Berry Wine Updates

The strawberry wine I mentioned in the previous post fermented to the point where I could rack it up in a carboy this past weekend. It took 6 days to ferment from roughly a SG reading of 1.080 to 1.010.

The blueberry wine is fermenting slower, but it is progressing. I have three 1 gallon batches fermenting and one 3 gallon batch. One of the three 1 gallons progressed a bit faster and I racked that tonight. I think this one I will attempt to turn into blueberry port.

Below you will find two photos of me straining the must and one video with me sipping the very young strawberry wine. I figured I need to taste the stuff along the way to know if I am on the right track.

Strawberry Wine

I made a 2 gallon batch of strawberry wine today. One lesson I had emphasized to me today, is always take a hydrometer reading when making wine. The hydrometer reading tells you how much sugar is in your juice, as fermentation proceeds the sugar is burned up and converted to alcohol. Basically, if you have a low sugar level, then there is not a lot of 'food' for the yeast and your alcohol level will be low. I followed my recipe exactly, if I had put everything in and added the yeast at the point I was done with the recipe I am certain the wine would have been awful (lol, it still may). Anyways, I think the recipe had me add too much water, as my initial reading was 1.050. From what I've read you need to be in the 1.070 - 1.080 range for strawberry wine. I added more berries and sugar and got it to the level I needed. We shall see how it tastes one year from now.

Blueberry Wine Started

The blueberry thieves seemed to stay out of the blueberries long enough for me to get enough to make some wine with.

I spent today gathering wine making supplies between NW Pennsylvania and NE Ohio. Since this is my first time making blueberry wine I wanted to keep my batches in smaller quantities in case I messed something up, plus I tinkered with my recipe a bit in some of the batches based on some advice I received from another blueberry home wine maker in my area. Locating supplies for the small batches was the main reason for all the running around, it's tough finding local stores that have primary fermenters on hand for one gallon batches, five gallons seems to be the standard that most people stock.

Right now, I have three, one gallon batches setting up. I am tempted to share all the details with the recipe and the process, but as I am not sure what the final product will be like, I don't want to publish something for other people to follow and find out at a later date the results are poor. The blueberry wine will be ready in about a year, so you will have to wait a while to get a recipe (or to drink it if your friends or family). If you come across this posting looking for a recipe, lets just say I followed one from a Google search for the most part.

My plan is to make some blueberry port wine with one of the batches, just to see how that comes out. That will take a bit longer then a year to be ready.

That's it for now, I leave you with a picture from one of the batches.

Updates for July 6, 2008

I haven’t had a chance to get posts up as often as I would like, it’s been busy around here with summer in full bloom, graduations, birthday parties, gardening, etc.

Peppers…our banana peppers and cayenne peppers are coming along nicely. All our sweet peppers are still just flowers, but the growth on the plants look good thus far. I had a couple that I thought died after they were transplanted in the ground, but they have rebounded and are just a little behind their brothers and sisters.

I trimmed our tomato plants today, it looks like we have a few tomatoes starting out now, lots of flowers everywhere on the plants. Our cherry tomatoes look the furthest along, I am holding out hope that we will have some ready in two weeks. Most of the larger tomato plants do not have really any tomatoes on them yet, I think by next weekend that will change though. I ended up putting 50 tomato plants in the ground, our crop of tomatoes this year is divided up into some seedlings we bought, plus some we started from seed. I think the ones we started won’t be ready until the end of August. I was a bit disappointed at this thought, but if it works out right we should have tomatoes ripening over a 45 day period. One downside to planting a larger tomato crop this year is I had to go out and purchase more cages this weekend.

Our lettuce and radishes are ready and we have been enjoying them in salads for the last several days.

We had some pests on our plants this past week, Lisa identified them as cucumber bugs. They were really doing a number on our squash plants. Lisa festered most of them out by hand.

We went to pick some blueberries Friday night and I was a bit surprised at how few there were ready. I mention this to Uncle Jeff and he said there were at least 10 quarts ready the day before. So it looks like we have some blueberry thieves in these parts.

I finally got around to picking up the posts for my trellis for my grapes this weekend. I have about 32 holes to dig and I think I am going to divide it up and try to do 3-4 a night after work. The grapes are doing quite well, some of the shoots are about 3.5’ now. Some of the vines have some grapes on them, since they are so young they should be trimmed back. Since this is a new experience for me, I decided to keep a couple bunches on the vines just to see if they mature.

Hover over the pictures for a description, click for a larger version.

Pancakes With Blueberry Syrup

I went out and picked some blueberries Sunday morning. About 1-3% of them were ripe as of then. It was slow going on the picking as I had to pick them off one at a time and not in bundles. I think it took me over hour to pick a quart and 1/2.

Lisa used some of them and made some blueberry syrup which we had on some pancakes for dinner last night.



Making a batch of blueberry wine is still in the forecast.

Blueberries Almost in Season

Blueberries are almost in season. This is a cell phone picture I took while fighting off deer flies (they seem to love me more then the average person).

These are at the far end of the property Lisa's family owns. Uncle Jeff planted them ~ three years ago.

I don't have everything lined up yet, but I am hoping to make some blueberry wine with some of this years crop.

In years past we managed to keep a few bags frozen until December, which made for nice blueberry muffins.

Learning To Feed Ourselves

News article from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/food/20080619_LEARNING_TO_FEED_OURSELVES.html