Raspberry Wine

I started a gallon of raspberry wine today.  Yesterday I did a post about raspberry jam and syrup. 

I decided to use some of the syrup and experiment with a fruit wine.

There was sugar already in the syrup. To make up a gallon to fill this demi-john, I used:

0.5 litre of sweet raspberry syrup

Teaspoon of yeast nutrient 

Teaspoon of wine yeast

Water

It is bubbling away nicely and I hope to enjoy a bottle of it at the end of the summer. Country wines most certainly improve with age! In both taste and the after effect on your stomach and head!!

Six months is the minimum needed to mature, and at least a year to be truly enjoyed.

I will bottle and prim this brew in 7-10 days. It will stay in the bottle till it is to be used. I don't normally double rack. I'm okay about having some sediment at the bottom of the bottles versus the work of racking twice. The bottles are stored upright in flip top bottles, so there usually isn't a problem once the bottles are handled gently.

Elderflower Champagne

I had collected more than I realised of elderflowers yesterday. I had enough to put on a batch in the fermenting bucket but i did not have a spare bucket.

Alas I have so much on that I am running out of demi-johns, bottles and buckets. My kitchen sounds like a witches coven with so many brews bubbling away!

So last night I took my foraging harvest of elderflowers and cut of the stalks and put the flower heads, lemons and enough water to cover in a large pot on the stove.

Before going to bed, I took it off the heat and added a sprinkle of champagne yeast, yeast nutrient and cream of tartar once it had cooled to warm. I covered it with a tea towel for the night.

When I stirred it this morning, it was fizzing away. The yeast had took up residence!

I had three available demi-johns to use, so I rinsed these out and set them up.

I strained the mixture through some cheese cloth and equally divided the liquid between the three demi-johns.

I rinsed the flower heads several times to extract as much juice as possible. 

I then added 700g of sugar to a gallon and filled them up with warm water. I put on the air lock and they started to bubble  immediately.

Ingredient summary per gallon

Elderflower heads

700g sugar 

Tsp yeast nutrient

Tsp cream of tartar

Lemon

Champagne yeast 

I have finally faced into bottling 27 litres of rhubarb wine. I am just ten litres in at the moment!

I love the colour and I had a wee taste. A dry rhubarb taste that has already began to soften. It doesn't taste too potent thankfully (alcohol%). I primed it with honey.

I hope the bottles don't explode!

Elderflower, Broadbeans & Onions

It is elderflower season!

Although a little behind schedule due to the cold spring. I got busy this morning at my sister's farm picking the fragrant flowers. Armed with wellies, heavy clothing and gloves to do battle with the nettles and blackberry bushes. I collected a large canvas bag of flowers that should make two gallons of wine that I will start this evening. Later in the week I will collect more flowers in my local area for a second batch.

I got a bit ruthless yesterday and pulled all the broad beans out of the polytunnel that were causing me problems. 

They were taking up a lot of room and had gotten very tall. They shaded out many of the surrounding plants and was causing air to stagnant in the tunnel which would have caused rot.I felt guilty at the time but now I am so pleased with the amount of space that it has freed up. 

I wheeled in a few loads of manure/compost and worked that into the soil. I then planted out a few pumpkin plants that had been long overdue to get their roots into the good soil. The air circulation and light is much improved this morning.

The onions are doing great! We sowed 300 sets earlier in the year. The flavour is strong and moist compared to shop bought onions. Many of them are setting seeds which I will save. Next month they will start to fall over, and then they are ready for harvesting. 

We will move them into the polytunnel to dry out and later plait them for use in the kitchen.

Washing brewing yeast

I have started to reuse yeast from finished brews. It is so easy and of course its free. 

The best thing about it is that I always have yeast available when I decide to start a brew.

There is nothing more frustrating then being excited when somebody give you surplus of produce but then you realize that you have no yeast. I have used bread yeast when I was stuck, which worked fine!

Now you don't need to wash the yeast, but it is helpful, if you don't want to pass on flavours from the previous brew, although this can be a benefit.

If you don't wish to wash it just use a few cups of wort from the previous brew.

Or you can just top up the uncleaned demi-john or bucket with your new brew leaving the original wort at the bottom. This is ideal if putting on a similar brew.

How to wash brew yeast:

Add a few litres of water to the wort and let this settle for twenty mins.

Then pour off the water/fluid into a clean jar, leaving behind the sediment.

Leave the jar in the fridge for a week or until you need it.

Then pour off the excess fluid and use the sediment at the bottom as the yeast. 

There will be enough for several batches.

It will keep for a few months in the fridge. I have frozen some but have yet to try them.

I have 6 gallons of rhubarb wine on, one gallon of raspberry beer and in the next few days as the elderflower start to open I will be starting elderflower wine.

Our home-brew larder is starting to empty out as we have finished off the ginger beer, larger and yummy nettle beer. That leaves us stout and ale!

That will be a lot of bottles for cleaning this week!!

What are you brewing at the moment?

Rhubarb wine

While we planted rhubarb here a couple of years ago, they are not yet mature enough to harvest anything worthwhile.

However, I have offers locally of as much as I can take ;-)
So today I started two gallons of rhubarb wine and next week I plan to make 5 gallons as I love rhubarb.

