Cooper Jackson

After some time I decided to try and make some new labels and after using a new pictures I decided to change the picture for each label. Since we are such a home made operation it take marketing (ME!) a while to get to making new labels since they take about 20 minutes each time.

This is the Amarone we made form a kit. It was a very expensive kit so we are hoping for a higher quality wine. We started it in May and bottled it in July.

This was my most fun label yet. We made a strawberry wine which was cheeper because we picked the strawberries was no where near as cheep as the beet wine. And I think is a pretty good wine (for strawberry). We made this in June and just are getting around to bottling it. I am looking forward to drinking it cold on a hot summer day in 2010.

We are planning on making a beet wine this week and our mulberry didn’t ferment, it didn’t spoil either which is kinda strange so we have juice. I plan to try and ferment it again this week and hopefully save the batch.

OMG. We started the beet wine 2 weeks ago. Lateef thought he would be clever by adding alittle extra sugar to slightly increase the alcohol %. We took the specific gravity reading tonight before doing the first transfer/racking of the wine. Yep, we have 20% alcohol wine at this point, and its still fermenting. However after trying some we realize we will only be drinking this wine in small quantities anyways, because of the taste. Think boiled beets with honey on top, then with a splash of vodka and that pretty much describes the sensation in your mouth when you drink this. However, the color turned out pretty, so at least it looks good in the pictures:

According to the picture I just inserted, it looks like we just bottled some ketchup in a few carboys. And now, even as I look at them in person, it doesn’t really resemble wine. But that is what the next few months are for, to turn these sludgy-looking things into crystal-clear, horrible-tasting high-volume wine.

After doing a few kit wines where we order the grapes pre-juiced, we decided to turn back to our roots …our beet roots that is. We’re going back to making wine from fruits & veggies. As you know, our first, and so far best, wine is the blueberry wine. The taste, the color, the clean crispness is amazing. Unfortunately, we only made 5 bottles of it. This time we made beet wine and the recipe says kind of the same thing – tastes nothing like beets but has a beautiful color.
I am very happy about the economy of this wine, as compared to the blueberry wine or any of the other wines. Blueberry wine probably averaged at $10/bottle, due to the high cost of blueberries. Beets were $.89 per lb., so we are out like $5 for the beets and other $5 for the other ingredients. So we are looking at $1/bottle. And, as I dicovered tonight, it gets even cheaper! Because the way to make beet wine is to boil the beets and use the now-red water as the wine base. And now we have plenty of boiled beets to eat.
Tonight we got our second run from those beets, via Lateef’s idea: Russian Borscht. This is a soup that involves beets as the main ingredient, followed by carrots, cabbage and onions. We have been meaning to thin out our carrots in the garden, and still have plenty of cabbage sitting out there waiting to be harvested. So, before I delve into the intricacies of beet wine making, please see a picture of our carrot harvest (I know, the are funny looking because we didn’t till the soil too good this year) and of the Borscht soup.

Now, on to the beet wine. We got the beets from the farmers market, the honey from the same place, and the other ingredients from the grocery store (oranges, orange juice, sugar, etc).
Basically the beets get cut up and boiled, then everything else gets added and boiled. All containers were sterilized. So the only thing unboiled and/or unsterilized was the ‘zest of the orange’. Because of this, we decided to leave out the Campden tablet, which kills any “wild yeast”. This is pretty risky as by not killing any potential wild yeast, we can end up with a spoiled batch. However, it also lowers the preservatives in the wine. As Lateef’s dad advised us before we got married, “take risks”. We’re laying all on the line right here baby! We are still going to wait 24 hours before adding the yeast so that all the flavors can combine. Also we are waiting because to start the yeast would take at least 1 hour, and it was 11:30pm on a Sunday night, and we were falling apart.

When we took the specific gravity, which is the starting measurement for determining how much alcohol it might have, it was high at 1.15. If this stuff ferments to completion, then the alcohol content will be 20%. Yikes. Probably the yeast will get drunk with power and die early.
24 hours later, we heard the beginnings of the yeast orgy. The familiar bubbling, frothing sound coming from the bucket was a good sign. Here’s a pic. It looks like a disgusting bubbling brew.

Since June 20 we have been excited about the day we could finally drink some wine we made! And today was that day even though technically we are not supposed to drink any, just bottle the wine. We chilled the left rover 1/2 bottle in the fridge and enjoyed a really nice flavor. We had made an entire 6 bottles! Ok so not so impressive for us.

Color: Wonderful clear purplish red color.

Smell: Some sent of blueberry or something sweet.

Taste: We didn’t notice that we where drinking the wine after the first sip. Which we thought ment it was a good sine that it was not really bad tasting. It did taste very green.

The recipe says that we should be waiting another 6 months before drinking I hope we can wait that long!

We are completing some steps that we should have done a few days ago, but the wine started fermenting again.  On 08/05/08 we added ‘packet number 3′, potassium metabisulphite, into the wine & mixed.  This seemed to stop any kind of air/fermentation that could have been happening.  Now there was NO pressure on the fermentation lock.  We stirred the wine 4 times a day as instructed .  Well, lateef stirred the wine 4 times a day.

Now, on 08/09/08 we moved on to the next step, which we did 2 days later than we should have. We dissolved a little potassium sorbate into water and added to the wine.  This supposedly is an anti-microbial agent and prevents re-fermentation.  We were thinking of skipping this step, since it is basically a preservative, but since this is our first time, we followed the instructions.  Then we added packet number 5, a fining agent.  It is supposed to remove proteins, resulting in a clear & stable wine.  I have heard fining agents also help to mellow harsh tastes and improve the general flavor. I will note that the blueberry wine calls for none of this extra stuff. All it needed was yeast and a campden tablet at the beginning.

