Cooper Jackson

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!

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.

The mash is very thick on top. We don’t think it is smelling very good but maybe this is normal for rotting fruit. Or maybe we did something wrong like keep the temperature too hot or didn’t stir often enough. The taste of the wine is very sweet. We are nervous that this is not going to be a good wine.

These are pictures of us removing the mash and putting it back into primary fragmentation bucket:

From Wine Making S…

Our first wine! Maybe a little bold because we begin with the full processes. We plan our next wine to be a kit that takes out a lot of difficult work out. This wine we crushed the blueberries and followed a recipe in a wine book.

Our notes:

• Use large pot with sanitizer in it to be able to dip tools in over next couple of days
• Fill up 5 gallons bucket with water night before to declorinate water for use
• Remember: Cover with cheese cloth first 4-6 days to maximize yeast growth also makes it easier to push down mash
• Remember: to sanitize all equipment all the time
• Prep the yeast early in the day so you don’t have to wake up at 2am to do it
• Make up a schedule & write it down in the calendar at the beginning
• Check recipe for any typos before beginning
• Have all ingredients before starting
• Wash the fruit before mashing
• Get screw on top fermentation
• Put air lock on periodically so you can see if your yeast is doing anything
• We didn’t have blueberry juice for starting the yeast, so we just crushed up a pint of blueberries. It seemed to work well.
• Find out the ins & outs of sterilizing
• Lateef believes the wine/must, he inadvertently ingested during first racking coused him to hallucinate