I wanted to try another new type of wine, and dandelions are popping up in our neighborhood. I thought about making this wine last year, but it was too late in the year and not enough flowers were readily available. Plus, it seemed like a pretty time intensive preparation, rightly so. I found a nice recipe at HomeBrewTalk.com, which had good reviews, so I am going to try and make that.
I had come across a recipe for German Apfelwein a while back and am now finally getting around to trying it. It is a very simple recipe, no cooking or anything involved. Just mix the ingredients and then wait, the longer the better. According to the reviews I’ve seen, 6 months of aging is great, 8 or more and it is amazing. We will have to see.
Apfelwein
5 Gallons
OG:
1.064
FG:
1.000
%ABV:
8.4
TA:
0.33%
Sugars
5.00 Gallons
Apple Juice (no preservatives or additives, ascorbic acid okay)
Another plum wine, this time with Santa Rosa plums from the store instead of the home -grown Italian plums I used in my previous batches. These plums are very ripe, getting a bit soft, and have a nice dark red color to them. I am going to make this wine without an initial recipe; I will juice the fruit, measure the SG and adjust to around 1.090, and try to add as little water as possible. This is in the hopes of getting more fruit flavor from the wine by adding less water, and also to try a slightly different method. I’m also making this wine a little weaker, so that I have some more variety in the strengths of the wines I am making this year.
My grandma gave me 4 pounds of her homegrown green grapes so that I could make some wine. I had been waiting for them to ripen and these are some of the first ripe ones she was able to pick. They sat in the fridge for about a week before I was able to brew with them; a simple one-gallon batch of white wine.
It’s time to use the plums before they all fall from the tree and spoil. A lot of our plums are already splitting open on the tree from being ripe and having all the moisture we’ve been getting the past couple weeks. I am making the same recipe I made last year for plum wine because it turned out really well. The only differences this time is that I am going to use my steam juicer to get the juice from all the plums instead of mashing them in the primary, and I am using a different kind of yeast.
Blueberries this time around. These were not fresh picked, they have been in my mom’s freezer for a little about a year, but I still wanted to try this flavor of wine. I’m also making this a stronger wine, with a potential ABV of almost 20%. Here’s the recipe:
Blackberries are in season now so I am making use of them. I have wanted to try this for a few months and now I finally get to, some nice blackberry wine. Two and a half hours of picking gave me twelve and a half pounds of berries. Here is the recipe I came up with, simple but should be tasty.
My very first foam over occurred tonight, one day into primary for my Blackberry Wheat Ale. That meant I needed to get a blow-off tube made, and quickly. As it was 2 a.m. in the morning, I had to work with the supplied I had on hand.
The foam actually clogged the airlock and I had a bit of foam and beer come out around the edges of the lid, a first for me. I could see the lid bubbling around the edges, meaning that the lid really doesn’t have a good seal. I swapped the entire bucket/lid set for one I think will seal better (from #2 to #1). I poured the beer from one bucket to the other, so it was aerated nicely in the process.
I made a makeshift blow-off tube by attaching the drain-tube from my steam juicer to the airlock stem, and running that into a jar of water. It looked like it might work initially, video below:
