One of Anne's coworkers has an enormous apple tree growing in her back yard. By enormous, I mean it is HUGE, it's as tall as the three story house, it has three or four big trunks and it rains down a ton of apples on her yard every year. The apples themselves are small to medium in size and they have a decent flavor, and are moderately sweet.

After receiving three plastic grocery bags full of apples in three consecutive days, our arms and wrists were sore from all the chopping. We put the chopped apples in ziplock freezer bags and froze them, then last Thursday I took them out of the freezer and dumped them into my fermentation bucket to thaw, on Saturday I pressed the apples and got about 3 three gallons of apple juice out of them. I took measurements, the juice had around 5% sugar (~1.050 gravity). I pitched yeast and that cider is currently bubbling away merrily.
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More is better?

Not content with a mere three gallons, I asked for more apples. Well last night I got my wish.

This is why they tell you, be careful what you wish for.

I took three baskets over and I cam back with three baskets, and three grocery bags, full to nearly overflowing with apples. HOLY CRAP!
First of all, there's no way we can process all of these apples the same way as the previous ones. There's simply not enough space in the freezer, also our arms would die before we'd be able to chop all of these buggers.

I recently read on the internets about a couple of different people making an apple chopper/crusher from a garbage disposal, I'd like to make one but garbage disposals aren't cheap and there currently aren't any used ones on craigslist. If anyone reading this has got one, please let me know!

The other alternative we've discussed is a divide and conquer strategy. Since we won't be freezing the apples to break apart the cell walls and release the juice, we need to do something that both chops the apples and releases the juice similar to the garbage disposal method. What we're thinking is to split the apples between us. Anne would man the juicer and the food processor to pulp (or juice) her apples. I would place my apples in a rubbermaid container and smash them with a hammer. In between this process we'd be loading the pulp into the press and squeezing the juice out. Anyone want to bring a food processor (or another press if you've got one!) over this weekend and help out? Cider will be a part of your future if you do!

Earlier this week my Marquette grape vines arrived on our doorstep. I'm currently soaking their roots and will be planting them tonight. That's exciting! What's not exciting is that I won't really have a decent crop of grapes for another few years.

Wine making is a great way to teach patience.

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.

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I've been meaning to post this for over a week but I've been busy and also lazy. I finished my new workbench for the workshop downstairs. I believe the former one was built before the house and it was starting to fall apart. I was able to salvage a lot of the wood from it to build the new one though. Additionally, Anne's office moved and they were getting rid of three drawing cases, which have now been repurposed to store wine bottles (formerly they held rolled up architectural drawings). The cellar has the ability to hold over 200 bottles of wine. Additionally the three new racks can hold magnums (1.5 litre bottles) if I want.

That's a lot of wine!

In the photo below you can see the three 5 gallon carboys of bulk aging wine. One carboy of Zinfandel and two of Concord. Also most of the racks are empty, I guess I'll need to harvest more bottles and make more wine.

Mute Dog, as most of my regular readers will know, is the label under which I bottle all of my homebrew beer and wine. We have recently released our first beer, an American Wheat which turned out quite well, if I do say so myself.

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.

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.

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...

Those grapes I picked were indeed Concords as I suspected. I got about 36 pounds or so, which turned out to be plenty for concord wine as you want to dilute it down with a lot of water because they are very acidic.

On Saturday night we cleaned and destemmed them all and Anne volunteered to give them the stomping of their lives. We learned that the machines that crush and destem for you are probably worth the money; destemming sucks and stomping isn't a whole lot of fun either.

Following the first recipe listed here (times 6), in addition to the crushed grapes I also added two and a half gallons of water and about ten pounds of sugar to the fermenter. Wow, that's a lot!

I do plan on doing the second wine recipe as well, where you take out the mashed grape guts about 5-7 days into the first fermentation, squeeze as much juice from them as possible, dump them into another fermenter and add more water and sugar and ferment again. Very soon we're going to be having a lot of wine in process around here.

