Lychees and Elderberries

At long last, we're making lychee wine.  My winemaking schtick originally was that I would grow the majority of the primary ingredient in each wine.  I've loosened that up a bit, and now the idea is that I grow an important portion of the primary ingredient in each wine.  I think this qualifies.

It took a bit of driving around with Shawn and Suzanne, but last weekend we found some canned lychee at an Asian market in Columbia.  My harvest this year was only about 15 fruit, but they are large, delicious 'Sweetheart' lychees, now frozen.

Lychee wine recipe

6 20oz cans of lychee

8oz fresh frozen 'Sweetheart' lychee

1 liter WGC

900g sugar

3/4t Fermaid K

1t GoFerm

3/4t tannin

4t pectic

1.5t citric acid

1.5t tartaric acid

QA23 yeast

6g bentonite

Add together the canned lychee, WGC, tannin, acids, sugar, and pectic.  Allow to sit 12-24 hours.  Check and adjust SG and pH/acid.  Rehydrate and pitch yeast.  Bentonite day 3.  Carboy when around 1.010.  Rack off gross lees after 1-2 weeks.  Rack at 30 days.  Thaw and lightly chop frozen lychees and add to carboy.  Rack again at 30 days and usual care thereafter.

This is basically the approach I took with my passionfruit wine...a "secondary infusion."  The lychee pH was 3.24 but TA a little low at 3.  I think my new WGC has less acid buffer than the old because the last two batches of wine needed far less acid to get to desired pH.  OG was fine at 1.080.  It may need a little more citric acid, we'll judge that after the third racking.  I moved it to the carboy after 6 days.

*****

Allie will be home next weekend from her internship in Washington, DC.  It will be great to hear more details about her adventure.  She enjoys being around people as passionate as she is.  

She will be home just in time to 1) sample last year's elderberry wine and 2) pick some more elderberries.  My elderberries have started to ripen and I have a few handfuls in the fridge.  But our big pickin' spot doesn't have too many ripe berries yet.

Last night Lisa and I popped open the first bottle of 2014 elderberry, batch 3.  Lisa was concerned about how many bottles we would have.  Between the four batches we have about 120 bottles of elderberry from last year so we were safe, in my judgment, opening a bottle last night. 

This wine is very good, just really young.  The color is terrific, so purple it has almost a blue color at times in the glass.  It is a little tart, and a little green peppery.  The tannin adjustments were right on.  I believe and hope this wine will settle down, the fruit will come forward in another several months.

Breaking convention, we had drank the elderberry with cedar-smoke-grilled chinook salmon and a mango-fennel-avocado salad.  Cheers!

Recipes are just guidelines

Last weekend I finally did muster enough energy to start the lemongrass mint wine.  Last time, the mint overpowered the wine and it took years to settle down and become really drinkable.  So this time I cut back the mint to 2.5 quarts.  I used 600g of lemongrass, just the good, soft white part.  I used 3tsp of citric and 3tsp of tartaric acid, which was well under the acid adjustments last time.

But this time I used a different white grape concentrate base.  Perfect OG of 1.084, but unfortunately, the pH as I started to pitch the yeast was 2.45.  Grrr...

I briefly considered pitching it out, but changed my mind and decided to make some additional adjustments with calcium carbonate.  I brought it up to 3.24.  It fermented steadily throughout the week and today I moved it to the secondary at 1.014.  pH was 3.12.  This is not the best way to do it.

U-pickin'

The greenhouse is 10 years old now and the one time the fan went out previously happened to be on a Saturday while I was in the backyard.  It took some time but I found a replacement motor and had the thing repaired by the end of the day.

Yesterday, while I was picking berries, the fan stopped again.  On the down side I had patients scheduled all morning.  So I rigged up some box fans, after a short struggle opened the ridge vent, and went on to work. After a trip with the fan to Mexico, where it ran just fine for the electrical motor folks at S and S, we're down to an electrical problem.  I have a call in to the electrician, he has yet to call me back.  Between that and the wireless at the office, it was a lousy day.

So as a pick-me-up, we decided to go U-picking. Danamay Farm is a new berry farm only about 3 miles from our house and they have great fruit.  Their blackberries are not as sunburned as mine.  Came home with about 20# of blackberries and 5# of blueberries.  We'll eat a few of these but we'll end up drinking most of them.

Weekend update

We're feeling pretty good about the yard for mid-July.  A number of fruit and flowers suitable for winemaking are coming along or even starting to ripen: elderberries, hibiscus, passion fruit, lemongrass, blackberries, citrus.  We should have a bumper crop of kumquat this year.

Purple Possum

Passion fruit 'McCain'.  I never much cared for the name.

Saturday's blackberries

Lisa has tamed the woodland bed.  We ordered a couple of hundred chinese ginger and epimediums to fill space and we really need a couple of hundred more...next year.  I spent a fair share of both days working on the greenhouse bed, weeding and mulching.
Saturday night we grilled chicken and with that had a tomato mozzarella salad with cherry toms from our one and only tomato plant.  We got brave and opened a bottle of my 2013 satsuma wine and for the second time in a week, we were pleasantly surprised.  This wine is colored like a sauv blanc, very pale and almost slightly green.  The tangerine is subtle but unmistakable and thankfully I didn't oversweeten it.  I'm happy to know that I have a couple of bottles left.

I can't remember where I got my black sapote (Diospyros nigra) tree.  I either grew it from seed brought back from PR, or my friend Ethan in California sent it to me...I think it came from Ethan.  This tree has been quietly minding its own business in the greenhouse for about 4 years.  This year it flowered!  It has these odd little flowers which open up to a size no larger than a pinhole.  Manual pollination is impossible.  So I brought it outside, hoping to get a little help from the insect world.  It just might have worked.

We have a lot of mint.  I'm thinking of remaking the lemongrass-mint wine we opened earlier this week but so far I just haven't quite found the motivation.  Additionally, I only have 2 free 3 gal carboys, and I'm hoping to use them for blackberry and elderberry.
Lisa made me promise I wouldn't freeze today's blackberries.  I didn't get as many today, but just enough for two ramekins of blackberry crumble.  Nice way to end the weekend.

Lemongrass Mint

 Time can do wonderful things to a wine.  Lemongrass mint I made in 2012 tasted for a long time like cough syrup.  No longer.  This wine's overbearing mint flavor has settled down nicely and a glass of lemongrass mint wine on a warm evening was just great.  I have lots of lemongrass right now.  The question is whether I can get the mint harvested and the wine started this year while I still have mint left.

4th of July Pork Butt

Jake and Taylor surprised me and drove up from Conway for the weekend.  The weather was great and so we decided to smoke a pork butt for the 4th of July.

My Weber smoker is not ideal.  It is really hard to keep the temp up.  We smoked it for about 7 hours.  Meanwhile, Shawn made some tasty sparkling wine/blueberry frozen treats which we enjoyed by the pool.  At the tenderization stage, I gave up on the smoker which was stuck at 190F.  I wrapped it in foil and finished it in the oven at 250F.

It came out great.  We had apple-raisin baked beans, marinated fresh vegetables, marjoram-lime grilled corn on the cob, and the pork.  For desert, Suzanne made an angelfood fruit layer cake.