I'm going to make this Mojito wine this weekend most likely. It's in the skeeter pee tradition of making a high acid citrus (traditionally lemon) wine using the lees from a more traditional wine that would normally just get dumped.

The reason for using the lees is that its sort of a super starter of tons of yeast cells that are (for the most part) still active. Thus you have a better chance of getting a highly acidic must to start (and continue) fermenting.

6/17/2010 Update:

I made the wine and it is fermenting away quite well. I tweaked the recipe posted by Wine Making Fool. After making his recipe I felt that the lime and mint flavor were too light, especially in the face of the cherry rhubarb yeast slurry that was lending it's own flavors to the wine. I added an additional 8oz of ReaLime juice and a few drops of Mint Extract when the gravity had gotten to around 1.05, we'll see how it turns out.

I finally got around to brewing again about a month ago. This time I sort of made a beer by the seat of my pants. I like dark beers, and I don't like too much hops so I got a 2 cans of John Bull English Dark Malt Extract, one hopped and one unhopped. I figured together it would make for a mildly hopped dark beer. Also, since we keep it so cold in our house during the winter (57° when we're home, 53° when we're gone or asleep) I obviously had to make a lager since ale yeast won't function at those temps.

It turns out that there are a few styles of beer that are similar to what my taste and situation demanded (not a big surprise really). German Dunkel beers are dark, mildly hopped lagers, however they are also made with German malt and a process called triple decoction that's done during mashing. Since I'm just working from English extract and I doubt there was any decoction, never mind triple, going on in the making of the malt extract, this isn't really a Dunkel. There is also another style of German beer called Schwarzbier literally translated: "Black Beer" which does fit the bill for what I've created.

It really is quite black, as you can see in the photos, which is why I decided on the name Black Dog Lager. It also tastes really good to me already, I'm looking forward to completing this beer and having a glass. This weekend I plan on bottling it and it should be ready to drink by mid-late April. Of course I'll have to make a new label for this new beer as well.

More photos

It's a light replacement extravaganza, or quite possibly a bonanza. The fact is, we've had a bunch of these lights that we've been meaning to replace for a long time now, some close to a year. We'll we're finally getting around to it. Today we're featuring a brand new foyer light as well as a new dining room light. Next is the bathroom light which I hope won't utterly suck. These have actually been getting easier? maybe?

Starting with the foyer, it was a very difficult decision to replace this beautiful fixture that showed off the light bulb itself as the focal point of the fixture. It was especially nice with a twisty CFL in there. Anyway, as usual it was sporting the crazy cast iron box and extra misc wires as well as a wealth of vermiculite insulation to pour out on me. This fixture was installed on a rafter, which I actually prefer since I can just get a low profile box and screw it into the rafter. It's better and easier than those 'old work' blue plastic boxes with their little plastic flaps.

We got this light for a crazy awesome price from someone on craig's list, the only problem was the cord coming out of the light was cut really short. Fortunately there was a bunch of excess cord in the ceiling fan that I had cut out so I replaced the cords in this light with those, yay recycling! It looks awesome and provides light, what more can you ask for?

Additional foyer light photos

The new dining room light also came from someone on craig's list. The supports were originally metallic aluminum but Anne painted them bronze and then did some nice dry brushing over the top for an awesome antiqued look that matches with the rest of the house. She also added a little yellow glass paint to the back of the glass and added the prairie style lines that really add character to this fixture. The former light was a seriously ugly number from the 60s that we were glad to see go.

This box was also nailed to a rafter in addition to the iron rod that had to be hacksawed, luckily I only had to hacksaw one side of the box instead of both due to the rod not going all the way through. Long story short, the new light got installed, Yay!

Additional Dining room light photos

I hope all of my four loyal readers had wonderful Christmases. Anne and I had (and are still having) a wonderful time in Michigan visiting her parents. In fact, we were having such a great time that our car decided we should extend our stay by breaking down and leaving us stuck here until we can get it fixed (hopefully today). Either that or the Big Three have turned to the desperate measure of using voodoo on foreign cars that venture too close to Detroit.

I just got a call from the mechanic. We need new spark plugs and wires and we may have melted the catalytic converter but he won't know until he gets it running again. If the CC is busted it is supposedly under warranty for 80,000 miles which we are about 1000 miles away from. I hope it's not broken but at least VW should pay for it if it is.

