Jalepeno Mead - April 2018

Last fall I made a gallon of jalepeno mead for Christmas and New Year.  It was sooooo good.  So I tripled the recipe to make a big batch.  We drank this while it was still fizzy and after it clarified.  Both were awesome.  The recipe couldn't be simpler.

10 pounds of honey
2-3 jalepeno
water

That's it.  I used local honey.  It turns out very sweet and the pepper adds a neat after flavor and zing that makes you want more.  It takes a very long time to finish and clarify.  The first batch made me think I did something wrong because it took so long.

After 1 full day of getting started I stirred it to make sure everything was still mixed.  Mistake.  It bubbled up like a soda bottle and I wasted about a cup or so.  Sad.  Still have plenty left.  No more stirring :-)

5/19/2018 - I put the airlock on a week ago and it's bubbling. I remember from my first batch that it takes a very long time to finish. It bubbles slowly and only wh e it starts to settle is it almost done.  Based on the way it looks now it will be a long time coming.

8/20/2018 - Bottled this past weekend.  Oh my it is soooo tasty.  I poured off some dregs for tasting after I bottled it.  Delicious.  I bought some grolsch style clear bottles and it looks so nice.  I got 12 small bottles and 3 750ml bottles from the batch.  Gave a bottle to the in-laws as a gift.

Turbo Peach November 2017

I haven't been able to taste the peach wine that I made in August yet but I bet it will be tasty based on my little taste when I was bottling it.  This got me to thinking that I needed to do something fun with the leftover peaches in my freezer.  Need to make room for Thanksgiving stuff.

I decided to make high-octane peach wine from them.  I figure that since they were frozen they might yield more juice and flavor.  The trick with high-octane is that you need to feed the yeast regularly so they keep producing the alcohol.

I took the frozen peaches and put them in the 3 gallon stock pot.  I warmed them a little to thaw them and then let them sit overnight.  I also added some pectin at this point to try to get more juice out of them.  The next day I mashed them up and got the juice out of them.  This was kind of tough because I think being frozen caused them to get slimy instead of juicy.  Still I actually got more juice than I wanted so I may end up with less alcohol content than I had intended since there is not much space in the jug.

I checked the plain juice and it was at a little over 5% sugar which is a good start.  I used my other peach batch as a starting point of sorts.

Ingredients:

• Peaches
• 2 bags of Morning Thunder tea (to add tannin)
• 2 tsp pectin in jug (after the overnight)
• 2 tsp acid blend.  A little dangerous because I don't know the initial acid starting point but the raw peach tasted pretty tame and I'm trying to boost the flavor
• Yeast
• Yeast nutrient
• Total sugar added: 18 cups

The picture below shows the initial jug.  I'll keep the pulp in it for longer than usual to try to increase the flavor.  The plan is to check the sugar daily and as it approaches 0% I'll add some sugar syrup until it stops fermenting or the jug is full, whichever happens first.

11/24/2017 - The batch is fermenting like crazy just like the last batch.  Maybe there's something about peaches.  I checked it on Saturday morning and it was almost at zero so I added 4 cups of melted sugar.  I read that this is called chaptalizing.  I checked on Sunday and again it was almost 0 so I added another 4 cups and a tablespoon of yeast nutrient.  Each 4 cups brought me back to about 5%.  So at this point it should be 10-15% alcohol.  I also read that you do not have to melt the sugar.  Good to know as I am running out of space.  I took a taste and it tastes good.  I'll play with the acid blend once it starts to finish using the taste method.

11/27/2017 - This morning it was still fermenting like crazy.  I didn't want it to starve through the day so I added a cup of sugar raw, not melted.

11/27/2017 - This evening I started thinking about how much more the wined could take and I was running out of jug space so I got a 5 gallon jug out of the garage and swapped them.  It smelled wonderful.  I added 4 more cups of sugar and had a taste.  It tastes good but the flavor seemed a little weak.  I found another 2 quarts of frozen peaches and melted them in the microwave.  Mashed them up and put them in.

