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.

Christmas Goodies - a book and a crock

For Christmas, my mom gave me the latest book by Sandor Katz (!) and a 3 gallon crock (!!!). One can only imagine how much this will enable my fermentation hobby/habit. The book is long and packed with new techniques, advice, and illustrations. The crock arrived last night, and in combination with the book should lead to some real fun and some audacious experiments that go horribly awry! At the very least it quadruples my kraut making capacity. It will probably come into use for wild yeast wine ferments as well. Thank you mother, and I promise to share the results.


Updates:

-Over the weekend I racked the beet wine and sauerkraut cider to clean jugs. The sauerkraut cider has really mellowed and is coming into its own. It should soon be stable enough to bottle and age. This one is unique folks, and very exciting, even if I'm the only one willing to drink it.

-I also filled several bottles from the carboy of maple wine, which may be under a gallon in volume by now. I'm a little excited and a little worried because this means that equipment will be free for a 2-5 gallon batch of something. Any ideas?

-Using a bit of my original sourdough starter that went up to Massachusetts to my mom's house in November and came back to Maryland in January, I'm making real sourdough bread this week. I'm also coming off a successful baking of rustic Italian bread which had an excellent crust and moist crumb, so I may be overconfident about my bread skills.

-Last night I started a small batch of peach nectar, cider, and cranberries as an alcoholic ferment. It's on the counter to catch wild yeast as we speak.

Updates

Another updates post because of how many things are going on in my fermentation world

-Fresh sauerkraut in the crock - packed full of savoy cabbage and red cabbage. This is a pretty simple batch - no beets - and I'm hoping that will translate into a cleaner, better flavor in the final product.

-The all wild yeast maple wine is all gone! We drank it at Thanksgiving in Boston, with gusto. It was delicious - exactly what I had hoped. Dry but not too dry, strong maple nose, a little bit of effervescence. The aging definitely benefited the wine. Makes me want to dive into making another batch of wild yeast stuff and aging it good and long.

-Beet wine went over pretty well at Thanksgiving. No clear consensus on what it actually tastes like. Some people swore they were getting too much beet, some couldn't taste beet at all. Many people thought it was funky and not altogether great. Some hopeful signs though, even some requests for a bottle. Someone made a blended spritzer out of it too, which came out good.

-Sauerkraut cider was kind of a dud. Too much sauerkraut flavor for everyone who tried it. The process will need refining.

-Distributed some sourdough starter to my mom - interested to see how it develops separately from the mother culture.

Thanks for reading!

Fun weekend and updates

I found a cool beer and wine store in Bethesda on Saturday, and have acquired not only the venerable Weihenstephaner Vitus (referenced in my earlier beet wine tasting post), but a dry-hopped Woodchuck cider which promises to be an interesting mix of flavors.

Fermentation updates:

-Brought the Memorial Day mead to Boston, where it didn't go over great, probably due to its own overwhelming sourness from having sat on the spent yeast for too long. I am going to have to persevere with this stuff, since I have about a gallon and a half left in the carboy. I'm thinking of blending it or using it for cooking or vinegar

-The beet wine is ready for racking, which I hope to do later tonight. I'm also going to do an experiment where I add extra must to the spent yeast in the jug after I rack it. I want to see how much life is left in there. It's going to be a challenge not to drink the beet wine before it's ready; it looks and smells so good right now.

-I sunk some of the beets that were boiled to make the beet wine into my current sauerkraut batch. They've been in about two weeks, so I'm getting ready to dig them out and see how much the kraut juice has penetrated into the cooked beets. Hoping for some kind of pickling effect, but absent that I still don't think there's any downside.

-Made sourdough starter from scratch and baked with it this weekend! The stuff works, simply based on capturing wild yeast from the air. All credit to Sandor Katz's recipe in Wild Fermentation, the bible of my current projects. The bread was good, and plenty sour, but I'm already thinking of ways to improve it.

That's all for now!

Illicit Tasting

After an ill-fated attempt to go to the Shakespeare Theatre last night, I came home and snuck into the basement. I was there for all the wrong reasons. I wanted a taste of the highly immature, barely week-old beet wine. It's way too early for that, and there's no way the wine is ready, but my curiosity would not be sated. As is often the case, I had to know what was happening inside that beet-red jug (get it?).

I went down with a jug of extra must that I've been storing in the fridge to top up after my tasting. Removing the airlock, I poured a little in a glass. The aroma! And the taste. Yeasty, funky, a little weird, but much different than what I was expecting. The sweetness from the added sugar in the must is mostly gone. That Montrachet yeast has been very active, gobbling up honey, cane sugar, and residual beet sugar to turn into alcohol and carbon dioxide. What remains is somewhat viscous and redolent of fruit flavors and a strong hint of banana. The yeast and shredded beets have mostly settled, but there's a lot of sediment in what I poured, leaving a chalky residue on the glass. The thing it reminded me of most is this beer.There was an immediate connection in my mind to the Weihenstephaner Vitus. The yeasty banana flavor is written all over it. There's also a musty, almost savory taste to it.