UPDATE: The catalytic converter is fine but the distributor coil is also broken so that needs to be replaced. It should be fixed by 1 or 2 and then we'll hit the road.

UPDATE: UPDATE: The catalytic converter is partially blown out and needs to be replaced but the car can run and we got home just fine. I will try to get a VW dealer to replace it for free since there is a federal mandate of warranty on catalytic converters for 80k miles and our car is only at 79500!

Brian and Melissa have announced that they are also pregnant! They are due May 9th.

Congrats you guys!

On a pretty much daily basis Dora reminds us how awesome she is by howling at us. Usually this happens around dinner time. Below are some videos I took of her pontifications.

Last weekend I bottled my first batch of beer, an American Wheat. The beer had finally finished fermenting with a final gravity of 1.012. The original gravity was 1.040 a difference of 0.028! That means the beer is about 3.5% alcohol so not too strong. The beer tasted like beer, except it was flat.

I made the priming solution, which is just hot water with dissolved corn sugar, and added it to the priming chamber (really just a bucket) and then drained the beer into the priming chamber as well making sure it was well mixed. The priming sugar is added to carbonate the beer. After the beer is bottled the remaining yeast in the beer ferments this sugar producing more alcohol and CO2. Since the bottle is sealed the CO2 has nowhere to go except to dissolve into the beer. And there's your carbonation.

Bottling the beer was very easy due to a little device that came in the box full of wine making supplies I got as an extra from a guy selling carboys. Basically it's a hollow plastic wand with a little metal rod sticking out the tip. The rob is secured by a spring, when you press the rod into the wand, liquid can flow through. When you aren't pressing, it can't. So it makes it pretty hard to let liquid out without intending to do so.

You're supposed to fill beer bottles until there's an inch of space between the beer and the cap. This is accomplished by sticking the rod all the way into the bottle and pushing on the bottom to release the beer and filling it to the rim. When you remove the wand the liquid displaced by it leaves it at just the right height.

Capping beer bottles is also quite easy. You simply place the bottle cap on top of the bottle, set the capper over the top of both and push the levers down until you feel it give. Removing the capper is actually a bit more difficult.

I ended up with 46 12oz bottles and 1 pint bottle full of beer. The challenge now is keeping the beer warm enough for the yeast to be able to carbonate the beer. As most of my readers know, we keep it crazy cold in our house during the winter; too cold for Ale yeast to be very active (which is why my next beer is going to be a lager). I stacked the beer in front of the heat vent in our bedroom and placed a blanket over it to hold in the warmth, hopefully that should do it.

In addition to the beer, I also bottled the cherry wine and the ghetto apple-raspberry wine. As an aside. I'm thinking of renaming the ghetto wine line to “Snob’s Nightmare” and just doing a completely separate label design.

I had finished degassing the Nightmare wine about a week or so ago. I had been storing it in two magnums (1.5 litre wine bottles) and used our wine pump to pull dissolved CO2 out of the wine. I poured both magnums of wine into a large stainless steel bowl to blend them together. I added sorbate (to kill any residual yeast) and added a little bit of sugar to bump up the sweetness just a little bit. I then siphoned the Nightmare into four standard wine bottles and corked them.

The semi-cold stabilization of the cherry wine in the fridge seemed to help it, it wasn't quite as sour as before it also cleared fairly well so I racked it off the fine lees and added sorbate. I then added sugar until it tasted good, three tablespoons was all it took. I poured it into a bottle and corked it. I only got one bottle of cherry wine but then I only started with about a pound of cherries.

One of the best musical groups on Jamendo has got to be Triplexity, which is actually the collaboration of three different Jamendo artists who have never actually met in real life. The fusion of their individual musical styles results in some excellent music. They have released a second full length album entitled “Live in Triplexity City” and it's very good. Jazzy downtempo electronica with a slight middle eastern/south asian flair; excellent Hookah Room music.

One of the best things about Jamendo music is that it's licensed as creative commons and you can listen and download it for free!

If you're going to make wine, then you should also make cheese, right? I mean, you've got to get the whole snobby skill set rounded out. Have a look over on Men That Cook for details of my first foray into cheese making with a quick cottage cheese.

