July 4th

I admit to some mixed feelings this July 4th. We had the good judgment to elect a man who may be remembered as the greatest president of my generation. And now we have a 22% chance of making one of the gravest mistakes in our history. Not for her? This probably won't change your mind, but I'm compelled to post the link anyway.

Over the 3 day holiday weekend we received over 4.5 inches of rain. Some places in town got even more. Yet we managed to get in plenty of weeding and picking, and a little cooking too.

Friday we went back to Danamay Farms.  We picked 9 buckets of blackberries and about 10# of blueberries. The plan at this point is 60# of blackberries, of which about 35# will go into a straight blackberry, all-juice, no-water wine. The remainder will be blended with elderberry. My blueberry target is 30#. That is 12# for a straight blueberry-concord 3 gallon batch like I made last year, and then another 18# for a blueberry rosé in standard rosé style - crush, a few hours on the skins for some color, then pressed. Then we'll use the seconds to make the same blueberry hibiscus wine that turned out so well last year.

Blueberry Hibiscus Wine
Leftover seeds/skins/pulp from earlier 3.5# batch 
160 hibiscus flowers
1 can Welch's red grape concentrate
1# 10oz sugar
1t pectic
1/4t citric acid
1/4t (1g) Opti-White
Fermaid K
Go-Ferm
1 gal water

Put the hibiscus flowers in straining bag and place in primary. Add the blueberries, grape concentrate, and flowers. Boil the water and dissolve the sugar.  Pour the sugar-water mix over the flowers and fruit. When cool, remove the flowers and squeeze gently, not too hard. Add the pectic, citric acid, and Opti-White.  After 12 hours, make a starter with Go-Ferm, and pitch yeast (K1-V1116). Step feed, kmeta at first racking, and usual care thereafter. This wine needs no fining or filtering.

Saturday after CME we worked on some of the wines that need to be bottled before we can start this year's batches. We bottled 6 gallons of DB, as good as ever. The blackberry was, after bench trials, stabilized and sweetened with 60g/gal and colored up a bit with 10% elderberry. We bottled it and the blueberry hibiscus.

Blackberry wine

Dinner was, again, on the BGE. Brisket burgers exceeded expectations, and the blackberry dump cobbler was excellent too.

Dump Cobbler on the BGE

Sunday, still raining, we worked on Shawn and Suzanne's new place. I've determined that down-sizing is not for me, not at this time anyway. 

On Monday the 4th we went back to Danamay Farms. I took them some wine - one bottle each of DB, elderberry, lemongrass-ginger, and blackberry. I know for sure that at least two of these are drinkable, so I felt as if I could take a chance on the other two. Amy likes drier wine, Gabe sweeter. He was given permission to sweeten them up as needed. 

At this point we have hit our 60# target on blackberries, but we're not quite there on blueberries.

We got some weeding done, and as important, nailed down the plans for Christmas. We'll have the kids together, which will be great. For supper, Shawn and Suzanne returned (lacking a functional kitchen in their new place) for roasted chicken, brussel sprout slaw, corn on the cob, and blueberry-peach yogurt cake for supper. 

Happy 4th! And I'm with her.

Dave's Smoked Salmon

My brother, upon learning I now have a BGE, sent me his favorite smoked salmon recipe. We gave it a go.

The fish is soaked in a brine with bay leaves and maple syrup overnight. Then the next morning you form a "pellicle" on the fish by drying it in front of a fan for 4 hours.

The fish becomes tacky. The thinner parts looked as if they had been smoked already by the time this step was complete - they were translucent and firm. The fish then went onto the grill. The BGE was easy to dial in at 200F.

The recipe says to baste hourly with maple syrup. It took only three hours to get to the desired internal temp of 145F.

Delicious! We'll do this again when Jake gets home. Thanks Dave!

Notorious BGE

For Father's Day I got a Big Green Egg. I practiced a couple of times, then went whole hog on 13# of pork butt. Here's how it went down.

Started with two pieces of bone-in pork butt. They were dried, coated with mustard, then liberal application of butt rub. Then they went into the fridge overnight.

