Merry Christmas!

Sweet! Scottie got for Liz and I a couple of books on wine and beer brewing!

Dave Miller's Homebrewing Guide
The Joy of Wine Making

The date of this post is approximate.

I was about to call the pineapple a lost cause due to the apparent stuck fermentation, when it suddenly lit up like a christmas tree and started fermenting.

It had even started to settle out and clear, when suddenly (overnight), it clouded up and the balloon puffed up.

The apple/pineapple mix has died down to almost nothing.

Grape Jelly not so jelly

The grape wine turned out beautifully alchoholic. and not real sweet. That bread yeast has some high tolerance.

It was a HIT at the Crackbaby Thanksgiving. We drank a ton of it.

Paul called it a semi-sweet. My untrained palette has to agree. It's strong, but not real dry. But it's also not very sweet. Nicely in the middle. It adheres to the glass nicely. It's a mid-colored red wine, not dark and heavy, but not real light. It cleared nicely, although because it was bottled young, it did settle out a layer of sediment in the bottom of the bottles.

That's the only thing that I think I did wrong. I was a little impatient and should have let it settle out before bottling. Although, next time, I think I'll try to kill it just a little before being fermented completely dry so that it comes out a little semi-sweet like it did this time, and I'll let it settle and/or filter it when bottling.

Oh yeah, and screw putting sugar in the bottles to try to sparkle.

Rescuing the Pineapple Exp

OK, the other night I decided that I needed to rescue the pineapple wines because they were going nowhere. In what I've read, they should have had more sugar, much more initial aeration, and possibly a boost in acid.

SO! I took 4 cups water, 2 cups sugar, and 4 drops each of lemon and lime juice, and brought it to a boil. Then I let it sit covered to cool, with a handful of ice.

I also crushed two Campden tablets and dissolved in about 3/4 cup of water.

Racked all of apple / pineapple gallon into Mr. Beer fermenter. I splashed a lot to aerate. While transfering, I slowly added about half of my Campden solution and about 3 cups of the sugar / acid syrup. Then I racked a little less than half of the straight pineapple into it too.

Racked the rest of the pineapple into a clean 1 gallon jug, again splashing, and slowly adding 1/4 Campden solution and 1 1/2 cups of sugar / acid schtuff.

By the time I put the airlock onto the larger pineapple / apple one, it was working. I checked the pineapple one and it was producing positive air pressure also (the balloon was starting to inflate)((I really need to order some corks and air traps for these small jugs))

Bottled Grape Jelly wine

Tonight, I bottled the grape wine ahead of time so that it could sparkle up and carbonate by this weekend (for Crackbaby Thanksgiving!)

I crushed up two Campden tabs, dissolved in about a cup of water, and gently stirred into the wine.
I put a teaspoon of sugar into each of three plastic Mr. Beer bottles (I gotta find out how much those hold), and three of the glass 1 liter flip-tops. Ran wine off into each of these and let them sit for about 20 minutes with the caps on, but not sealed (to let CO2 replace the air in the bottles, Pat told me about doing that with the beer).

I filled a 1.5L bottle and corked it (w00T! got to use my cork press! I was surprised at how easy it was.)

I also filled two 750ml bottles, one of which I added a teaspoon of Wine Conditioner to.
(liquid invert sugar and potassium sorbate) I've read that Potassium Sorbate combined with Campden usually kills off yeast and fermentation.

I drank some of what was left. It's not killer dry, but VERY alcoholic. I wouldn't call it fuseled (rocket fuel-like), but it's strong.

Should make for excellent entertainment...