11/28/2017 - After work the fermenting has slowed but is still present.  I added 2 cups of sugar and 3 tsp of yeast nutrient.  Prior to adding the sugar I checked the gravity and it was at about 6% so the sugar was a just in case.  I may try getting a stronger yeast to give it one more kick... or maybe not.  I haven't decided.

11/30/2017 - Last night when I got home I could see that the mix was still flurrying.  I think this happens because when the sugar content is high the pulp floats to the top.  As the sugar goes down it all sinks and the CO2 lifts it up.  Anyway, it was still churning this morning.  I checked the gravity and it was about 4%.  I don't want to shock it so I added 1 cup of sugar and will watch it daily.  I took a taste and the alcohol is higher.  The added peach and sugar are making it pretty tasty too.

12/1/2017 - Last night it was still bubbling pretty well.  This morning it was a little quieter.  I checked the gravity at about 3% and added one cup of sugar.  I think it's getting close to the end of what the yeast can handle.  It tastes very good.  I'm glad I added the extra peach.  With this cup of sugar I have 18 cups of sugar in there.  Since 4 brought it to 5% 18 should bring it to almost 22%.  I doubt there is that much alcohol in there but it gives an idea of how much sugar the yeast can handle.  I think I'll take it off of the fruit this weekend.

12/13/2017 - I took it off of the fruit and put the airlock on.  It's been bubbling about every 15 seconds ever since.  It tasted very good.  I think the extra peach was a good idea.  I'll play around with the acid blend after the fermentation stops.

1/24/2018 - Still bubbling about once every 2 minutes.  Must be close to done.  the color has really deepened.

2/28/2018 - Bottled the wine.  Super strong and not super tasty.  Added a bunch of acid blend to improve the taste a little.  It reminds me of when I made the maple wine that seemed so harsh.  It has a slight bourbon taste.  Makes me wonder if it will mellow and become tasty later.  Might be good in a sangria in the summer.

7/4/2018 - We made some sangria with it at Myrtle beach.  It wasn't bad.  Usable.  Very strong.  A great experiment.  I might find other uses for it.  It's not bad for sipping though.  Might be good on ice.

September 2019 - Over the past year I've opened a couple of these bottles for sipping.  It's strong and sharp, a little rough, less rough than whiskey.  The more I drink it the more I like it.  A little goes a long way, great for sipping.  the peach flavor seems to come out more and more.  Oddly, Mary B really likes it with orange juice.  I have to experiment to see if it's the flavor, the sweetness, or the acid that improves it.  I'll make another batch of this in the summer.

Initial Batch

Lyric's Strawberry Wine September 2017

Lyric will be 21 in January and asked me for a very special gift.  She asked if I would make her some strawberry wine.  I thought it was a very special request.  I researched a little and found a brewer's product on Amazon and followed the recipe exactly.  This will be the first time I've used pectin enzyme and acid blend.

Ingredients:

• 1 can strawberry pulp and juice
• Water to make 3 gallons
• 7 lbs sugar
• Acid blend
• Yeast nutrient
• pectin enzyme

Since the pulp was mostly juice there was no need to let it sit overnight so I dumped everything in the jug.  I heated water to melt the sugar.  I was surprised at how much sugar it needed.  Below is the first ferment.  It started bubbling voraciously on the first day and has been cooking for a week.  I'll take it off of the pulp this weekend.  I usually do this after a week.  I don't want to chance it getting a weird taste.

9/15/2017 - I racked the wine to a second fermentation after a week.  I took a taste and it is very sweet and delicious.  It still measured 5%-10% so it has a ways to go.  After almost a week on the second ferment it is still bubbling like crazy.  The airlock is popping every 20 seconds or so.  Nice.

10/3/2017 - Still a few wee tiny bubbles happening.  I'm pretty sure that the bubbles are coming up from the spent yeast on the bottom and that it's not really still in a fermenting stage.  After writing this I decided to rack the wine to take it off of the old yeast.  It wasn't at zero yet and was still a little sweet to my liking but very tasty.  An airlock confirmed that the wine is still fermenting.

