BellaDonna Brews

Wine and Mead Making at its Most Experimental (at least until I figure out what the heck I am doing!)

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Location: Houston, Texas, United States

If you need help feeding a family healthy delicious food on a shoestring budget, I'm your girl, errrr, mermaid. Tiny budgets deserve better than the drive thru, and I'm here to help give you the tips and techniques to help you succeed. I am currently a full time student and single mother of two, but I have been responsible for feeding a family of six, including 4 adults on a regular basis. The kinds of tips I'll be sharing will cover big families, small families, even singles!

9.23.2005

Strawberry Wine

Okay, so yesterday I racked my wine to a secondary. Had a taste from the hydrometer reading sample - wow. It tastes like wine! Really bad, really cheap, harsh wine, but dang - I made wine! It's now burping away next to the cranberry mead, but nowhere near as active (1 blip every 10 seconds as opposed to one every second) - I'm going to ask on GotMead about this. It looks very different from the mead, too. The mead has been fermenting and dropping sediment (I am cautious about calling it "clearing" so early in fermentation) for a few days now and is now a beautiful ruby red with a thin layer of what looks like very compacted lees. The wine, on the other hand, dropped a huge amount of lees within the first couple of hours, and is now a nice light orangish red with maybe and inch and a half, 2 inches of very loosely packed lees at the bottom. I hope these compact more as time goes on so I don't have to top up so much when I rack again in a month and a half (per recipe). So the stats for this racking:
Current temp: 75 degrees
S.G. .997

So, going by the O.G., I'm already at 13% alcohol or so. I am wondering if the reason it is bubbling so slowly is that it already fermented to dryness. I mean, looking at the current S.G., I am already fairly dry with this one.

Hurricane still coming . . . . we're gonna be securing everything and lifting as much stuff as we can above waist height today in case we do get some flooding in the house. We'll also be taking baths and showers and then filling the bathtubs. We had a power outage yesterday. Luckily only for a half hour or so, but I am so not ready to lose power before tomorrow morning. I like my computer. Current weather at our house: nice actually. Pleasant temperature, cloud cover, light wind. In the immortal words of Denis Leary, "Oh, man, this is gonna SUCK!"

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