was one of the hardest things I've ever done. The remaining 5 gallons of country wines and meads were fine (they had a different style of airlock) but I did find mold growing in the water in a couple of the bubblers. I hastily rinsed them and added fresh water and resolved to check them closer, in the morning, and bottle if they were ready. That was the evening of August 2nd. I didn't sleep well. I kept waking up and remembering about the mead, and worrying that I would have to toss out more of the wines I had spent so much time creating.

Yesterday I set to work. I checked all 5 of the gallon fermentors. 3 of them were ready for bottling and the other 2 needed to be racked. Here are the results of my labors. 15 bottles of some of the tastiest wine I've ever had the pleasure to drink.

From left to right:

Mandarin Orange Banana, Raspberry Apple & Apple Raisin.

(5 bottles of each)

I like my wines to be a little on the sweet side. I back sweetened each gallon with 1/2 cup of sugar (dissolved in 1/4 cup of water). I also added 1/2 tsp. of stabilizer to each bottling bucket, to inhibit further fermentation. All of these wines were racked numerous times and left to age for months, so there shouldn't be any active yeast left. But better to be safe than sorry. This is my high tech set up. Here I am transferring the wine from the fermentor to the bottling bucket, to which the sugar syrup and stabilizer has been added.

Look how clear the wine is. That is what you are looking for.

Once it is clear you can bottle it and add it to your cellar.

This is the apple raisin wine, BTW.

And here it is, all freshly bottled. I got 5 bottles from

each gallon of wine, plus a little sample for the winemaker.

Here is the raspberry apple:

(made with frozen apple juice and my fresh raspberries)

And the one I am most proud of, mandarin orange banana. The husbeast told me I couldn't make a proper wine using oranges. But a customer (when I was still employed at the yarn shop) brought in a bag of "past their prime" mandarin oranges and you know how I hate to waste things. I also had a couple of over ripe bananas at home, so combined to two to make this concoction. And it is yummy! Bet you won't find anything like this on the store shelves.

Even though I lost my prize mead, it was a good (and painful) lesson to learn. I need to keep a closer check on the bulk aging closet, especially during the hot summer months. I won't make that mistake again. I was so distraught that I was considering giving up wine making. But after bottling these lovelies I am even more enthralled with the process.