Brewing Notes (Cider and Wine)

Mainly just notes for myself so I don't forget when I did what. Today I racked the rhubarb wine into a clean carboy. It's been about a month in the first one, and a week in a fermentation bucket before that. I tasted it as a transferred it and it's AWFUL. But that doesn't mean anything. The plum wine was gross at this stage too, and it turned it pretty good. This is only my second attempt at fruit wine. Last year's plum wine was the first. Having never even tasted rhubarb wine before, let alone made it, I have nothing to compare it to. I just had so much rhubarb I had to do something with it. If it turns out horrible it's no big loss - my plant puts out rhubarb enough for as muchexperimentation as I feel like doing. 

Also racked the cider into a second carboy.  The cider tastes pretty good already. It's very dry, though. I think when I bottle it in a couple weeks I will add a bit of sugar for a little sweetness and fizz. I like my cider frizzante. 

Brewing is fun. It feels like magic. 

Fall Fermentation (Wine and Cider)

Plum wine in the autumn sun 

The satisfactions of living off of one's own land are many and varied. It is, for example, delightful to invite my extended family over for Thanksgiving and feed them on turkey we raised ourselves and apple pie made from the apples on the trees of our own orchard.  It makes me happy and proud to throw a big birthday bash for Homero and give his Mexican friends the pleasure of an old-fashioned goat barbacoa such as they remember from their younger days back home in Jalisco or Oaxaca; the slaughter, butchery, and the digging of the pit oven included. These pleasures still lie in the future this year - imagining them is one of the distinct joys of this short ephemeral season. 

This is my favorite time of year - after the heat of summer has dissipated and the leaves have turned and are falling, creating a crisp, fragrant carpet underfoot - but before the rains have turned everything into cold muck. The sky these past several days is a cool, cerulean blue, and the trees are ninety different shades of gold, orange, burgundy, and brown. I try to let the goats out every afternoon to forage on the dry leaves and blackberry vines, and on the fall-flushed grass before the first frost comes and kills the nutrition. 

Today I enjoyed the unique pleasure of sitting out in the late afternoon sun on a warm October afternoon and drinking a glass of beautiful, pink, home-brew plum wine. I'd have to page back in this blog to find out when, exactly, I started this batch of plum wine. I don't want to do that - bathed as I am in the rosy glow of the same. Let's just posit that the wine was ready, today, for bottling. I decided to do it today not because of any learned examination of the wine itself, but because I had finally collected a sufficient number of large brown bottles. Corona beer puts out a "family" size that measures 36 ounces. There were eight of them lined up today, and I decided that the time was ripe. 

I have never made wine before - though I have made apple cider a few times. In fact, I made apple cider earlier this year. That's a funny story, and a lesson. We pressed apples on three separate occasions this year, which is three times more often than we usually do. Faced with many gallons of fresh juice, I decided to try making hard cider. I'm not the kind of person who cautiously measures and precisely calibrates anything. I'm more of a "wing it" kind of cook. I'm a good cook, I won't ever say I'm not, but I am much better at soup (such a forgiving medium) than I am at baking cakes.  When it comes to brewing, that means I am not going to be exactly certain of the strength of my creations. 

A few weeks ago, I bottled this year's cider. I bottled it in these same 36 oz Corona bottles. My husband, seeing them lined up on the mantle, decided he was thirsty and didn't feel like going to the store. Accustomed as he was to downing one of these hefty bottles full of Corona, he did just that. But the bottle was full of home-brew cider. Hard cider that you buy in the store is usually more or less beer strength - 5 to 7%. I, however, used a champagne yeast, and my cider was at least twice as strong as beer. Maybe as much as three times. Had my husband consulted me, I would have told him to drink it like wine, not like beer. Alas, he did not. 

I have never seen Homero so drunk. He was accidentally drunk, so it doesn't reflect on his character at all - but it was pretty funny nonetheless. Poor man could hardly speak, and hardly stand up. I had to put him to bed. My main regret was that he had downed  too much of the limited supply of cider.

Most of the plum wine was bottled today in the same size jugs. I simply capped them with bottle caps instead of using wine bottles and corks. My local brewer's supply store rents out a corking machine, but we don't drink enough wine to have bottles to use. I asked about using beer bottles and capping them like this, and was told that if we drank the wine within the year it shouldn't matter at all. 

