Christmas break

At the moment I am enjoying a very welcome christmas break. And even though christmas always comes with a busier schedule than anticipated, I still got some hobby-projects done. The whole plum-project is now finished and in bottles, for instance. The two varieties of liquor/schnapps turned out to be very pleasant drinks. We made a sweeter variant where we boiled the fruit and added a bit more sugar, and that is a nice drink to sip from. The unboiled and less sweet variant turned out to be great for a shot after christmas dinner as a digestive.

The strong stuff. Left the less sweet variant, and on the right the sweeter one. Boiling the fruit resulted in a very different colour.

The plum wine project is now also finished. It was my first brewing project and it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot of new things by trying this out and I will certainly keep on brewing. The wine turned out to be rich in plum taste, and on the sweet side. I have not measured the alcohol concentration in any of my brews this time, but it tastes quite strong. Certainly over 10 percent, and maybe over 12. Now I have six bottles of plum wine and six bottles of elderberry port aging in a cool dark spot. I will age them for a couple of months and pop open a bottle of each in may.

The plum wine. It has a very nice light orange colour, and it is clearer than this picture makes one think. 

I also found a few hours to sit down with a knife and some bits of wood, and whittled away at some butter spreaders that came is very handy during our christmas brunch. It is nice to see others use and appreciate your own work. Wooden spoons are not really used in the family, so finding the spreaders well recieved was nice for me.

Some spreaders. Fun to carve, and very useful. I will be making more and play around with the curves a bit. 

For good measure I`ll include a picture of the brunch-table that was a joint effort of the whole family where everyone made very nice things in abundance.

One of my guilty pleasures in this time of year is to have breakfast with the left overs of the brunch the day after. Gingerbread men, cake, a cinnamon roll and coffee from a sycamore kuksa? A proper start of any day I imagine.

Bottling of the Elderberry port

The elderberry port is finally in bottles. The fermentation stopped a few weeks ago, and this weekend it was time to get it into bottles. I had the help of my brother, which was really nice. There are just many things to hold and and extra pair of hands is really convenient. Here are the pictures of what we did. Started by placing the demijohn on the countertop, taking care to not disturb the sediment.

 Meanwhile we boiled some corks to get them into the bottles, and cleaned out six bottles. I have tried to gather old used bottles, but couldn`t gather a sufficient amount of bottles with the right opening and size, so eventually I gave in and ordered twelve appropriate bottles for €0.80 a piece. Along with that I ordered a simple bottling-device. I had planned on using a mallet, but figured that I could just as well invest the €5,- in this device I`ll be using more often in the future.

 Above you see the bottling device that compresses a cork untill it fits the bottleneck and shoves it in. It makes life a whole lot easier. When the bottles were clean and the corks ready, we started racking the port into the bottles. In hindsight I think racking the port into another container before putting it in bottles would have reduced the sediment in the last bottle we filled, so that is something to remember for the next time we do this. The next picture is a bit messy, but getting this process on is tricky enough while holding tubes and making sure the bottle doesn`t overflow.

 For the last bit of port in the demijohn you have to tilt to get it out without sediment. When all six bottles were full we pushed in the corks. This is a matter of placing the corks into the device, placing the device on the bottle, and pushing in the plunger. Here is a shot of my brother pushing one in.

 While we were at it, we racked off the plum wine into the now available (and cleaned) demijohn. This is to clear it further. The result of the evenings work are six bottles of port, an a racked gallon of plum wine of which we got to have a little taste.

 Since we didn`t degas the port, and want to know if there is risks of the corks coming out, I sealed the corks with wax. When the wax breaches we know the cork moves, and then we have to take action.

Six bottles of port. I like the colour. I didn`t really get to taste it yet though. The small sip I got was promising, but I couldn`t really taste all that was going on. In a couple of months we can open a bottle and see what we think of it. If people like it I want to scale up and make 12 bottles next year. Then there is some to give away as well.

Racking the plumwine

Last weekend I reckoned it was time to rack the plumwine. The fermentation has stopped. The water in the waterlock has been level for a bit more than a week, and there was layer of sediment at the bottom of the flask. I assume that now the fermenting has come to an end the next objective is to clear the wine, and that all we can do to achieve is wait and rack the wine into a clean container every few months. So, here is what I did:

Carefully, not disturbing the sediment, place the demijohn on a high surface. Have another sterile container ready to rack the wine into. I used one of my food-grade buckets. Take a tube, hang one end in the wine, and suck the wine through untill it starts flowing. I love this principle of transporting fluids. When the wine flows it is a matter of waiting. With the last bit you have to be careful to not suck up the sediment. Tilt the demijohn to get as much wine as you can.

