Another Book

A friend loaned me Booze for Free by Andy Hamilton. I'm very impressed with it. So much that I think I'll be buying my own copy soon. I haven't read all of it yet, just the section entitled The Basics and I've  already garnered a few new ideas from it. I like Hamilton's style. He is easy to follow and slightly irreverent, reminding us that making booze can't be that hard when prisoners have been known to make it in jail with hardly any equipment at all.

I used one of Andy's ideas when I was straining the apple wine I started last week. It's very simple and if I had an ounce of common sense I would have thought of it myself. I used plastic clothes pegs to pin the muslin straining bag to the edge of the bucket. Previously I put the muslin inside a funnel but it really slowed the process up. I added the sugar, gave it a good stir and decanted it into a sterilised demijohn. No sign of any mad fermentation yet.

Then I saw the fly. At least it looked like a fly. It had wings. I panicked and got Bert's binoculars out. You might wonder what use binoculars would be. But if you reverse the way you look through them and hold them close to the object of interest they make a rudimentary magnifying aid. The fly started to look like a broken apple seed. I do hope so. If the fermentation stops I'll know something is wrong. I have seventeen gallons of wine in jars now. They'll not all be marvellous but I hope they will be drinkable. There is still a lot to learn.

The apple wine recipe is from Pollard and Beech. It's supposed to be a dry one. Unless you're a fly.

Making A Start

I've been blogging at Nelly's Garden since 27^th August 2004 and in the past year I've often written about my adventures in wine making. It's something I used to do years ago, maybe more than twenty years ago! Unfortunately I'd given away most of my wine making equipment so I had to start again from scratch. There were a few glass demijohns stored in the shed and a couple of tattered paperbacks and that was all I had.

I started my first two batches back in August 2011. Blackcurrant and rhubarb, both from the garden. Since then I have made a further 32 batches of wine of which half has already been bottled. That is 96 bottles of wine! At this moment I have a batch of beetroot in the primary vessel waiting yeast and 6 pounds of apples on the kitchen table to be chopped and got ready. I have a lot of frozen fruit in my freezer and a cupboard full of sugar. 

Judith Irwin writes in 'A Step by Step Guide to Making Homemade Wine' that home wine making does have its problems, the chief of these being the amount of space that is needed. She cautions, "...be careful not to get too carried away. One gallon can soon multiply into ten, and then twenty, as enthusiasm grows, and all the problems multiply with them." But as Bert says, "Where's the problem in that?"