No problem there. I drank about one-tenth of it today. Such a beautiful afternoon and evening. I absolutely love days like this - crisp enough that other people complain of the cold, and I can feel superior and smug sitting out in my shirtsleeves. Especially on days like this, when I have completed all my housework and I can take a book outside with me to read without remorse or guilt. Well - only the delicious guilt of reading trashy fiction instead of anything "serious." 

A canvas slingback chair, a cheap novel, a jug of new plum wine, and the sunset......

Is There Anything as Good as Apple Cider?

Oops, that's a picture of bowls full of cherries. When I selected the thumbprint, I thought it was buckets of apples. Oh well - doesn't matter. I didn't take any pictures of the first - and probably only - cider pressing of the year, because I was too busy pressing cider!

We didn't make any cider at all last year, and I missed it. Cidering is very hard work - even if you can convince other people to bring you apples so you don't have to pick them all yourself. But it is so, so worth it. There's almost nothing as good as that first drink of fresh apple cider after the sweat and the aching back of cidering.

Things that are not as good as fresh apple cider:

- finding a twenty dollar bill in the laundry

- coming home to an unexpectedly clean house

- seeing a movie you thought was going to be dumb but it turned out to be really good after all

- losing five pounds somehow without even really trying

- (average) sex

- a phone call from an old friend

- when you thought you were wrong in an argument but later you read something and find out you were right all along


Things that are almost as good as fresh apple cider:

- getting a handwritten letter in the mail from an old friend

- finding a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk

- surprise bouquet of your favorite flowers from the husband AND an unexpectedly clean house

- discovering a really, really great new author

- that dream, that one dream, swimming effortlessly underwater like a mermaid in a coral garden

- the hot bath you take after a hard day's work on the farm

- baby goats


Things that are better than fresh apple cider: 

- only you know the answer to this one. We each have a different answer and I'm not telling mine.

Cider, Revisited

As I wrote in my last post, our neighbors J. and L., our pastors and friends, are leaving town. In exchange for Homero fixing up their car, they are giving us all of J.'s homebrewing equipment - and a couple of lessons. On saturday, I went over to their house with a few gallons of freshly pressed apple cider to get my first lesson.

Wow, J. has a lot of stuff! He's a fairly serious homebrewer - meaning, I guess, that he brews several times a year and consistently turns out a yummy product. The pile of equipment he is giving us was enough to almost cover their kitchen floor. Three carboys of varying sizes; yards and yards of various types of tubing; airlocks, small buckets, mesh bags, filters and funnels of all descriptions. Large stainless steel kettles. A stainless steel chiller - which is a really cool item that enables to cool down five gallons of boiling mash to room temperature in short order. A stand-up bottlecapper. Bags of bottlecaps. And several boxes of bottles.

the bottle-capper

the chiller

When I arrived, J. had a batch of dandelion wine in the smallest carboy that was ready to bottle. So we did that first, and I learned how to sterilize bottles and tubes, siphon the liquid off the top of the carboy into the bottles and how to use the bottlecapper. We sampled the wine, of course, and it gave the rest of the proceedings a certain golden, summery glow - which I believe is the whole point of dandelion wine.

Some of the equipment...

J. has not actually tried making cider before, probably because he doesn't have a cider press. Believe me, when you have ten or fifteen gallons of fresh cider on hand, turning it into a storable product - a storable alcoholic product - floats to the top of one's mind. Winemaking, let us not forget, is one of the preservation arts, no less than smoking or drying. Originally, in fact, winemaking was most likely a semi-accidental by-product of preserving fruit. The pleasant effects of alcohol were probably a felicitous side-effect, one that was only afterwards studied, harnessed, and turned into an art in its own right.

God bless the internet - in under five minutes, we had located a simple recipe for hard apple cider. We added two cups of sugar per gallon of fresh cider and brought it to a temperature just short of boiling. Then we let it cool to blood temperature, more or less (we didn't use the chiller, because it needs to be well-washed and sterilized), and poured it into the carboy. At this point, before you add the yeast, you want to aerate the product, so we shook it up real good.

Then J. put in the yeast - a champagne yeast which I bought at the Four Corners brewing supply in bellingham, and capped the carboy with an airlock. Today, not quite 48 hours later, he called me to let me know that the cider is bubbling away. In a week or so, we will decant it into another carboy for the secondary fermentation, and a week after that I will bottle it. Probably by myself, since I think J. and L. will be gone by then.

I hope this batch comes out better than my single past batch, which was wholly undrinkable. I'm very much looking forward to adding brewing to my small but growing repertoire of traditional skills. I can think of no other ability that has the ability to add so much cheer to a long dark winter.