I just made a post over on men that cook about making Scotch Eggs. If you're unaware, a Scotch Egg is a hard boiled egg that's wrapped in sausage, coated in breadcrumbs and deep fried. They're a pain to make but they taste awesome. Go take a look.

If you're unaware of the Men That Cook site it's because it's a fairly new blog run by Brian where we can share recipes and instructions for things worth cooking, with a slightly manly angle, of course.

This is what I'm currently calling the small gallon batches of wine I make from grocery store bought frozen juice concentrates. I ferment them in plastic gallon milk jugs and that just feels rather ghetto to me. Also (so far) the wine comes out tasting like Boone's which really just adds to the ghetto feel. Maybe I should add brandy so they can be fortified wines?

I racked my ghetto apple-raspberry wine yesterday. It was pretty clear and tasted pretty good. It's probably ready for bottling but I'm going to wait a bit yet. and see if any more yeast/sediment drops out of it. Since it's a white (in appearance) wine I want to be sure it's totally cleared before bottling.

Currently it is sitting in two 1.5 litre wine bottles with ferm locks and one partially full 1 litre bottle with a ferm lock. The stuff that's been in the bottles tastes better to me than the stuff in the partially full bottle. I'm wondering if this is due to the amount of air/oxygen exposure the wine is getting since the bottle is not topped up? It's not that the litre bottle stuff tastes bad, it's just not quite as good. So my quandry is, should I blend all of this wine back together before bottling in order to have a larger quantity of ghetto wine or should I dump (or just separately bottle) the not as good stuff?
As I'm writing this I think the answer is obvious. Mixing them all, and potentially lowering the quality of the whole batch for the sake of what's going to be one bottle (if I'm lucky) of wine is not worth it. I'll keep them separate and maybe add some fruit juice to the not as good stuff in order to top up a 750 ml bottle of it.

I loosely follow this recipe to make this ghetto wine. It's pretty easy to do, the wine tastes good (though not complex by any stretch), and it's done/drinkable relatively quickly.

In other wine news, the extremely sour cherry wine that I stuck in the fridge about a month ago is losing some of it's sourness so either it's just mellowing with age? (in a month, unlikely) or some of the tartaric acid has been precipitating out of the wine in this cold environment. I still don't think this wine is very good tasting, but perhaps with some sweetening prior to bottling could have a good effect.

Anyone got a better name than ghetto wine for this stuff?

Since I've been making wine, it's only logical that I try my hand at beer as well. Making beer is a lot faster than making wine, generally you can go from fermentation to bottling and ready to drink in about 6 weeks with beer. With most wines you want to let them age for at least about a year.

Making beer is also a lot more work, in my opinion, than making wine. Beer is made from fermented malted barley (or wheat) and hops. Malted barley is sprouted barley. Once the barley seed sprouts it's sugar content increases and we all know that you need sugar to make alcohol. So to make beer, you have to get a bunch of barley (or wheat) and get it to sprout by keeping it wet or something. Then you have to boil your malted barley or wheat along with a flavoring/bittering agent in the form of hop flowers. Basically you make a sort of tea out of it which is called wort (pronounced wert). After boiling for about an hour you then need to cool down your wort as fast as you can, apparently this helps preserve flavors vs letting it cool slowly. Once you have your wort sufficiently cool you have to add oxygen otherwise your yeast won't be able to reproduce and your fermentation won't start (boiling removes most of the O2 so you have to add it back). Finally you can add your yeast and let it ferment for a few weeks before bottling and aging for an additional couple of weeks before it's ready to drink.

Fortunately in this day and age the home beer brewer does not need to start by malting their own barley or wheat. You can buy malted barley and wheat extract syrup, essentially skipping the biggest pain in the ass step of the process. A few weeks ago I brewed up a big pot of water, added malted wheat and barley extract syrup, and hops. Boiled it for about an hour, cooled it in the sink poured it into my fermentation bucket added sufficient water to increase the volume to 5 gallons, stirred it up to add in some oxygen, pitched the yeast, put the lid on with a ferm lock and let it sit.

After about a day it hadn't started vigorously fermenting, I'm pretty sure this was due to how cold it had been and how that subsequently made our house rather cold as well. Yeast doesn't die when it gets too cold but it does go dormant. So to get my fermentation off the ground I employed a wool coat and applied a small space heater for about an hour. Soon after the ferm lock was bubbling away merrily.

