Eruption

Well, I think that if I ever do another pumpkin mead (and this one had better turn out REALLY good for me to even consider it at this point), I may give something mentioned on GotMead a try - using a seeded pumpkin as a primary fermentor. As it is, I am sick unto death of this one.

I would like to thank, publicly, whatever deity or deities (does anyone know of a god or goddess of mead? *grins*) were watching over my house the last couple of days. Thank you for:
-causing the small eruption to occur in the cabinet, so that I moved the carboy into my water bath so as not to have to clean that cabinet twice
-giving me the idea to stick the water bath under the overhang of a pennisular counter in my kitchen so people wouldn't walk into it
-causing the airlock to be blown off the top of the carboy when no one was looking at it
-having most of the explosion go in the water bath or under the counter instead of all over the floor and the ceiling
-having the eruption be in this house with the old cruddy carpeting instead of the house we just moved out of with the brand new carpeting
-only losing about a quarter of a gallon
-making sure I remembered to cap the extra mead I put in the fridge for topping up this time.

Ick, what a day. I am not topping that stuff up for a while, as I don't want a repeat. I think I am going to have to get some lids for my buckets and use them for putting fruit in the "secondary" for melomels. This is the second time this has happened, and both times were right after transferring to a carboy over fruit. The brew is still bubbling happily, though, and my house still smells like mead in the kitchen and living room. I took pictures, but I have to beat my husband to get him to find the cord for the camera and take the pics off of it. Might be easier to do now that the World Series is over. *grins*

Okay someone PLEASE smack me the next time I consider transferring onto fruit before fermentation has slowed drastically. I don't think I will be doing it again for a while, I am still cleaning pumpkin guts off my kitchen.

Transferred both meads last night to secondaries. The one with pumpkin went nuts and gooshed up into and out of the airlock all over the cabinet and kitchen floor. Changed out the airlock, and will have have to do it again once I can get the other one clean and sanitized. I have it sitting back in the water bath (ant free zone) to make cleanup easier. The Trick is doing fine, bubbling happily and NOT coming out of the airlock. *grins*

Forgot to bring my brewlog upstairs, so I can't give you the exact S.G.'s right now, but they are around 1.080.

Eight batches?

Whew . . . Next year will be happy indeed. I already have 8 bacthes going, and I plan on doing an apple wine and a cyser next month. Looks like I'll have a huge selection from which to pick presents from for next year. Also, I'm thinking about changing the layout of the site. I like Having a list of what currently fermenting, but I would also like to add a list of what's bulk aging (nothing just yet), and what's been bottled (planning on bottling the AO sometime after the beginning of next month). And I need to find where my printer cables were packed so that I can start designing my labels (it has a scanner, too), and put those as well as the few pics I have taken up in a gallery somewhere. Well, gotta go unpack some more boxes and take care of the baby . . ..

Pumpkin Marathon

Whew. What a weekend. So Friday night I decided I was going to get the pumpkins out of my pantry and get my pumpkin brews started. And deal with the cherry limeade while I was at it, too.

So, even though it was the last thing I did Friday night, I'll tell you about it first, because it is the quickest to tell. I was going to top it up with another gallon or so of sugar water, but as it was cooling down to add it to the must without killing the yeasties, silly me forgot to cover the pot, and it got contaminated. "Ummm, brewmistress, there is a fly in my limeade!" So, I got fed up with it (I needed the space in my ant-free water zone, patent pending), moved it to a corner of my kitchen and had my roommate knock the lid on it. Airlocked it and left it alone. It's gurgling away, slowly, but noticeably. It took me until this morning to realize what that strange gurgling noise was, I was wondering if my new house had a leak in it somewhere. Thank goodness it's just a happy batch of limeade!

