Friday, September 12, 2014

The old trickster - peach wine

I'm up to my old tricks again - making peach wine! I had a hankering to put something in a vessel and watch it bubble, especially since I haven't started any new projects since we moved to this little one bedroom apartment in Silver Spring. My equipment, such as it is, is all in place, but I haven't set aside time and mental energy to do something fun, fermentation-wise.

This is a small (half-gallon) batch, with the base coming from one of those cheap cartons of peach nectar you can get at the grocery store.

Following my traditional method, I mixed the juice with some sugar and water and put it in a bowl to sit by a window. This, I assume, is when the yeast flies in and starts devouring the sugars in the highly saturated solution. Luckily our windows open here on the 4th floor.

As is typical, nothing had really happened after 2-3 days of stirring and checking, except that a crowd of fruit flies was attracted to the dishcloth covering the bowl.

Then things got weird.

The peach nectar has some kind of solids in it, so this was already a cloudy mixture. On about the 4th day, there was a grayish sheen on the surface of the liquid in the bowl.