The Original Gravity (OG) of the wort was 1.042, I checked it a few days ago and it was down to 1.020 so it still has a little ways to go to finish fermentation. It's been a slow fermentation probably due to the initial coolness of the house though thankfully it's warmed up recently. It tried it when I checked the gravity and it was pretty good; tasted like beer so that was encouraging.

We also had our annual pumpkin carving party this past weekend and it was quite fun. We cooked up a bunch of chili and cornbread and pies, invited our friends over and drank alcohol while wielding sharp and potentially deadly weapons! It doesn't get any better than that.

More Photos

This is only a week or so late in posting, actually I'm behind on posting about a lot of stuff from about a week ago. Last week Anne and I dog sat for two dogs, Lily and Oliver. They were good dogs, though they loved being on furniture; not a big deal.

Lily is the little black and white sheperd/terrier? mix and Oliver is the white husky.

More photos here

for growing!

Even though we're in Wisconsin doesn't mean we can't grow good wine grapes. There are quite a number of hybrid grapes that are very cold hardy and also produce a good wine. In addition to cold hardiness, many of these hybrids are resistant to various diseases that plague traditional Eurpoean vinifera vines.

The University of Minnesota has developed a few hybrids that I'm currently investigating, particularly Marquette grapes. They're very cold hardy (down to -35°F) and also very disease resistant. They create a good red wine that some have compared to shiraz, and others merlot, thought Pinot Noir is Marquette's grandfather. The acidity is a bit high but that can be corrected for in the winery either through blending, cold stabilization, or other methods. It also yields a fairly high sugar content, around 25 brix.

Another grape I'm investigating is the Sabrevois. This variety was bred by Elmer Swenson in Northern Wisconsin (he also did a lot of work along with the University of Minnesota). Sabrevois is also hardy down to -35°F very disease resistant and makes a complex red wine. Similar to Marquette it gives slightly high acids and its recommended to combine with a grape with higher sugars (Marquette perhaps?). It is also recommended to to a semi-carbonic maceration to ferment these grapes or at least pressing early to avoid an off flavor that often results from a full maceration.

Those two I have done the most investigation of, they're appealing to me because of their extreme cold hardiness, strong resistance to disease and the good wine they produce. Some other varieties I'm interested in but haven't investigated as much are: Marechal Foch, Noiret™, St. Croix, and Cabernet Severny. Cabernet Severny is an interesting one to me since it's not a hybrid with american grapes but was actually developed for growing in Russia. It's been hybred with a hardy Mongolian grape vine as well as some french varieties and of course Severny. Not sure how that all works out as there's not a lot of information about it online; not even sure if I'll be able to find anyone selling it.

Last night I pressed the second wine I'm making with the concord grapes. The SG was getting down below what the recipe I'm following recommended for removing the skins. I had been hesitating because I had no spare carboys to deposit the wine into. I had called a few people selling them on Craigslist but nothing panned out. But it was past time to press and I didn't want to risk compromising the wine any further.

Luckily, I had picked up a beer brewing kit this weekend. While it didn't come with any carboys, it did come with two 6 gallon plastic buckets and a sealed lid with a ferm lock for one of them. I pressed pretty much the same way I did with the first fermentation using the large wire strainer. The only difference was this time I squeezed the skins with my hands to extract as much wine as I could.

I got a lot.

I literally filled the bucket to the rim with wine. I had to take two liters back out to put the top on. I now have something like eleven gallons of concord wine undergoing secondary fermentation. This is in addition to the five gallons of zinfandel that is clearing in the basement. That's a lot of wine!

I also decided to attempt a cold stabilization of the cherry wine to take out some of the acid and hopefully reduce it's sourness. I put it in our fridge, which I don't know if it's cold enough but it's worth a shot. In cold stabilization excess tartaric acid will crystallize and precipitate out of the wine. You then rack the wine off the crystals and you've reduced the acidity. We'll see what happens, the cherry wine may just be destined to become and ingredient in sangria but I have higher hopes for it.

This weekend was busy! Anne and I took Friday off of work because AT&T was coming to install our new internet (and TV, which we'll be canceling when our free preview is up) We also wanted to get some stuff done around the house.