I looked up several recipes online but they all require lots of sugar which doesn't suit us here. We like something drinkable as opposed to rocket fuel!
The yeast converts the sugars to alcohol. We scaled down the sugar per gallon from 1.5 kg to 500g. We hope that this produces an alcohol content around 8% as opposed to 38% ;-0

I made two gallons using the following:

2.5kg Rhubarb
200g Grapes
1kg Sugar
Yeast nutrient
White wine yeast

Wash and cut rhubarb into a large saucepan, add sugar and grapes and a few litres of water.

Bring to boil and simmer till soft.

Put through a strainer, adding more water to the rhubarb to help extract as much yummy juice as possible.


Pour juice equally into the clean and sterile demi-johns then top up with warm water and add yeast and one teaspoon of yeast nutrient each.

Add air locks and wait...could take a few months :-(
Place in a warm room to help with fermentation.

Pigs are arriving tomorrow. Exciting!!!
Dreaming of salami...

Anyone brewing something special?

Nettle Beer

 We have done a good bit of brewing this week. We bottled the 5 gallons of stout a couple of nights ago and started a demi-john of nettle beer today. We haven't made nettle beer before so it will be trial and error. A good way to learn!

As it is spring / summer !?! the nettles are starting to grow well but are still tender enough to make beer out of them. Later in the year they may be too bitter.
The recipe that we followed was the following:

1kg of nettle tops
500g of sugar
1tsp cream of tartar
juice of 2 lemons
yeast
water

Using gloves of course! I went out and filled a bag with nettle tops, there was no shortage of them.
I put them into a large saucepan with water and brought it to the boil and let it simmer for a bit.

I poured the hot strained nettle juice into a clean demi-john, and then added the other ingredient except for the yeast as it would be too hot yet.

 I topped it up with cool water and then scoped out a cup of wort sediment (yeast) which was at the bottom of the stout brewed and used it to start this brew.

I will freeze the remaining wort in an ice cube tray to use again for other brews.
It is bubbling away so it must have worked ;-)

Only four chicks hatched out from 20 eggs! My experiment with low humidity didn't work! All were fertile but the humidity stayed about 35 so next I time might try to keep it to 50's and see how that works.

The bees were flying well today but the weather has been very difficult for them as all the rain is preventing them from flying most days! I have ordered more hives and brood boxes so it will be a busy weekend of beekeeping and I will give them a mite treatment while numbers are low as we don't expect to use any supers this year for honey.

The young fruit trees are coming into blossom now. Lets hope the bees get the chance to visit them.

Note: This turned out to be a great beer and we were so disappointed that we didn't make more. Next spring I will brew at least six gallons of it.

If I brew more now it will be bitter. The nettle plants turn bitter as the season progresses.

Milking machines

I went into our butcher on Tuesday to collect the calf's offal, liver, heart and tongue. For now we will put them onto the freezer. Our butcher was disappointed with the calf. He was far too lean and as a result he won't be able to hang him long. Maybe ten days at best. We usually finish a jersey calf and they are wonderful. They fatten well and therefore can hang a month and make very tender eating. Yum!
We won't finish a friesian again. I forgot to ask for the hanging weight. I'll think of it when we collect him next week. Hopefully!

We decided to move from disposable nappies to washable nappies. We only got them yesterday so it's early days yet but so far so good. I'll keep you updated on that as it seems like a great economy to the household budget after the initial capital investment.

I got delivery of hive parts and frames today. I had ordered them before I realised we had lost the last hive. I might not need them this season after all.



I bottled off the rest of the ginger beer yesterday and started a batch of lager. We now have a selection of mature stouts, beers and ales. We bought about 60 swing top pint bottles a couple of months ago and they were a great investment. The head/gas on each pint is great. We are very pleased on how this is working out.












Mama moo the cow has being holding up milk all week. At the start of the week I was getting a cups worth at milking and this morning I milked 4 litres. I felt like i won the lottery. The calf had cut up her teats much worse than I can expected. We are using lots of udder balm while milking (ignore the socks ) and we are not using the milk for the house yet until everything heals up. The dogs and cat are delighted with this arrangement.

We are going to start using a milking machine. I do all the milking here and it leaves me tied down while if we had a milking machine hubby would be happy to milk, and friends and neighbours.
While we would like a milking machine we don't wish to pay for one! They really are very expensive for a portable single unit.

Our neighbours both have old delaval milking units, with the help of another good neighbour we are stripping both these systems to hopefully get one functioning unit up at our place. The men were busy last night testing the units and planning the process and on Saturday we will hopefully have a working milking machine that we expect will cost maybe €100 for replacement rubber and parts.
I'm so excited about this. I always wanted a milking machine!
My job for today is to clean up this milk bucket ( in the bath )and then bring it to our co-op for them to replace all rubbers and tubing. I'm so excited!!

Homebrew

So i have been trying my hand at wine making since last October, and beer and stout since the New Year. It has been successful if alcohol content is your end goal. It certainly will get you drunk, very drunk! But unfortunately I need more than just alcohol %, taste would be a help.
I have come to the realization that just because I had a bumper crop of beetroot, it doesn't justify making a wine out of them. Beetroot wine taste, well, like beetroot. Crab apple wine, that tasted like cider, a strong cider, but very drinkable and no hangover, Yippee!
So this season I intend to try my hand at many more recipes. I have made batches of ginger beer, that was very successful and didn't last long. The beer is already drank, all 5 gallons of it! and I have another 5 gallons of stout maturing in the bottle. And 4 gallons of ginger beer using a different recipe in the fermenting bucket. I will bottle that off next week when I gather more bottles. And put in a lager into the fermenting bin when that is freed up. But it pays to let them mature, as the taste improves so much.