The thing about concord wines is they have to age for a long time before they get good. This recipe says at least 3 years, so I guess in 2011-12 we'll see if this wine turned out well. (Maybe I should do the same thing with the cherry wine?)

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:

This weekend I racked the Zinfandel since primary fermentation was pretty much done with, if not completely done. As must ferments what's happening is that yeast is going crazy eating all the sugar and converting it into alcohol. Eventually either the yeast creates too much alcohol for it to continue to survive or it runs out of sugar and starves. Either way the yeast dies off and settles out to the bottom in a layer of gunk called the lees. Racking is when you siphon the wine off of the lees. Gravity is on our side as dead yeast and other remaining gunk in the wine slowly (over a matter of months) settles to the bottom allowing us to siphon off the good wine on top. This process is known as racking. You generally want to rack your wine a number of times (with a number of weeks or even months between rackings) to eliminate as much dead yeast as possible which gives you a better tasting wine.

One thing that was kinda interesting during racking was in the measurements: the sugar % reading and the brix (which are really just different scale readings on the hydrometer) both came out negative. What does that mean? Other than the specific gravity is pretty low, I'm not totally sure really.

Racking measurements (8/31/08):

• Wine: 5 gallons
• Brix: ~ -1.5
• % Sugar: ~ -3.0

So to get the alcohol % you are supposed to subtract the initial sugar % measurement with the measurement after fermentation. So 12 minus -3 equals 15. So the wine should be about 15% alcohol or so. So if I hadn't added that extra sugar to the must at the start to raise the sugar % from 10 to 12 would I have a 13% alcohol wine instead? I'm starting to question the accuracy of my hydrometer, or maybe I should measure by the specific gravity scale and calculate from there? Regardless it was a change of 15% points on the scale so it should be about 15% alcohol which is all I'm trying to measure with the hydrometer anyway, right?

Other things of note:

This wine is my first 'large' (large being relative) batch, and I noticed it was much easier to accept that some wine at the bottom was just unrecoverable from the lees. The fact that I had already filled a 5 gallon jug with wine made it easier to let go, compared to the liter bottles I've been filling so far.

This wine tastes much better than the previous two, which I also racked. The cherry wine is still very sour and I may have to augment it by adding back some sugar to make it drinkable. The milk jug wine is decent/drinkable but nothing spectacular.

Can dead yeast and lees be used as a fertilizer? We will soon find out as I dumped them in the back of the yard/garden/over grown area.

The grapes on the vines in the back are starting to turn purple, but they're not very large at all and there aren't very many of them. I'm guessing I'd be lucky to get 6 ounces of juice total from the whole vine.

Encouraged by the improving flavors of the Milk Jug wine and the improvised cherry wine, this weekend I finally got around to putting together the large batch of Zinfandel that I had bought a number of weeks ago. I pretty much followed the directions on the cans of concentrate and then added 4 extra cups of sugar when the sugar % measurements came out a little lower than I wanted (ha ha, as if I actually know what I want).

Here are the ingredients I dumped into the fermenter:

• 2 cans of Zinfandel Grape Concentrate (Alexander's brand)
• ~11.5 cans of cold water
• 12 cups of sugar (recipe called for 8)
• 3 tsp yeast nutrient powder
• 2 tsp acid blend powder
• 1 pkg Premium Cuvée yeast

I decided to forgo adding any tannin or doing anything else too far out for this first big batch. I want to get something good and drinkable to start and then I'll start experimenting and producing stuff that sucks.

Initial measurements 8/16/08:

• Must: ~5 gallons
• Brix: 23.0
• % Sugar: 12

I think I have decided to go with my wonderful mother-in-law's idea and call the winery Mute Dog Winery. I suppose I need to get going on designing a logo and some labels for it now.

The week before last Anne's coworker, Chad, gave her a huge bag of cherries from the tree in his backyard. We figured we had two options, either make about 5000 cherry scones or mash it up and try to make wine out of them. Last weekend we mashed up the cherries and deposited them into a makeshift fermentation vessel. Initially the cherry juice by itself was about 5% sugar so I added some extra. Then I dumped in some yeast and stuck a fermentation lock on the top.

Initial measurements (7/26/08):

• Must: 2 litres
• Brix: 23.5
• % Sugar: 12.0

Upon checking it this morning it looks like the primary fermentation has completed. I now need to improvise some way of pressing the wine to separate it from the cherry fruit, seeds, and skins. Cheese cloth will probably work...

Now that it seems I'm doing this in earnest, I need a name of my winery, got any suggestions?

Update: On saturday, Anne and I pressed the wine through a colander lined with cheese cloth. It was a rather messy business and I have to thank Anne for doing most of the really dirty work. We poured the pressed wine into a new container and stuck a ferm lock on top though it's pretty much done fermenting based on the measurements I took:

Press measurements (8/02/08):

• Wine: 1+ litres
• Brix: 1.0
• % Sugar: 0.0

Last weekend I picked up a used wine making kit from an ad on craigslist. I've been interested in home brewing for some time, last Christmas I got a book on making wine as a gift and a few weeks ago we went to a part at a friends and he served up his home brewed beer that was quite tasty. So being utterly provoked and having let the opportunity of a used wine kit slip through my fingers a few months ago (these are fairly rare on craigslist), I jumped on this one and brought it home. I also stopped at The Purple Foot home brewing supply store and got some additional supplies and ingredients.

The Purple Foot, however, does not sell wine grapes, and, in fact, wine grapes aren't especially easy to come by in Milwaukee, who knew? There is a winery in Pewaukee, but their website doesn't mention anything about their vineyards, so I have a feeling they buy their grapes from elsewhere. Similarly, Cedar Creek Winery in Cedarburg also do not grow their own grapes (as far as I know). They are partnered with Wollersheim Winery in Prairie du Sac, who do have a vineyard but even so they also buy grapes for some of their wines. In addition to their scarcity, or more likely because of it, wine grapes aren't cheap either. What's a home winemaker to do?

Well, if you're crazy, and I am, you could try growing your own. It just so happens that there is a grape vine growing in my back yard. I didn't plant it, I have no idea what kind of grapes it will produce, nor do I know if they will any good for making wine. If you think this seems like a stupid thing to rely on to make wine from, you'd be right.

Luckily for idiots like me you don't even need grapes to make wine anymore. And I don't mean that in the 'you can make wine from strawberries' sense of the word (even though you can). What I'm talking about is wine grape concentrates. Some crazy genius figured a way to remove most of the sugar and the water from wine grape juice. Then he packaged it up and shipped it all over the place to be sold to dorks like me. All I have to do is reconstitute the concentrate with water, add sugar to my desired level of sweetness and away I go. From two 46oz cans of concentrate you can make yourself 5 gallons of wine. Additionally, you don't have to go through the effort (and cost) of getting a crusher/de-stemmer for your grapes and pressing your must (if you're making red).

So I got a couple of cans of Zinfandel. It seems wrong to even write something like that, but that's what I did.

Now, because I'm a freak, or because I'm scared to attempt this with pretty much no experience and I don't want to run the risk of making garbage wine. Instead of diving in and putting all this stuff together right away, I have delayed the making of my Zinfandel for the moment. I am sort of following these instructions and making a small batch of wine in a repurposed milk jug out of raspberry-apple juice concentrate, some water, and a bunch of sugar. I figure if I can create something semi-decent out of this, then I will start my Zinfandel.

This is all stupid, of course, what will I do if my milk jug wine turns out crappy? Give up? No, I'll go ahead anyway, but maybe I'll have learned something? hopefully? please?

Anyway, hoping that I will be able to make decent table wines, I have created a section on the site called Home Brew, where I'll be posting my recipes and notes as I move forward with this hobby. Maybe we can all learn something, hopefully it won't simply be that I suck at making wine.