Wine and Beer. AAAGAAAIN :D

Hi again guys.

I have not written recently, honestly, lazy again plus things to do.

As you can see we were quite busy recently. Spring has come and soon summer will.
To celebrate this we have visited the Beltane fire festival. It was great, all the naked girls dancing, impressive.
Seriously, the whole show was very surprising in its quality. Great costumes, story, preparation. Too many stupid
people though, drinking cheap cider and making innane / stupid comments.

To move a bit more into the past, we were at the amateur winemaking circle annual show! This was very very good for us.
Again, it was prepared very professionally, with clean-cut positions and roles. The people from our wine making circle were
really nice, as always. They prepared everything at a high level, including the wine judging, lunch, prices. Really a great
experience for us. We did also learn a lot, such as what makes a bad wine - smell and sediment for instance. Too sweet
or too dry is also not good if it is not good in the proper category. It is also important to know a few tips, for instance, if you
are making a kit-wine, you normally have to add water. However, the good tip for much better wine is to use 2 kits to one gallon,
making it twice as good but twice as expensive too. You can though use some good grape juice, even boil it for a while to make it thicker.

For now we are making 3 wines.

1. Normal Kit Wine (Type: Spanish Rioja.) Unfortunately I used water in it according to the recipe. Did not yet know I could use grape juice.
2. Apple juice wine. From normal apple juice. This one will be quite thin so I think we should add something to it. The taste is nothing special really, just alcohol and a bit of apple. I need to think how to improve it. Maybe add banana juice? Or maybe mix it with other wine? Hmmmm.

3. Our latest invention. We really hope it will come out well.

The recipe:

3 litres of mixed fruit juice: Polish "Kubus" juice, very good, no extra sugar, no preservatives. The fruit used: Banana, Apple, Peach. It is quite thick so I do not really know how much sugar there is. I will need to put it in a different demijohn very soon as the liquid separates from the fruit pulp.

Some sugar to give the yeast something to eat. Later I will add more sugar, to make the starting amount of sugar in wine at about 1050 so called "specific gravity"

The Specific Gravity - is a scale telling you how much sugar there is in a liquid. You can buy a hydrometer - we did and check it, quite fun to use but needs to be cleaned every time... a lot of work.

You then chop 200 grams of raisins and one banana, without skin. Put it into about 300 mililitres of water and boil for a few minutes. Then you add it all to your demijohn.

Add half a teaspoon of pectolaze (to dissolve the pectine in the fruit and help the wine to clear later on)

In the meantime add a big spoon of wine yeast compound to a bottle with 100 ml warm (less than 30 degrees) water and a bit of sugar. Leave it standing for a few minutes for the yeast to "wake up". This is actually not necessary but looks cool and gives you a bit more to wash up later, pffffffffffffffff.

Put everything into 1 gallon demijohn (carboy) and add water up to 1 gallon.

Leave standing and hope it is not going to spoil.

Even before you start, sterilize your containers and WASH them with cold water later - otherwise there will be a taste of sterilizer -very unpleasant bleach smell and taste.

We will let you know and publish the final recipe later.

We are also making 2 beers at the moment.

5 gallon barrel - 24 litres of Australian Coopers malt beer. I additionally bought dark malt - a special beer addition that you use instead of sugar. It makes it darker and "malty" in taste. Very pleasant even without fermentation. Of course then you add beer yeast and very soon such a mix starts fermenting very quickly.
After 5 days beer is ready (6 or 7 is good too) if the barrel stays in a warm place - about 20 -25 degrees.

The second beer is only about 3 gallons, roughly 12 litres. It is a beer called (forgot for now and will give photos later) Brown Bear (in Dutch.) It is very thick and dark as night. It even needs to ferment for twice the normal time - about 10 days. Later on we will put it into bottles and enjoy. It should be great!

Photos are coming later today.

P.S. I am making a polish soup today. Hope it will be good.


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今日もHappyな一日になりますように！
kojiczuk (kojisato & Pa-panda)