10/27/2017 - The wine had completely stopped for a week or so.  Time to bottle it.  I checked the gravity and it is not completely to zero.  Tastes pretty strong so I guess it stopped because of the strength.  Bottled really pretty.  Got 11 bottles out of it.  Should be nicely mellowed for Lyric's birthday and beyond.

1/4/2018 - Opened for Lyric's birthday.  Absolutely delicious.  Brought a bottle to Aunt T's to share as well and everyone loved it.  The character definitely changed with a little age and I feel like the taste and octane increased.  Shared with Matt from work.  He and his wife liked it as well so it's a hit.

Mixing the batch.  Day one.

Racked to new jug October 3

Bottled October 27

Opened January 4 2018 Happy Birthday

Peach Wine August 2017

It's been way too long since I made a batch of wine.  Been very busy.  I had this idea that since it's summer there must be a lot of local peaches.  The local market (Cronise in Boonsboro) said that they keep seconds off to the side for jelly makers.  We got a couple of bushels from them and still have a bunch in the freezer after making this batch of wine.

I try to keep things simple when making wine.  I try to imagine the old days and not having fancy ingredients.  I did look up online (a treat they didn't have back then) to see if there is anything different about peaches.  Didn't learn much.

Ingredients:
 - Half a bushel of peaches
 - 9 cups of sugar
 - Morning Thunder Tea
 - Lemon juice
 - Yeast
 - Yeast Food

We cut the peaches into halves and removed the pits and put them in a big 12qt stock pot.  They were already pretty soft so I mashed them with a potato masher.  I poured in about 4 - 8 cups of hot but not boiling water.  I let this sit for a day to leach out the juice.

The next day I poured off the juice into my 3 gal jug.  I got over 1 1/2 gallons.  Then I mashed and squeezed the remaining peach meat with a cheese cloth and got out about another half gallon or so eyeballing it at 2.5 gallons.  I measured the sugar using a hydrometer and it was about 5%.  I like sweet and high octane wine so I did a little math to try to get the mixture to 20%.  The math went like this:

2.5 gallons of wine at 5% sugar (8 lbs liquid per gallon) makes 20 lbs of product.  At 5% that makes one pound of sugar.  I want to end up with 3 gallons at 20% which is 24 lbs of product which means I want 4.8 lbs of total sugar.  Sugar is about .44 lbs per cup.  9 cups is about 4 lbs of sugar plus the pound that was already in there.  Like I said, not an exact science.  Plus, I never check the gravity after I add the sugar because the mixture is warmer and at that point, with the jug full, if I'm off there's nothing I can do about it anyway.

So I heat about 6-7 cups of water to almost boiling and add the sugar a little at a time so it can dissolve.  Once dissolved take it off the heat and let it sit.  If it's too hot it will kill the yeast.  I poured a little of the mixture into a mug and put my morning thunder tea in it to steep.  I also poured some into a bowl and added some warm water to get the temp down to 110º.  I put my yeast and yeast food into this bowl and mixed it up.  You have to wait about 15 minutes for the yeast to re-hydrate.  You can tell they're happy when it starts bubbling.  This was a good time to do some dishes.

I poured the yeast, tea, and a few tablespoons of lemon into the jug, mixed, covered, and put away.  I  read that the tea adds tannins which are good in fruit wines, they add a little pucker feel to the wine.  The lemon was to add a little acid to the mix.  This is supposed to enhance the flavor.  You're supposed to use wine-makers acid blend but I didn't have any.

By morning it was bubbling away.  Lots of juice, little pulp.  This should make a lot of wine.  I still have enough peaches to make another 3 gallons at least.

I can't believe it but the ferment finished after only a week!  I think this is the first time that has ever happened.  I took the wine off of the pulp for the second ferment and put an airlock on but it didn't budge for days.  I checked the gravity and it is at zero.