We also took a taste of the wine, hesitantly, because last week when it did, well it basically sucked.  The smell has improved, although it still has that underdeveloped fruity aroma to it.  However, we were happy to find that it tasted much more like a ‘real’ wine.  It is progressing for sure.  We are re-looking forward to next week.
Now we leave our wine to sit for 6 days to clear, and the next step is bottling!

From Wine Making S..

According to the instructions, we should have done this step today two days ago but we were out of town.  We cleaned everything then racked the wine from the carboy to the fermentation bin.  Since fermentation was complete, we decided to do a taste test with another red wine.  Alexis gave us a bottle of pretty awesome wine last week, and so we used this one as the comparison.  That was mistake #1.

It was a blind taste test, and they looked exactly the same in the glass, but just one sniff and you knew which was which.  Ours smelled very fruity and underdeveloped compared to the ‘real wine’.

Our ‘blind taste test’ of our wine produced the following notes: Smells raw, smells scary, taste is underdeveloped.  On the positive side, we have paid for and drank wines that tasted like this before.  The other wine smells more like what we think wine should smell like, and less like ripening fruit.  The ‘real wine’ also had a much more complex flavor.

After drinking a 1/2 glass of the wine, Melissa made a visit to the toilet. Or, as they say in the Bordeaux region of France ‘le toilette’

We had a hard time siphoning the wine from the carboy to the fermentation bin, and we think its because:

1. Our hose wa 2 ft shorter than it needs to be

2. The height difference between the two bins was too small at first, so we moved it, then the difference was too large.

3. Hose may have been pinching at the top of the carboy.

After racking, the fermentation restarted, so we will not finish the other steps as listed on the instructions until yeast completes its activity.

Hydrometer reading: 0.99 (target less than 0.995)

We started by cleaning the equipment early in the morning, because last time it took 5 hours to dry.  Today it still wasn’t dry by 8pm!  We would prefer to clean the equipment the day before to allow for dry time, especially the big carboy and the hose.  The primary fermentation bin was leaking through the nozzle part a little at the bottom, so there was a ring of wine on our floor that had been developing for the last week.  Lateef tightened the nozzle up.

We drained the wine to the huge carboy through the nozzle.  Very easy, very fast.  Should we siphon instead in the future for less oxygen exposure?  It sure did splash around alot.  The nozzle is set slightly above the bottom of the fermentation bin, so the sediment sucessfully stuck to the top of the bin and stayed at the bottom below the nozzle.  There was suprisingly alot of sediment.

Hint: Today, due to last week failing to take out the trash, we have lots of fruit flies in the house.  We have perfected killing them with magazines but it would have been nice to eliminate them before, as we spent an hour tracking them down (lured them with fruit and bread dough on the counter) and then killing them.

Hydrometer reading: 1..000 + temp adjustment .002 (it was 77 degrees inside) = 1.002.  Target on instructions 1.01.  SWEET.

% reading: 1%

Our last % reading was 13%, and so I believe that we now know the alcohol % of our wine is 12%.

We were a little disappointed upon reading the instructions on how to make blueberry wine that it could take 2-6 months before bottling the wine, then another 6 months before opening your first bottle.  We wanted instant gratification!!!!

So we bought some juice from a company called EC Kraus, which sells wine supplies and already juiced grapes online.  They promise drinkable wine in as little as 28 days.  Sweet! That’s about as instant gratification as you can get in wine-land.  We bought the European Select Red Bordailles, also known as Red Bordeaux.  The grapes were grown in France, and then juiced, packaged and sent to us in a big bladder.  We add the water, the yeast, the other miscellanous tablets  over time and take various measurements and this and that.  Then, 28 days later…poof…30 bottles of wine.  Total cost will come up to about $3 per bottle.

On 7/13/08, here was our notes:

Instructions say to pour the juice, water, & yeast in to the primary fermentation bin and then seal and put an air-lock on .  However in our vast experience and of course some online research, we hear it is better just to cover with a cheese cloth to let it breathe a little more and give the yeast a better chance to develop.  We decided to buck the first instructions on the list and use a cheese cloth.

Hydrometer reading: 1.095 + .002 due to the tempeture in our house (77 degrees), so total is 1.097.  Target on instructions was 1.080-1.095.

Hydrometer %: 13%
This process was extremely easy compared to the blueberry wine starting from scratch.

Our “total water/juice/yeast” mixture line was slightly higher than the anticipated 6 gallon mark.

In our previous fermentation, it was more than a 1 gallon carboy could handle, so we put the extra in a 1/2 gallon milk jug.  We didn’t have a proper seal for the milk jug so we drilled a hole in the cup & stuck the airlock in the hole.  It fermented slower than the carboy for a few days, then it stopped while the other was going full steam ahead.  We suspected air was leaking out of our homemade mil cup fermentation lock so we were wondering if it was going to turn out.  When we racked today and Lateef siphoned, he said the milk jug wine tasted better than the carboy wine.  I tasted the wine, and it tasted NOTHING like blueberries.  Not even a hint of blueberry flavor.  Now we have a proper fermentation lock on both of them and got lots of sediment out when we racked.  The milk jug wine register a more progressive hydrometer & percentage reading.  They are both slowly bubbling after racking.

Hydrometer reading, 1 gallon bottle: 1.002

% reading, 1 gallon bottle: .5%

Hydrometer reading 1/2 gallon bottle: .992

% reading, 1/2 gallon bottle: -1%

From Wine Making S…

One of the key aspects of making wine is clean equipment. Lateef invented this crazy way to help dry out hoses.
When we put the campden tablet in, we should have taken the hydrometer reading in order to determine future alcohol percent. On this day the reading is 1.020 + .003 (80 degrees in side) = 1.023. It must be below 0.995 before bottling.