So now for the pumpkin marathon: For all three batches I started by chunking up a couple of pie pumkins I had bought, sprinkling the small one with brown sugar and pumpkin pie spice, just brown sugar on the other, shoved it all in the oven to cook for and hour and a half at 350. The smaller pumpkin, with sugar and spice, was then shelled and put in a ziploc to keep in the fridge until I transfer the mead into a secondary. The larger one, with just sugar, became the base for my pumpkin wine:

Midnight (recipe from Jack Keller)
5 lbs. (ish) Pumpkin
3 1/4 lbs sugar
1/2 oz. citric acid
1 t. nutrient
6 1/2 pts. water
K1V-1116 yeast

Removed cooked pumpkin flesh from shell and put in a hops bag. Brought water to a boil, and stirred in sugar to dissolve. Removed from heat. Placed bagged pumpkin in primary and poured boiling water over it. Allowed it to cool overnight, covered, until it was at room temperature. Then added 1 T. citric acid (I don't have a kitchen scale yet, so I spent about 20 minutes looking for the conversion) and nutrient. Rehydrated yeast according to package directions. Pitched yeast.
Temp: 78 degrees
O.G.: 1.120 (not adjusted, gotta find my charts . . . it's a pain finding one online with google)


Halloween Trick
3.5 lbs local honey
1 c. brown sugar
1 T. pumpkin pie spice
1 t. nutrient
water to one gallon
D47 yeast

Put honey in primary. Add warm water and stir to dissolve. Add brown sugar and pumpkin pie spice, stir. This is a pain in the patootie. Like adding tannin, the spice just wants to float there in clumps. When it came to room temp, added nutrient and rehydrated yeast. I split the rehydrated yeast between this batch and the next, because I was originally planning on getting a 3 gallon bucket or carboy to start these batches, so they would be the same until I added pumpkin to one. Pitched yeast.
Temp: 90 degrees
O.G.: 1.130 (again, not adjusted)


Halloween Treat
3.5 lbs local honey
1 c. brown sugar
1 T. pumpkin pie spice
1 t. nutrient
water to one gallon
D47 yeast
1.5 lbs (ish) pumpkin

Okay this one was done exactly the same as the one above, except for preparing the pumpkin to be added later, as I said above. I don't know how, prolly inaccurate honey measurements (honey is hard to measure by the cupful! I want a measuring cup like Alton Brown has), but the two batches are already slightly different:
Temp: 85 degrees
O.G.: 1.125

I will prolly be transferring the wine to a secondary tonight, and the meads tomorrow night. That way I have a chance to clean the plain pumpkin flavor of the wine out of the racking cane before I contaminate the meads with it.

Hard Cherry Limeade

Well, I am trying out a new recipe. This is based on Miriam's Hard Lemonade recipe, posted in the GotMead forums. Unfortunately I had some major problems with just getting this one started. First I messed up the calculations. I converted the units to American units for a 1 gallon batch, and wrote that down in my recipe book. But I had planned on making a 5 gallon batch. So when I went to the grocery store for supplies, I bought enough for 5 gallons. When I started mixing up the must on Saturday, I dumped in the limeade, put the cherries in a bag, then proceeded to add the amount of water and sugar specified in the recipe. The recipe for ONE GALLON. Then I wondered why my 6.5 gallon bucket looked less than half full. I checked the O.G. and it was way too high, so I added water until it was brought down to the recommended 1.060. This was about the time I looked at the recipe and realized what I had done. I was so frustrated I wanted to scream, so I decided to fix it the next day. Besides, I had to wait to add the yeast anyway, since I added campden.

The next day I started boiling more water and adding sugar to it, and then dumping it into the bucket, 5 quarts and 5 cups, respectively, at a time. I did this twice before I realized I was going to run out of room if I added any more. So I stopped there. Rehydrated the yeast and pitched it.

Final recipe for what's in the bucket:
7 12 oz cans frozen limeade concentrate
1 6 oz can frozen limeade concentrate
3 t. nutrient
1 campden tablet
2 16 oz jars maraschino cherries, with the syrup reserved for sweetening and flavoring later
4 pounds of sugar
13 1/4 quarts of water
Premier Cuvee yeast

O.G. 1.070 at 94F (not adjusted because all my charts are still packed away somewhere)

I have been stirring the bejeezus out of it. I am kind of worried about the temp, because this is supposed to be kept warm to counteract the high acidity of the must. Our house stay at about 74F, on the cool side. I guess it's doing okay, though, because when I stirred it this morning I got lots of nice foam.