First order of business, on Friday morning the Specific Gravity of the concord must had fallen below 1.030, and you know what that means! Well probably you don't. But for the recipe I'm following it means it's time to remove the juice from the grape skins and pulp. This is what's generally known as pressing, however I didn't actually use a press. One, because I don't have one; and two, because I'm reusing the pulp I wouldn't technically be losing any wine by not pressing it out.

I scooped it out with a strainer.

Once I had removed all of the floating pulp and skins I attempted to rack the remaining liquid must into a 5 gallon carboy. This did not work well because the siphon kept on getting clogged by remaining pulp and gunk on the bottom. I ended up using a large cup to scoop the liquid out and pour it through the strainer and into a funnel into the carboy. When the strainer got too coated with gunk it was deposited in with the rest of the skins and pulp. The gunk got thicker as I got towards the bottom of the barrel, and there were tons of seeds as well. This all went back into the primary fermenter for the second batch. Soon the carboy was full to over flowing. I removed some of it to make room for the bung and for any small foam ups and put that into a small container to use for topping off when I rack this wine. It was bubbling away merrily the moment I put the fermentation lock on it.

Apparently, and I'm not too surprised about this, there is enough flavor in concord grape skins and pulp to ferment two batches of wine from them. Actually as I read a bit more this is not an uncommon practice (with any grape skins/pulp) for making table wines.

Friday night I put together the second batch of concord wine. I'm going to need to name these two differently somehow so as to distinguish them once they are bottled. For this second batch, I added to the existing gunk, a bunch of water, four cans of concord grape juice concentrate (from the grocery store), a bit of grape tannin, some acid blend powder, and ten pounds of sugar. Stirred it all up and let it go. No yeast this time, the pulp from the previous fermentation already had plenty. I'll let this batch ferment until the Specific Gravity reaches 1.010 and then I'll press again (and for real this time) and put this second batch into a carboy as well. Of course before that happens I'll have to get another carboy...

Each year IAMRA, the rescue organization where we got Dora, has a homecoming and fundraiser even called Malawalk. Basically all the adopted out malamutes (and their owners) are invited to a big malamute picnic. We went down this year with Mitch, another IAMRA adopter who lives in Milwaukee, and two of his Dogs, Lance and Molly.

We had a lot of fun. Dora had a great time and behaved very well considering the amount of dogs there. She participated in the bobbing for hotdogs event (she got her hot dog) and also competed (and sucked it up) in both the kissing and singing contests.

More photos here

Yesterday, Anne saw a craiglist ad for free grapes in someone's backyard in Menomonee Falls. So I called them and went out there to harvest some grapes in the hopes that I'll be able to make some wine from them. They had a huge arched arbor that was covered in vines and loaded with grapes. I think I got pretty close to 50 pounds of grapes. There were still plenty of grapes on the vine when I left but they were difficult to access and hard to see since it had gotten dark.

I'm not totally sure what kind of grapes they are, probably Concord. They're very sweet and a few of them were literally bursting out of their skins. I'm hoping they'll make some good wine. I guess we'll find out.

So now, in addition to the millions of other things going on this weekend we'll also be crushing and destemming these grapes and getting them ready for fermentation.

In other winery related news, I believe the milk jug wine is about ready to be bottled. Though there will probably only be one bottle of it. The cherry wine is still very sour, I'm gonna try adding an antacid to see if I can cut down on that. Worst case scenario it gets turned into sangria. I racked the zin again last weekend, it's tasting even better and I'm excited to be bottling it maybe in a month or so.

I also made a couple of potential labels for my bottles:

In two days, God willing, my awesome brother-in-law, Steve, will be married to his wonderful fianceé Nicki. I think they're great together and will be happy to see them married.

They're getting married in East Lansing, MI. Anne and I are both in the wedding, so tonight Anne, Dora, and I are going to be driving to Anne's parent's in Brighton, MI. I'm looking forward to it, Anne's family is cool and always fun to hang out with. I wonder if we'll have time for a game or two of Euchre?

UPDATE: The wedding was great despite the torrential rain all weekend. Steve and Nicki are now in Mexico on their honeymoon.

Here are photos I took at the rehearsal and wedding.