I topped up the jug with some more must to feed the yeast a little bit and replace the airlock. Needless to say, can't wait to taste the finished product.

Beet Wine - now with video

I spent Monday afternoon making beet wine. It was a long time in the offing, but surprisingly easy when I actually started doing it. I boiled about 3 pounds of beets, removed the beets from the water, added sugar, honey, and orange juice concentrate.

 Boiled that mix, cooled, added a yeast-orange juice starter mix, and voila. Beet wine, in a brilliant purple-red color. Won't be ready for at least six months, so temper your expectations, please!

Here's the video of the must bubbling away in the fermenter:



Waiting for this to finish fermenting and aging is not going to be easy. I want to drink the whole thing right now! Definitely encouraging to try something that seemed so complex and find it a fairly simple proposition. I will not hold back from attempting outlandish wines or other fermentation projects in the future. As the truism goes: you can't succeed until you try. Or something like that....

Sanitizing

In preparation for the beet wine batch today, I'm sanitizing jugs. One problem - my kettle is too small (really just the biggest pasta pot we have). I've ended up pouring sanitizer into the jugs and sloshing it around a little. If it sounds amateurish, that's because it is. We'll have to make it work!

Quick post: Weekend Plans to brew for Columbus

I will be making beet wine this weekend! At last, the day has come. Montrachet yeast ordered, orange juice concentrate stocked in, beets to be bought, 5 lbs of honey in the basement. Just need to rack the maple mead out of the primary fermenting bucket, and maybe bottle it. I even bought fresh corks for the bottling process. Hurray for me!

This means I'll be sterilizing and siphoning all weekend. That's what Columbus would have wanted on his feast day! This recipe should only be for a gallon, so quantities are limited. Leave a comment if you'd like me to reserve you a bottle.

Dance Yrself Clean (Wine Edition)

This weekend, when I'm not rocking out to the breakdown at 3:08 or attending the National Book Festival, I'm going to make Spiced Beet Wine. The 1 gallon recipe from the wild wines book I got from my mother calls for 3 pounds of beets, 2 pounds of white sugar, and 1 pound of honey. I'm using packaged Montrachet yeast and some yeast nutrient for this go-round to ensure a lively fermentation, but I'm not averse to doing this recipe with the wild yeast air-capture method in the future. The spices also seem pretty mild in the recipe. No reason why the amounts shouldn't be jacked up to nausea-inducing levels of fresh ginger rather than a pinch of dry. This seems like the perfect time to try and fail with exotic recipes. Beets, tomatoes, garlic wine. I may learn something, even.

May the beet wine I make now be dug out of a dusty cellar in 2088!

This project has partly come about because I'm obsessed with beets and their color. It's so....red. But not just red, it's a living, pulsating reddish-purple. I want to capture this color and turn it into wine and keep it in a bottle for several years. The color is itching to get out of the beets, too. If you scratch them they will bleed deep dark red juice into your hands that doesn't come out except under prolonged scrubbing. If you cut them, your hands and your cutting board will bear the mark long after. I wear it as a badge of honor now, the pink hand of the beet-preparer. They have a sweet, earthy, wholesome taste as well and a delightful crunch. I would eat them every day in an ideal world.

Image credit: untitled (Alexandre Moha) / CC BY 3.0

17 or more Fermentation Possibilities, who's counting, really?

Potential future fermentation projects:

-Beer
-Kvass (Russian bread soda, basically)
-Beet kvass
-All-beet kraut (or pickled beets, you might call it)
-Beet wine
-Beet hot sauce (sweet and hot)
-Fermented beet and corn salad (very close to becoming a real thing)
-Beet yogurt (getting the theme yet?)
-Tomato wine
-Sourdough pizza
-Fermented tomato sauce (we'll need this on our sourdough pizza)
-Fermented peach preserves
-Sour pickles
-Hard cider

-Beet hard cider (why not?!)
-Fermented ginger preserves
-Pickled potatoes
-kombucha
-Kefir!

Any more suggestions? I'm open for business.

Let's not hold back here. The possibilities are limitless, constrained only by imagination and equipment. People have laughed when I told them my plans. I understand fermentation is easy to dismiss as a mad scientist-type hobby without productive consequences. This is real, though. I'm going ahead with it anyway, but I want people to know that it's not a joke. There are vast opportunities for fun, financial savings, and health improvement. I plan to laugh all the way to a tasty bank of jars containing the products of my labor combined with friendly bacteria.

It's mostly for fun right now, but it feels good to have a modicum of skill that creates something you can eat and drink and give to people. It feels good to make your own. And when people laugh at you, you can go home to your pickled beets and feast until your lips turn red.

Also, let's not lie, it's fun to be able to make alcohol. It's not just fun, it's easy too. I'm a little short on jugs, but once I get my operation running, there's going to be a large quantity of wine in production. If you're nice to me, you'll be on the distribution list.