Updates on my other brews:

The 3 other brews I have here at the house (Cranberry Mead, Strawberry Wine, and Cherry Vanilla Mead) have all slowed down a lot. The moving prolly did it, along with temp shifts and whatnot. I am not overly concerned though, as they were all looking good at last S.G. reading. They are really quite pretty, and look to be starting to clear.

The leftovers from racking the Cherry Vanilla Mead were deemed unsuitable for topping up purposes because I left them in the fridge uncovered for too long (24 hours). Therefore, they were drank. OMG! Yumminess! My roommate said "Now, that's some good beer!" He hates beer, so I guess this was a complement. But now he wants me to make my meads sparkling, because these bottles were carbonated from stopping the fermentation in the fridge. *shrug* I told him that if he wanted to help with capping the beer bottles, I'd think about it.

I finally took a peek at my Ancient Orange over at my mom's house. About two weeks left to go, according to the recipe, maybe more, and it is BEAUTIFUL! It has already cleared a huge amount, but the orange and raisins are still floating. I think it will definitely be ready for bottling at the beginning of next month. Just in time for my birthday!

And in other brew news, I have my pumpkins sitting in in the brew pantry ready for baking and turning into Pumpkin Wine and Pumpkin Pie Mead. I am going to make one gallon of wine, one gallon of mead with just pumpkin pie spice, and one gallon of mead with pumpkin pie spice and pumpkin. It should be an interesting taste test next Halloween.

Also, I finally got a hold of a bottle of Chaucer's Mead. $11 at my local liquor store. Wow. It tastes really good! And from everything I have read on the forums, my brews will more than likely taste even better. YAY!!

Geyser!

Okay, so not much of one, but this morning as I was walking through the living room to the kitchen, I said to myself "Hmm, that's odd. The whole house smells like mead. It should have dissipated from racking by now." As I got closer to the kitchen, my mind started going back to posts I had read on the GM forums about fermentations being so vigorous, they blew off the airlock and painted the ceiling with mead. I started getting scared of what I would find in my kitchen.

Imagine my relief when all I saw was mead in the airlock and a little on the counter. Thank goodness! I cleaned up the counter and bottle, and fitted a new airlock, set a little higher in the stopper to try and avoid having mead get into it.

But the Cherry Vanilla mead is going STRONG! One and half blips per second, maybe more, because they were going so fast, and running into each other sometimes, so it was hard to keep really good count. Them are some happy yeasties! I'll just have to remember to check the airlock before I go to bed and see if I have to change it out again.

Cherry Vanilla Mead: Now with cherries and vanilla!

Tonight we transferred the plain mead into a carboy over one and a quarter pounds of dark sweet cherries (frozen, then thawed) and three vanilla beans (OMG - the smell left in the bottles!!!! I think I'll put some sugar in them and make a weak vanilla sugar) split lengthwise. It filled the carboy, a 750 ml wine bottle, and half a Grolsch bottle (16 oz). Whew. I put the two smaller bottles (no fruit or vanilla in these) into the fridge to stop fermentation, so I can cap them up in a couple of weeks and use for topping up as necessary. Or maybe I'll wait for the smaller one to clear and drink it. Dunno. This stuff tasted soooooo good. A little "green", young, but it was definitely not rocket fuel. Very smooth and sweet. I hope it stays like this, with added goodness of cherry and vanilla. I'm thinking of adding a maraschino cherry to each bottle when I bottle this stuff.

Current Temp: 78 degrees
S.G.: 1.050

K1V-1116 has an official alcohol tolerance of 18% (so it would chew through my original amount of sugar and be ready for more), but apparently usually poops out around 16% in practical terms. I hope the cherries add enough sugar to make it end slightly on the semi-sweet side. Yeah. I like sweet drinks. Sue me. *grins* Worse comes to worst, I can just add some more honey at the end.