We’re moving house in a few weeks before I can get on with the packing, I needed to sort out some racking. With the success of our beer making, some of my older experiments had been forgotten about. In particular, there’s the dubious Coffee Wine which has been sitting in a demijohn under the stairs for several months and has built up a solid lees. It needs racking before I try and move it, although I have given up all hope of this clearing, or even being drinkable.

Also, there’s the cider that I never intended to make. After our apple pressing day back in autumn, I brought back a 2 litre bottle of apple juice intending to drink it as juice. However, it has lain forgotten down the side of the fridge since then – its beatifully clear on a good sediment and the bottle is now incredibly pressurised. This also need racking (into glass bottles to condition) and I didn’t think this was going to be a problem. But as soon as I opened the bottle just crack, there was huge hiss of escaping gas and the contents began to seeth an bubble furiously churning up the sediment completely. I’d never seen anything like it since the Geek taught me about booby-trapping bottles of diet coke with Mento’s. Needless to say the bottling was a disaster – I ended up with two and a half bottles of opaque scrumpy which was still so fizzy I didn’t dare prime it. Will the same thing happen when I open these ones? Who knows. We haven’t tried any of the cider we made yet. We will have to set a date for a tasting session.

And next time, I think I need to make sure I allow for proper aerobic fermentation…

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Trenchfoot and I finally acquired the pressurised keg from the Squire, and having cleaned out the rather soily odours, we filled it with the OBC that had been stewing in my room for several weeks. The one drawback to the keg approach, as opposed to using coke bottles is the agitation of the priming sugar for the secondary fermentation. I gave it a good initial shake when we first bottled it, but was not content, so gave it a further shuggle that night. Dissatisfied at the output the handle grip was giving me, I decided to switch grip. As I was doing so, I lost control of the keg, and it rather inconveniently chose to fall on the tap. An impressive explosion ensued, such that my walls are now covered in beer. Amazingly I managed to salvage an impressive 10 bottles of beer (brew2 finally got the treatment it deserved).

Racked my Tesco Value pineapple wine which has had plenty of time to ferment but was stubbornly bubbling through one blip every few hours. I added a campden tablet, half a teaspoon of fermentation stopper and also sweetened it with 500g sugar as I am going to make this into a dessert wine.

Its tasting lovely and will only improve after being in the bottle for a few months. Am going to let it clear for a few days and them bottle it and try it at Christmas. Nice.