I got concerned that it would turn funky without any fermentation happening so I hurried out and got some corks and some bottles that a friend gave me.  Tuesday 9/5 I had the house to myself so I could spread out in the kitchen and bottle it.  I got 11 bottles!  Sweet!  I also tasted (of course) and it is delicious!  I can't wait for it to age a little.  Should be great with some mid-winter meals.  I'm thinking it would go well with pork.

March 2018 - Had a bottle of this with TV.  The flavor is changing.  Very tasty and very peachy.  Brought a bottle to T's for Easter.  Big hit.

First Ferment

Finished Product

Pumpkin Spice V2 2/26/2017

The first batch of pumpkin spice was so delicious that Mary B said I should make more.  She doesn't want us to run out in the fall.  So I followed the same recipe and steps as the first batch.  As with all things there are always slight deviations.

Notably, I started with about a half gallon less water.  The first batch was a bit unwieldy so less water made it easier to work with.  I added the remainder of the water during the step where I heated the mixture and added sugar and honey.

Another noteworthy item is that when I was heating the mixture to add the sugar it started to boil over a little.  It never scalded but I think it got hotter than the first batch.

Finally I eyeballed the spices more.  I'm sure that I added more spices than the first batch.

It's been brewing for 2 weeks now.  It started out thicker than I remember the first batch but has liquefied a lot now.  Fermentation seems pretty rapid and it smells very good.

I plan on letting this one sit on the pumpkin pulp longer than the first batch since it didn't seem to have a negative effect.

- 8/26/2017  I let it sit for a long time.  It seemed to ferment for much longer than the first batch.  I took it off and bottled it.  I don't remember the date but just realized that I didn't finish this blog entry.  Life gets busy sometimes :-)

11/23/2017 Thanksgiving - Had this and the V1 batch at Thanksgiving and everyone liked it.  The V2 batch didn't bubble in the glass.  Maybe it finished more completely.  Both were very tasty and had their own character but were very similar in taste so I guess the recipe is good.

Maple Syrup Wine 2/19/2017

This weekend we were having pancakes and Charlee says, "I love maple syrup.  Can you make wine from it?"  Of course, it's mostly sugar.  So I didn't even look this one up.  I just used what I knew from making mead.  I went for approximately 25% sugar content by weight.

• 4 cups maple syrup
• 1 cup sugar
• Box of raisins
• Water and yeast
• Yeast nutrient

Nothing fancy.  I didn't even heat the water on the stove since my tap water get's pretty hot.  Maple syrup has 53g sugar for 4 tbsp.  16 tbsp. per cup which makes 212g per cup.  A pound of sugar is 450g. So 4 cups makes 848g or 1.8 pounds.  A little extra sugar to get to 25%.  I was too excited to actually take a hydrometer reading.

I mixed the hot water and maple syrup in the gallon jug and poured the raisins in.  I heated a little water in the microwave to melt the cup of sugar and poured that in along with the yeast nutrient.  Rehydrated the yeast and pitched it in.  Within an hour it was bubbling pretty aggressively.  Depending on how it tastes when it finishes I may back-sweeten it with sugar or maple syrup.

3/5/2017 - It's still bubbling pretty well.  I could see a fair amount of old yeast at the bottom and so I siphoned it into a new bottle to let it settle and continue fermenting.  It has a slight bourbon taste.  Very enjoyable.  Unsure if I'll back sweeten or not.  I'm not a huge fan of sweet wines anyway.

1/24/2018 - Opened this to have with a Christmastime pork meal.  Wonderful.  Finished it off over the next couple of months.  I really liked the character and taste.  Although expensive I may make a small batch of this again.  It was really good.

Pumpkin Pie Wine February 5, 2017

This one may be weird but I got to thinking what other things can be fermented and thought there are a lot of pumpkins every year.  I looked online and sure enough you can ferment pumpkin.  All of the online recipes said to use chunks of pumpkin but I don't have any of that so I decided to go with canned pumpkin puree.

