You Brew Your Own Beer? Bottle and transfer

Part 1 of a Pale Ale experiment

Skeeter Pee finally got down below 1.000. Yeast kill, clarify, and backsweeten are the next steps.

Busy Day!

Hop wine int he glass chilling for a taste. Hop wine in the champagne bottle, and apfelwein in the wine bottle.

The weather is a little lousy, my wife is at work, and the kids are cleaning their room. So I finally get to some of the things I’ve needed to get to for months. I first cleaned the kitchen. Then I bottled 5 gallons of 8 month old Apfelwein, 1 gallon of Hop Wine, racked 1 gallon of scrumpy into a secondary blend, and started a batch of Lemon Wine. Then I cleaned the kitchen again.

The original post:

http://littlehouseonthesandpit.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/you-make-your-own-wine-hop-wine/

The Yellow and Black Attack-No, not Stryper.

The dandelions are out so that means I am gathering them. It’s a slow start, I like when there are so many I can site down and fill a bucket from where I sit. Soon. I’m not sure where these will end up; dandelion mead, dandelion wine, dandelion jelly, dandelion tea, dandelion cookies, maybe a dandelion beer. Someday I plan on planting a bed of them and bring them into our diet regularly.

What my fingers look like after processing dandelion heads.

Small harvest for this early in the season.

The petals separated from the stems.

You Brew Your Own Beer? – Bottle Day

Sassafras Spruce Porter bottled on left (the much happier Corona bottle), and the Hop Wine moved to secondary on the right.

You Make Your Own Wine? Hop Wine

The ingredients: 2.5# sugar, 3 oz homegrown magnum hops, 1 tsp lemon juice, .5 oz ginger, 8 oz raisins

Boil some of the sugar, all of the hops and ginger for 60 minutes. I added 1 pouch of outdated bread yeast as yeast nutriet...darn cannibals get hungry.

The boil smelled awesome!

The must. Raisins and lemon juice went in. It was left to cool, then 1 gm Montrachet yeast was pitched. I topped up with boiled and cooled water to get to 1 gallon.

You Make Your Own Wine and Mead? Dandelion Day

Today I bottled up my Dandelion Mead and Dandelion Wine that I made in August. Hopefully that will get rid of these darn fruitbflies! It is ridiculous how crazy they are for the stuff, they would slip through the holes on the top of my airlock and dive into the vodka and die a drunken death after swimming and swimming to get to the wine or mead. I had to change the airlocks every few weeks because they were filled with bodies of fruit flies. Nobody made it into the fine liquor though. I’ve got small samples in of each in the fridge to try later. Last time I tried them, they were still pretty hot with fusel alcohols, I expect some improvement but I bet they need a lot more time, like maybe next August or the following summer.

From flowers to wine and mead

Dandelion Mead on the left and Dandelion Wine on the right

Dandelion Mead on the left and Dandelion Wine on the right

Got gas?

Degassed my lemon wine tonight. Cool stuff.

Bottle day

Bottled up my Roggenbier tonight. Racked the Dandelion mead and wine. Sampled the Skeeter Pee, rack that to secondary tomorrow.

You Brew Your Own Beer? Erm, wine and mead?

From left to right: New sprouter, dandelion mead, dandelion wine

You Brew Your Own Beer? Erm, Wine? Dandelion Wine, step 2.

The dandelion tea after 3 days

3# sugar, zest of 2 lemons and 1 orange will boil with the tea for 1 hour

The juice and pulp will go in after the boil once cool, yeast and nutrient go in