I read in the paper today that there is a new La Nina system forming in the pacific, meaning another wetter and colder than usual winter around here. Here's hoping that we will have plenty of hard cider to keep our spirits up!

Good News, Bad News

I'm sad, because my pastor is moving across the country to be some other church's pastor. Pastor L. and her husband J. are friends as well as spiritual leaders, and we will miss them greatly. I can't even say much more about it, because I don't feel like crying at 11:00 in the morning.

They will be driving across the country, and came to Homero to check out their car and make sure it is fit for a long journey. Homero looked, and found several important things that needed to be fixed. He told them to get the parts and there would be no charge for the labor. Of course they protested, and we protested, and they said "we can't possibly..." and we said "we can't possibly..." and we were at an impasse.

Then J. called the next day and said, "you know, we are selling off most of our stuff, anything that won't fit in the car. Would you be interested in accepting our brewing equipment as payment for the mechanic work?" J., you see, is an enthusiastic and talented homebrewer. We have sampled his product a few times and can attest to it's deliciousness. He and Homero have talked several times about getting together to do a few batches, but it just hadn't happened.

I have had a little run-in with homebrewing of my own (Cider Season) and it was a miserable failure. I've always wanted to give it another go, but making cider is such hard work - picking the apples, hauling the press out of the garage, washing the apples, getting stung by bees, cleaning everything up afterwards - that I just haven't wanted to risk turning the hard-earned delicious fresh cider into disgusting undrinkable sludge. Again.

HOWEVER! If we are to have our very own brewing equipment, and a few lessons from a master before they (sniff) go away, then I am willing to take the plunge. Delighted, in fact.

Only problem - I still don't have any APPLES.

Gotta work on that.

Homebrewers Make Good!

Hooray! Several weeks ago, a couple of college age homebrewin' boys came to press apples with me. Even though I have burned in the past by homebrewers who take all my juice and never deliver the promised cider, I decided to take a chance on these boys. What the heck, I already had a freezer full of juice. So instead of taking 50% of the fresh juice (my usual take), I asked for 25% of the finished product back. I figured odds were 50/50 I'd never see them again.

But on friday, they showed up! With 24 bottles of hard cider! They said they had just bottled it, so leave it at room temperature for another couple of weeks, but it should be ready to drink by Thanksgiving.

I'm SO glad I'm hosting this year!

Quiet Days on the Homefront

I'd be writing more, but there's just not that much to write about. This is the quiet time of year. We still have the rent-a-buck here, and we are still living in a faint miasma of funky goat ball pheromones and watching the goats butt heads and tails together, but other than that, there's not much going on.

A black hen is still on her eggs up in the hayloft. I think today I will clean out the rabbit hutch and get it ready to transfer her and her eggs into. And I'm going to keep them there as long as possible.

Food preservation season is over. Maybe, maybe someone will still want to press a few apples, but there aren't that many apples around any more. I did have fun making tepache - basically, wild fermented apple-beer. Leave it out on a warm countertop for three or four days, until it gets a not-unpleasant tang, then freeze it. Remove ice. The liquid left over is pretty strongly alcoholic. I'm guessing here, but maybe 12-15%? From a gallon of cider, I got a quart of tepache. I poured that into a quart jar and screwed the cap on loosely and left it in the fridge for another two days. When I opened the jar, it was fizzy and quite delicious. And rather heady. I would

try making more, but I'm all out of fresh cider. I am also out of cheese and running out of eggs.

But the freezer is still full of beef and berries. And seven or eight gallons of frozen cider.

The last food preservation job of the year is butchering the goats. I am not looking forward to it, but it is almost time. When we are feeding the goats exclusively hay, then it's time. When the weather is cold enough to hang them for a day or so, it's time. When they are fat (and they are) it's time.

I better go get a gun, I guess.

Apples Kicked my Ass

After the girl scouts went home, a lovely older couple from Lynden showed up with a full barrel (or more) of Russet apples off their antique tree.

I've heard of Russets before but I hadn't ever, to my knowledge, eaten them. They are kind of a homely apple; small, greenish-brown, and speckled. But they are also a freakishly delicious apple. Crisp, sweet, and juicy.

This gentleman's apples were terrific, clearly from a very healthy tree. They hadn't a scab, a wormhole, or a bruise on them anywhere. The cider they made was, like the apples, rather homely and kind of brown, but extremely sweet and flavorful. They took home about six gallons of cider, and I got about four - plus all the extra apples, which amounted to a couple of tote bags full. I think we will mostly just eat them as is, but if there are too many for us to eat in a timely fashion, I'll have to see how they cook up.