 When all the wine is out, clean the demijohn, pour the wine back in, put the waterlock back on and wait again for a month or two.

I got to taste a sip of the wine when I sucked it through the tube, and was very pleasantly surprised. It is mildly sweet and the plum-taste is very nice. I can`t wait for this stuff to be done so I can enjoy a glass.

The brew goes on.

The demijohns have been blurping away nicely the past weeks, and now they have calmed down a bit. Over the first weeks they bubbled constantly, and you could see the liquid in the flasks buzzing and swirling. Now the plumwine seems to have come to a stop, while the elderberry port bubbles on very slowly. It is interesting to see how the colours of the brews have changed over time. My pictures are a poor approach of reality and do not quite show this, but especially the plum wine has changed colour from a dark purple to a nice orange. It`ll continue to become lighter as it clears over time I assume. I am not entirely certain on how to proceed with the wine, because I thought the fermenting would not stop this quick. I suppose I`ll rack it, clean the flask and put it back in there for some weeks. Then I`ll rack and bottle. For the port I`ll just wait a week or two after it stopped bubbling and then I`ll rack and bottle.

The Plum-Project. Part 3 - Wine

This will be a write-up covering my first experience in the fascinating craft of brewing. It is by no means intended as a tutorial. It will simply cover what I have done, why I did it, and eventually how it turned out.

First I weighed out 3 kilograms of plums, and washed them under hot water. Then I transferred them to a food-grade bucket. I got my buckets from a snackbar franchise in the Netherlands. They get their sauces delivered in them and afterwards have no need for them. The good thing about these buckets, besides the lid, is that they are made of polypropyl, as opposed to the PVC that household buckets are made from. The PVC has a tendency to release chloride into your product. The bucket should be well sterilized before use. I do this by soaking them in a bleach-solution for a bit, and then rinse them very well. 

After I had a sterile bucket I put four liters of water on the stove to let it boil. While that was going on I began the noble task of crushing the plums with a potato-masher. This turned out to be no easy task, and I found out it is better to wait with this untill you poured some boiling water on them.

While crushing the fruit you have to be careful to not crush the stones as this will affect the flavour later. Once this mix is cooled down I added about 8 grams of pectinase, a pectin degrading enzyme, and let is stand around at room temperature for 24 hours. The pectinase degrades the cell-walls in the plums and this increases the amount of juice and therefore flavour you can get from them. 

After 24 hours (well, it might have been about 32) it was time to strain the liquid. I had my sister here to help, and that was very nice because holding stuff in place while pouring liquids through isn`t so easy while alone. We strained the fruit out of the liquid (that would at be called 'most') and pressed as much out as we could. A nice dirty job. 

 The most we boiled up, and once it was boiling we dissolved 1700 grams of sugar in it. This whole mix went back into a sterile bucket to cool down.

Once the most has cooled down, which takes quite some time, it is time to start the yeast. I mixed a good teaspoon full of yeast in about 2 dL of organge juice. If it goes frothy this proves that the yeast-cells are active. Leave this for 10 minutes or so. 

 The cooled down most still had quite some particles and stuff in it, so before I put it in the demijohn I strained it through a clean tea towel, yet again into a sterie bucket. After that I poured it into the sterilized demijohn using a funnel, and then added the yeast. In hindsight I could better have done this in the opposite order, as that would have mixed the yeast through the most better.

 In this picture, taken just after I put the airlock on the bottle, you can see that the yeast floats through the most in little clumps. Now, after a few days of bubbling the colour of the wine changed a lot, and all the clumps have disappeared. One day after the plum-wine was in its flask bubbling away I also started a batch of elderberry-port. I followed this recipe for that: http://www.bushcraftuk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=60997&highlight=. It is a very clear tutorial made by a man who knows his buisness very well. Here are my projects side by side. I left some head-space in the port-bottle, because the man who made the tutorial says it will have a violent first fermentation. When things calm down a bit I`ll add the last bit of most that I am now keeping in the fridge in a clean coke-bottle.

I have really enjoyed my first ventures into the brewing-world. It is very satisfying to just look at the bottles bubbling away every now and then. It is so alive in there! For now the bottles are standing isolated from the ground and in a bucket. If things decide to become violent in there this will avoid a great mess.