Cooper Jackson

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

From Wine Making S…

With all the wonderful wine out thee in the world why make your own? Well for many reasons why not list a few:

• We think that making wine will improve our appreciation of wine
• Just like making bread has improved the quality of bread we eat, we believe the quality of wine we drink will also increase
• Dreams of dreams? I mean it is hard to not dream of walking though your vineyard so we need to know how to make wine if we ever want to own a vineyard
• You never know we might learn something!

As we begin to do research from talking to people who have made it, reading online and in a couple books. Besides everything saying clean there was not a lot of constancy of information. One of the nice things about making something that you can decide what you are going to have in it. As with bread we have found quality flour, sugar and water make the difference and thus we wanted to have quality grapes (or fruit) to make our wine.

Lets not get ahead of ourselves though. This is the begining and thus we have a plan! The plan is to learn as much as we can by doing a couple practice rounds.