Peachy Keen! part 2

So peaches are in season and on sale right now. Yummy yummy yummy! And at 97 cents a pound you can't beat the price with a stick, so I decided to go ahead and get almost 5 pounds of them and make one gallon of wine AND one gallon of mead. I mean, heck, the peaches for both gallons cost less than the honey for the mead! :) I am using recipes from First Steps in Winemaking (for the wine) and The Compleat Meadmaker (for the mead). Ken Schramm's recipe is for a Ginger Peach Mead, which sounds so yummy that I am modifying the wine recipe to make it Ginger Peach, as well! :) I know the recipe in the book calls for fresh ginger, but I'm on a budget, here, and I already have a ton of ground ginger, so that's what I'll be using. Not sure how much yet, probably on the order of a tablespoon per batch. Here's the brewlog start for the wine, which was started last night (mead gets started tonight):

Ginger Peach Wine
2.25# peaches
.5 t. pectic enzyme
??? ground ginger
2.25# white sugar
1 t. citric acid
.5 t. tannin
1 gallon boiling water

7.23.06
Set water to boil on the stove. Cleaned the peaches and hands well. Cut peaches into half and removed the stones, managed successfully to avoid eating any (they smelled sooooo good!), and placed into a plastic fermenter. Squeezed the bejeezus out of them. Poured just enough boiling water over the peaches to cover them well (have to save room and water to boil for the sugar). Covered the fermenter with plastic wrap, and put it in a pot filled soapy water and left it overnight to cool. I am not going to have an ant problem this time!

Schedule for the rest of the week:
Add pectic enzyme today. Leave overnight again. Tomorrow strain the liquid off the peaches, pour liquid into a carboy, and add the rest of the ingredients, except the yeast, and fit with an airlock. Let must cool. Pitch yeast and refit airlock.

Ginger Peach Mead
2.25# peaches
2.5# raw clover honey
.5 t. pectic enzyme
??? ground ginger
water to one gallon
D47 yeast

Haven't started this one yet, but I plan on using the standard fruit in primary method, and am going to make sure the fermenter is ant-proof. I am not going to add the peaches to the secondary, because I don't want to be cleaning peaches off of everything in the kitchen. :)

Oops, gotta change the template . . .

Okay, guys, give me a second, I know the pics have taken over the entire page here. I was planning on messing with the template soon, anyway, but I guess I get to do that now. Yes, I am going to change the template rather than changing the pic sizes. *grins*

Pics and Progress

I love my new camera phone. Bluetooth is a wonderful thing that means I no longer have to wait for DH to upload pics form his camera to his computer to my computer. And since I mostly want pics for the web, I don't care that they would print small and unclear. They're perfectly sized for blogging! :)

Here are the bottles of Strawberry Wine and Cherry Vanilla Mead. I think I am going to stick with more descriptive names and less "cute" names for now. Unless they are really good, like Trick and Treat.


This is a shot of my "wine cellar" after last weekend's bottling and racking session. Scorp and I bottled the Trick and racked the Treat and Pumpkin Wine to get them off the pumpkin particles. In about 3 weeks, I'm going to see if they need to be racked again, or if they can be bottled up at that point. Both needed to be topped up a little (Treat needed to be topped up a LOT, after the explosion).


Here's a shot of the Pumpkin Wine and Treat. Treat tasted horrible, I'm hoping that it will get better. Pumpkin Wine may turn into a star. It tastes like a nice, but very young, wine right now. It is so good, in fact, that DH said he would drink it, and he's more of a gin and tonic kind of guy.


And I started a 6 gallon batch of Joe's Ancient Orange cuz that stuff is so dang good!


JAO - 6 gallon
20# raw clover honey (cheap from grocery store)
5 valencia oranges
4 1/2 packs of raisins (about 150)
6 sticks of cinnamon
5 whole cloves
1 pkg. Fleishmann's yeast
water to 6 gallons

7.18.06
I followed the recipe, dumped everything but yeast in after dissolving the honey in warm water. I added water until there was only about 4" of headroom left. Left it overnight to cool to room temperature.

7.19.06
Pitched the yeast, lidded and airlocked it. It was happily burping by the end of the day. I plan on opening it in a week to top up, and then ignoring it until October or so. That will give me plenty of time to gather up bottles - I will prolly get 25 out of this batch. Yay for cheap and easy Christmas presents!

Peaches are on sale right now, so I am planning on making Peach Ginger wine and mead. I love the fact that I can make really wonderful wine for about 75 cents a bottle and wonderful mead for $2 a bottle. I wish I could find a cheaper source of honey. :) The good news is that my grocery stores are starting to have more than just clover honey. I've seen Alfalfa, Buckwheat, Orange Blossom, and Wildflower. I've seen a couple others, too, but forget what they are right now. The only problem is that we are talking about $5 a pound for these honeys. Which more than doubles my cost. *shrug* One day I will have a coupon or I will just have enough spare grocery money to be able to grab enough to do a show mead.

So it's been a while . . .

Wow. Okay, I have an excuse. Being pregnant and completely unable to sample your wares as a brewer (and as a beadmaker, too - more on that later) - if you're being good anyway! - kinda takes the fun out of racking and starting new brews. But I am back.

Bottled the strawberry wine and the cherry vanilla mead last night with Scorp. The wine smells divine, tastes awful. I hope it ages to match the smell. The mead is extremely hot right now, but it tastes a heck of a lot like the batch of Joe's Ancient Orange did right out of the carboy, so I am very hopeful. The AO was delicious, I mean, DELICIOUS at Christmas and better at Art Camp in March. I still have one bottle left, and that one is dedicated to long term storage, which may mean I am cracking it at my birthday (after one year) or maybe waiting another four years. Don't know yet, but I am now making sure I bottle at least one bottle of everything in a dark glass bottle for "Long Term Storage".

Now that my computer is finally set up in a way that I can use it, I am going to play around with the tablet I got for Christmas and work on labels. That's my plan for as much of tomorrow morning as the kids will let me have.

I am planning on dealing with the various pumpkin stuff sometime this week or weekend. More important to me to take care of this weekend, though, is to get my lampworking bench set up. I have missed torching almost as much as I have missed brewing. Hopefully I will have pics of beads to post next week. :)

Here is a pic of the kids, from the hospital: