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

Yes, it can be done.

The key, thus far in my experiments, is to buy the vacuum sealed strips, they tend to be juicier than the large packaged stuff (which is very dry). Fry it up in large quantities of butter and oil, give it time to absorb the oil and get tender, cutting it into small bits facilitates this by increasing the surface area.

So there you have it, a new ingredient for your culinary creations, similar to bacon in it's legendary awesomeness.

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.

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.

Yes, another rum. What can I say? I'm partial.

As far as spiced rums go this one is quite good, and quite different.