Summer is here and knowing that it will will only last a few days at most, I invited a bunch of friends over for a barbeque. Summer just isn’t summer without spending at least one evening defiantly trying to cook sausages in the pouring rain, or biting through the thick black crust on a piece of burnt chicken to find that it is complete raw and bloody in the centre. Yum…

It was also a good opportunity to crack open a few bottles of the unidentified homemade wines that are cluttering up the garden shed, sample the accidental cider, and at last to have my long-awaited mead taste-off with Fendog.

Firstly, the cider. Well, what can I say… it was sweeter that I expected, and flatter than Fendog’s wallet. After the explosive bottling episode, I had expected some secondary fermentation in the bottles but clearly the yeast had bought it. Still, it was very pleasant. I’m not a cider fan but could happily have enjoyed a couple of jars of this scrumpy. The Paramedic, who is a cider drinker, also gave it the thumbs up.

Next, the mead. We had to drink our way through three (still unknown) bottles til we actually located my mead, but we got there eventually, and thankfully Fendog had managed to distiguish his mead from his (potentially poisonous) ginger wine. Here is my completely unbiased review of the two meads:

As I have mentioned in a previous post, we are getting ready move house and today’s job was to clear out the cupboard under the stairs. Since getting into beer brewing, I have not only given up on the wine-making but also lost track of all the finished wines that I had left to condiiton in said cupboard. My delight in rediscovering these dusty old bottles must had matched that of Tischendorf at St Catherine’s Monastery. Most have been there for several months or even years and are surely ready to drink by now. One of the things that puts people off making wine is the agonisingly long wait between bottling and drinking. But now, having forgotten all about them, I have a vast selection to get stuck into – over 60 bottles of the stuff!!!

One slight problem….. many of them are unlabelled and I can’t for the life of me remember what they are! Its funny – at the time labelling seems like such a faff and you think “I’m not stupid, I’ll remember what this is. Its not difficult”. But I realise now that is a schoolboy error. I have 2 batches of white and 2 batches red that are mystery wines. I know that one of the whites is the pineapple and one is the mead, but they have all gotten mixed up. I have no idea about the red. Perhaps I can work it out when I open them.

Perhaps a housewarming party in the new place will be a great way to identify them and make a dent in my stocks.

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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With Trenchfoot ministering to the good folk of Banbury today, as in our former ministerial days, I shall be walking in his footsteps in a couple of weeks, so am getting in some prep this afternoon, with the carboy of ale fermenting on my desk as inspiration.

As I procrastinate, looking back through some old posts makes me realise that it’s high time we tasted some of our (well mainly Trenchfoot’s) experimental brews.  I’m particularly interested in trying some of this coffee wine, as well as maybe some of that pineaplle… there’s also my dandelion, mint and ginger wines (though I have no idea which wine is which in my cupboard). 

Of probably greatest import, however, would be the much spoken of mead taste-off.  Trenchfoot, in private conversations with the author, has goaded me, saying how much better his mead will be.  While, I fear that his thoughts may prove to be true, you know where they say the proof of puddings is…

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.

I know it sounds minging, and it probably is. But I thought I would give it a go. This recipe is adapted from one found on Jack Keller’s website. Jack is an elder statesman of winemaking and although his site is in desperate need of a makeover, it is an absolute treasure trove of valuable information and recipes (if you can find what you want).

Ingredients:

• 225g ground coffee
• 1.1kg soft dark brown sugar
• 4.5l water
• 1.5tsp citric acid
• 0.5tsp wine tannin
• 1tsp yeast nutrient
• 1tsp wine yeast

Method

• Bring water to the boil and dissolve in sugar
• Add coffee, bring to the boil again. Then remove from heat and leave to cool
• Strain in to a sterilised demijohn and add other ingredients
• Fit airlock and leave to ferment

Not sure what I will do in terms of racking, etc. Jack suggests racking 3 times, 60 days apart. I think I will see how it goes.

Right… needed to clear out the fridge today – otherwise, some of the stuff in there was going to be able walk out on its own soon. Amongst the stuff that had to go was a bowl of strawberries and a bowl of raspberries (both homegrown, and both beginning to go off), half a jar of marmalade, a nearly full jar of cranberry sauce (left over from last Christmas – or was it the the one before?), and a partial jar of apple and blackcurrent jam that I made in 2005. We also had loads of bags of different sugars that had been open for years (demerara, muscavado, dark brown, icing…)

Not being being one to waste food, I wanged it all in a bucket and got it fermenting. This one could go either way…

The Queen is out of town for a few days, so I took the opportunity to host a cheese and wine evening in honour of Fendog’s birthday. Despite the particularly unhelpful staff, he and Gogs managed to get an amazing range of fromage from the Oxford Cheese Company. Then we picked up a selection of wine from Majestic. Didn’t realise they had a tasting counter! Nice. I suspect there may be a few lunch time visits in the future…

Anyway, I leave it to the Fendog to fill you in on the details of the party. Suffice to say, it was truly cheesemungous.

We also polished off the final bottle of my sparkling Parsnip Wine which went down well. Shame its all gone now – since it was the result of a malolactic fermentation, it’s completely un-reproducible. But it has inspired me to make some proper sparkling wines in the future.

Not content to let Trenchfoot hog the limelight, I am finally back and ready for action after my compatriot has laid down the gauntlet with his ‘turd in a jar’ mead. I’ve had some tinned strawberries in the cupboard for quite some time now, desperate to have a go at a wine from tinned fruits following Trenchfoot’s quite outstanding plum wine cracked out at the Church christmas party. I’m going for a rather simple recipe:

2 x 400g tin of strawberries
1 kilo sugar
2 medium lemons
1/2 teaspoon tannin (or leave a tea bag to soak in a little water)
Pectolase (helps to clear the wine)
Yeast nutrient
Wine yeast
Water to 1 gallon

Drain off the syrup from the strawberries, and put to one side. Mash strawberries in a bucket. Dissolve the sugar in c. 4 pints of boiling water. Add syrup and sugar to strawberries, top up water to gallon and allow to cool. Add Tannin, pectolase, yeast and yeast nutrient and cover bucket.  Stir daily for 4 days before throwing into a demijohn via a nylon sieve allowing fermentation to be completed.

Dispatched a bottle of my recent Banana effort up to Birmingham for the Green Cushion (an old housemate). Although it still needed several months in the bottle to mature, the plonker couldn’t resist opening it for a sample. He then had the cheek to say it didn’t taste good!

Patience is a fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22) and I was dissapointed that my friend was lacking in this essential virtue.

One thing you need with country wine is patience. They often need a good few months to mature after bottling before they are quaffable.
Often, if a wine does not come out as I wanted, I leave the rest of the batch for several months (or years!) and it can taste complete different the next time you come to it. Several bad batches have become quite pleasant after a few years maturing.