I believe I might be done with cider for the year. There are ten or more gallons frozen in the chest freezer, and a couple of gallons in the fridge. My arms and legs are killing me, and I got a wasp trapped in my dress today. It didn't sting me; it was far too drunk on apple cider. But still.

Apple Madness

More people came over to cider yesterday afternoon. They were a very sweet couple originally from New York with six or seven big tote bags full of beautiful apples. Almost too beautiful to press, except what else can you do with 500 apples? I think they were gravensteins. They made a very clear, sweet cider, and lots of it. About seven gallons, and the couple wouldn't take more than two. They also left me the thirty or apples that were left over from the last barrel. I think I'll make a pie this evening.

The press itself is showing its age. It still works perfectly, but the frame is getting rather rickety and the blades are in need of sharpening. Also the wooden tray that the barrels sit on is a little bit warped and the juice runs out the sides unless we cover the tray with something flexible like tinfoil or chopping mats. I think at the end of this apple season I will see about getting it serviced..... at least, the blades removed and sharpened and some screws tightened or whatever. This is the same press we used when I was a child in Woodinville, after all, and I doubt it was new then.

Cidering Party

What a great day I had yesterday. Two of my friends came over with their husbands, kids, and boxes of apples and pears to make cider.

I made lunch, and beforehand we had a picnic on the grass in the lovely bright september sunshine. The kids played together beautifully. The men talked easily with beers in their hands (including Homero! Yay!) and bonded over the mechanical aspects of pressing, while us girls chatted as we washed fruit and cast an occasional eye in the direction of the kids.

When we ran out of apples we raided the neighbor's tree. She owes me apples.

All in all we pressed some eight or nine gallons of a delicious cider, roughly 80% apple and 20% pear. I love cidering.

Apple Overload

   Apples and equipment are sterilized in a very dilute bleach-water bath

   Hot day + hard work + cider and pulp everywhere = sweat + wasps

Everyone wants to use the cider press! I have appointments lined up all week. Today a family with four kids is coming over, and the dad says he has two 55 gallon drums full of apples. A guy came over last week with a whole bunch of windfalls which he pressed to make ethanol for his Prius. (Don't worry, I carefully disinfected the press afterwards.) And I have about 150 pounds of apples in the shed, still.

My problem is that I don't have any containers for juice. Last year we saved all our gallon milk jugs and used them for juice storage, but this year I haven't bought any milk at all since April. I have my 6 gallon carboy, of course, but my first batch of hard cider is just about ready to decant into the carboy for the secondary fermentation, so I can't use it. I guess I could use the 6 gallon plastic bucket that is currently holding the hard cider, if I decanted it right now, but I would have no way to refrigerate it, and without refrigeration, it turns into vinegar in about two days. 

I guess I'll just have to use the big jars that I use for milking, and figure out how to get more jars quick!

Cider Season

My lovely old apple press, before I dragged it out of the shed and killed my back.

                                        First batch of juice

                                        Apples waiting to be pressed

Finally, the apples are ripening. After much scouting about, I now have a virtually unlimited supply of basically free apples; all I have to do is pick them. Since my sources have many different varieties, I should have apples all season long.

This year, I decided to start a new project. As much as I love sweet cider, and I do, there is a limit to how much one family can drink. Last year we drank cider with every meal, we froze some, we gave some away, we did our level best, but we still had cider fermenting in the fridge after a while. So I decided, why not ferment it on purpose?

Brewing is one of those intimidating culinary tasks. All you have to do is open a book and you see terminology like "titration" and "specific gravity." The list of necessary equipment includes things I last saw in high school chem lab. But hey, I've tackled other intimidating culinary tasks in this past year, like cheesemaking, canning, and pickling. Those things all had a learning curve, but I did okay. I'm up for it. Brewing may be a step up from canning, but it's not charcuterie (that's for next year.).

And besides, how can I play the self-sufficiency game in my head if I can't imagine getting pleasantly tossed?

So I went to the local brew supply store and bought the absolute minimum: a plastic fermenting bucket for the primary fermentation, a glass carboy for the secondary fermentation, two airlocks, a siphon, and some tubing. Oh yes, and yeast. I'm not even going to bottle, at least until I know if I can make anything worthy of bottling. It will be the middle of October before I can taste my first cider.

I pressed for the first time today, and drank sweet cider with supper. I also threw my back out moving that damn heavy machine. Gotta take the bitter with the sweet.