I recently checked on my fermentations and they all moved along a step toward being finished.
My first mead, brewed to the simplest of recipes from Storm The Castle.com (This guy does all kinds of creative things including mead-making), has finally finished and 'dropped bright' (become clear). It looks really good! Still has a strong 'high alcohol' taste to it, but has mellowed a lot from when I did the first racking. I also hit it with a Campden tablet to permanently stop the fermentation.Now it just needs to age. I don't think I will be touching iot again until next summer at the earliest. It was just a really small batch, starting out at 2.25 litres, and has ended up at about 1.5 after fermentation and 2 rackings. I'll get 2 full 750 ml bottles from it. Haven't decided if I want to do anything special with it in the bottle yet or not. I thought it might be nice to add some of our passionfruit before we have to leave it behind.
Oh yeah! We will soon be leaving the warm beaches of the Hibiscus Coast and returning to Hamilton. Well, I'll be returning, the rest of the family will be living there for the first time. I'll be starting a new job there on the the 22nd of March, and we will all be moving on the weekend of the 10th - 11th of April.
We decided it would be best to let the girls finish out the school term and it gives me 2 weeks down there to try and find somewhere for us to live during my down-time. I'll be staying with my folks and driving back here on the Fridays to spend the weekend packing and getting some time with my family. We've booked the moving truck already so if we haven't found a house by the time we move it will all be going into storage.
My second fermentation is another mead, made to a basic formulation that I worked out using the GotMead.com mead calculator. I got the honey for this one from a local apiary on East Coast Road. This batch is quite a bit bigger than the first one at about 4.5 litres. I also used the yeast nutrients and acid blend to get things going, instead of peel or anything else. I also left this one a lot longer in the primary. It has come out quite a bit smoother than the first one, but I think I had the temperatures too warm on both batches so far. This second one is now out in the garage as I'm hoping the cooler temp out there will help it mellow. I'm definitely going to do a few different things with flavouring this batch as it will get me 6 bottle of finished mead.
The third thing I have brewing is one for my wife. Christi loves all the fresh fruit we get here, and while we were in Hamilton for January we picked our own blueberries. It has become a tradition with us now, as we have done it every summer for several years. We plan to keep it up every year for as long as we can too. Some of the bluberries were eaten fresh, but the majority were frozen. Christi uses them in baking muffins and a couple of other things as well as just for eating. We have watched all of the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall River Cottage series on TV and we want to make some gorse wine like he made for his summer party. I mentioned to Christi that we could make a blueberry wine as well so she had me look into it further. I found a lot of good information on all sorts of fruit wines, both online and at the local library. I got some 20-odd recipes together for blueberry wine and just sort of winged it from there, using a combination of 2 recipes. It has made about 4.5 litres of wine and I just racked it off the primary sediment a couple of weeks ago. It has already started to clear really well and smells good. It doesn't taste of much at the moment but I'm hoping the flavour will develope over the next few weeks. It will need a second racking in 5-6 weeks time. Then maybe 2 more months and another racking, 2 more months and then bottling. It's recommended to leave it to mature in the bottle for at least 6 months, so we won't be trying it any time soon.
I'm really wantig to try my hand at brewing beer, but I am very limited in both time and money at the moment, so it will have to wait for after the move and settling in. I have few bits of equipment gathered, but have mostly I've just been reading the hell out of the subject! No such thing as 'too much information'.
I'll try to get more posts in about the move before it happens, and keep updating after we settle in. I may even get recipes for the mead posted too.
that's a wild colour, dude!!
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