Ingredients:

• 3 cans (6lb) of pumpkin
• 5 cups (2lb) of sugar
• 2lb honey
• clove
• allspice
• nutmeg
• cinnamon
• ginger root
• raisins (recipes say they add body and mouth feel)

The basic idea is to make the pumpkin taste like pie, then add sugars and let it go.  The pumpkin has very little sugar, 15g per can hence the large amounts of sugar and honey.  I think this one will get bottled until the fall.

I took a gallon and a half of water and added the pumpkin in a large pot and heated it.  Add the spices and let it boil for a few minutes.  This is to kill off anything weird.  Most of the recipes that I saw had a step where you let the mixture sit for 8 hours.  I assume this is to leech the flavors out of the pumpkin.  I had to work so I let it sit for 24 hours on the stove with a lid to keep anything weird out of it.

I didn't want to water the mixture down further so I scooped out a couple quarts of the liquid and put it in a saucepan on the stove and heated but didn't boil.  I added more spices since I thought the first batch of spices was a little on the weak side.  Once the mix got up to 180º I added the sugar and kept stirring until the sugar was no longer granular.  

My estimation was that I have around 1.5 gallons of liquid.  Maybe a little more.  That's 12 pounds.  Honey is about 80% sugar so with the 2 pounds of sugar and the wee bit in the pumpkin I have a total of 4 pounds of sugar.  That's 33%.  I'm sure in reality it's less though.

I added the pumpkin, sugar mixture, raisins, and honey to a 3 gallon carboy.  I hydrated my yeast and threw it in and mixed really well.  Overnight, by the morning, the airlock was bubbling away.  I removed the airlock and covered with a towel to let some air get in if it needs to in order to keep the yeast happier.  I plan on stirring it daily during the rapid ferment just to keep things mixed.

My only concern is the thickness of the concoction.  This might be why recipes don't use puree.  After the first ferment I plan on straining through fine mesh if it doesn't settle out on its own.  It may though.  In the picture below you can see that some settling had already happened.  This morning though the settling had mixed up again, probably because of the fermenting.

2/10/2017 - I've mixed the concoction daily after work.  It was a very nice pumpkin yeast smell.  It's still pretty thick so it's hard to tell how much fermentation is happening.  So I've been putting the airlock on after mixing and can see that it's still fermenting pretty rapidly.  I've been covering it with a cloth and will go to the airlock full time when fermentation slows down.  This morning I noticed that it is clearly separating.  This is a change possibly brought on by the fermentation process.  Time will tell.

2/19/2017 - Around 2/12/2017 I got tired of waiting to see if it was going to separate so I siphoned what I could into a gallon and pint+ jugs.  I tried squeezing the pulp through cheesecloth but it was too thick so I put it in a gallon jug and have been watching it.  It's still fermenting which I think is due to the sugar getting into the pulp.  This weekend (the 19th) I siphoned off the wine and checked its gravity.  It's at 1.000 and hasn't moved for a week.  I racked this wine to see if it will settle out any more.  I don't think it will and am fairly convinced that it's completely done fermenting.  It's delicious!  Mary B says I need to make another batch because it's so good.  There's probably a good glass full of wine that came off of the extra pulp.  I'll use that to top off the wine when I bottle it or I may just drink it.

2/26/2017 - It didn't seem to be settling any so I bottled it.  I ended up with a gallon and a quart.  I kept the quart set aside so I can taste it to see how the character is changing.  I put the rest in some nice wine bottles with corks.  We plan on not touching these until the fall.  Let's see if we can wait that long.

11/23/2017 Thanksgiving - We had this and the V2 batch at Thanksgiving and it was a hit.  Everyone liked it a lot.  Theresa says that it needed maybe more cinnamon.  When she mixed it with a little ginger ale she said the flavors came out.  So, next time I make it I will add some fresh ginger.

We drank it at Thanksgiving 2017.  Very tasty!