Welches and Wood Chips Feb 2020

I'd heard of using wood chips to flavor wine and heard that it works best with red wine.  So I made a simple batch of welches wine.  I used 3 cans of concentrate to make a gallon of wine.  After the fermentation mostly stopped I boiled some hickory chips (only ones I had) to make sure any natural weird yeasts were gone.  I actually didn't like doing this step because I could see a lot of flavor going down the drain when I poured off the water.

I racked the wine off of the lees and it tastes pretty good as is.  I put three small handfuls of chips.  I'm checking every 2 days for taste.  This morning after 2 days It tastes great.  I didn't taste wood but I do taste something different.  Kind of exciting and interesting.

2/28 - So then I got the flu and it sat a few more days.  I guess it's been 6 days.  I'm tasting something, it tastes good but I wouldn't define it as woody.  It does have a more mellow taste, quite good actually.  Still waiting until I taste hickory or it starts to go south before I end the experiment.

3/4/2020 - Ended the experiment last night.  Put the wine in a half gallon bottle and shared the remaining with Mary B.  Very tasty.  I think the wood mellowed the wine some.  I don't really taste any wood flavor.  the chips were very red so they absorbed something.  I felt like the alcohol content was pretty weak, weaker than when I started.  Can't prove it but there it is.

I think next time I'll make it stronger and will be sure to take some readings.  I'm putting the half gallon away for a while to see how it changes.

May 20 - Cleaned up the wine storage area and found this.  Decided to have some and ended up "sharing" the remaining half gallon with Mary B.  It aged really nicely and wow, what a kick.  Almost too strong (said no one ever).

Pumpkin Feb 2020

February 17, 2020

Looking back through my blog I see that this is the 4th time I've made this wine.  I wanted to go bigger so I took a 6 gallon ale bucket that my friend Dave Fraticelli gave me and made a batch in there.  I reviewed all of my old notes and pretty much went the same rout with a couple notable differences.

Ingredients:

• 6 lbs canned pumpkin
• 10 cups sugar
• 4 lbs honey
• pectin enzyme
• yeast nutrient
• same spices as the original recipe

The last time I made this I noted that I didn't boil the pumpkin.  I changed that this time for no special reason.  The last batch tasted fine but something told me that boiling would be better.  So I took 2 big pots and filled 2/3 full with pumpkin and water.  I boiled for about 20 mins.  After it cooled a little (probably not enough but I get impatient) I poured them into the bucket and added water to top it up.  This is probably a mistake because if it foams up I'll probably have a mess to deal with :-).  I added the sugar, honey, pectin, and yeast nutrient and mixed it well.  It was still too hot to add the yeast so I waited overnight to do that.

We'll wait until I rack it the first time before we add the spices.  This will have the benefit of tasting the spices with the wine but will make it so the spices are not in the pulp.  So it's a trade off but that's what experimentation is for.

BTW - love the little digital scale I got for Christmas.  It made measuring out the honey very easy.

2/28/2020 - My ale pail doesn't have a good seal so I can't watch the bubbles but I popped the top yesterday and it looks like it is still bubbling.  I might give it a stir just to be sure in a few days.  No need to rush to the first racking.

4/8/2020 - A lot has happened in the past few months.  The COVID virus happened so everyone is on home lockdown.  Schools closed, I'm teleworking, getting tons done around the house.  Fiona will graduate early but possibly without a ceremony.  On the wine tip I racked the wine and squeezed out the mash.  It's kind of incredible how dry you can get it!  It's in the freezer to make pumpkin bread.  Also, I put a couple of pints in a small jug and noticed the spent yeast at the bottom and got an idea.  I siphoned the yeast and fed it some sugar and yeast nutrient and it came back to life, bubbles!  Then Mary B made bread from it.  We've made 2 loaves and the second was better than the first.  We're keeping the barm in the frigde and it seems very happy.  Making another loaf today for Easter.

So, after racking the wine I let it sit to clear out.  Some more pulp sank to the bottom and got some weird white stuff in it.  I think I remember this happening before.  Last night I racked it again.  I think the white stuff was just spent yeast.  Everything tasted fine.  So we spiced it and now it's sitting to clarify some more before I bottle it.  We went heavy on the spices this time and I really liked it.  For some reason I feel like the alcohol content is lower.  Not bad and still very tasty. 

Spices:

• Ginger - 3" root
• Nutmeg - 1 nut
• Clove - 1 tbsp
• Cinnamon - 2 tbsp
• Allspice - 5 berries

This is what it looks like today 4/8/2020.