I loaded the Egg with charcoal and fired it up. My one mistake with the Egg was allowing the temp to get too high at the start. My thermometer did a 360 it got so hot, probably 800F. So it took some time to cool it off. I put them on at about 325F and did 1 hour/pound (about 6 pounds each) at 300F. It is crazy easy to lock in the temp on the Egg. My temp didn't vary more than about 15 degrees for the entire 6 hour smoke.

After about 4 hours I wrapped the pork in foil and let it finish to 200F. I didn't add any charcoal the whole time and when I went back out to cook steaks last night, there was still about half of the charcoal left.

The meat pulled off easily. It had a little less smokiness than I would like, so next time maybe more chips or even a few chunks of wood. But these butts made for a great Saturday supper with Shawn and Suzanne.

Tomato mozzarella salad, apple cole slaw, and pulled pork 

Wine Weekend - Part 2

Today I racked the reds. It is possible that the worst of my 2015 reds is better than the best of my 2014 reds. Lisa has declared the 2014 second-run elderberry her favorite wine. In 2015, the second run wound up with about 1/3 blackberry and so far this seems to be an improvement.

Is it a red? Is it a rosé?

The elderberry-blackberry blend was roughly 2/3 elder, 1/3 blackberry.  This wine took the oak very well. It is fruity and dark and jammy.

I'm calling this EB. It will certainly make it to the label.

The straight elderberry has less oak than the EB, but well enough. This wine is less fruit-forward, thick and tannic.

Straight elderberry wine

Finally, today I racked the blackberry. This was a straight-juice wine, one of the first I've tried. It has an interesting, fruity pop. I'm going to lightly oak this one, and so I added 7 cubes per gallon. I will also probably nudge it with a hint of vanilla.

I'm told this color is typical of blackberry.

For Father's Day I became and EGGhead. I lit it and played around for a few hours last night, cooking some cedar plank salmon. I hope I'm far enough up the learning curve that I don't ruin the 13# of pork butt we have planned for today.

Wine Weekend - Part 1

It is too hot for anything to really grow outside, including weeds. We have started watering early in an effort to just keep things healthy. So this weekend will be spent catching up on winemaking. Friday I tackled the 1 gallon batches.

First up were the blueberry wines. We have a straight blueberry which isn't bad, but suffers from a little foxiness from the bit of Concord used. For unclear reasons, this foxiness is missing from the blueberry hibiscus, which was made from the seconds. Both wines are clear, with good color and taste. Of the two, I prefer the hibiscus blueberry. They will be bottled soon, dry.

Blueberry and Hibiscus Blueberry Wines

Arkansas Black was made from straight juice of apples given to me by one of my patients. It could be that I just don't like apple wine. I find this wine unremarkable. I have to search for any hint of apple. The acid is about right, as are the tannins. I'm afraid that no matter what I do this this I won't like it that much.

Varieta Tropical is my Christmas Tutti Fruiti freezer wine. This wine is a pleasant surprise. It's only problem is its tea color. It has a nice floral aroma, just a little green peppery bite. Tannins are a little prominent. It might need some acid and a little backsweetening, but this wine has much more promise than the apple.

Costa Rican Hibiscus batch number two tastes as good as batch number one, like a combination of red hots and peppermint candies. Like the first batch, it is slow to clear however and will require a clarifier.

Arkansas black, Varieta Tropica, and Costa Rican Hibiscus wines

The 2016 citrus combo wine is clearing nicely. This wine is citrusy without the bandaid smell some of my citrus wines get. I'll sweeten this a little bit and we'll have a nice wine for next summer.

2016 Citrus Wine

Tomorrow we'll get to the elderberry and blackberry wines. And some more outside watering.

A Tidy Yard

It is interesting what having no kids at home means for keeping the yard tidy.

Saturday saw no relief from the high temperatures. We worked outside in 95F (35C) moving the last of the plants out of the greenhouse. The plumerias are back in their summer homes.

Plumerias in their summer home

We are experimenting with some of the greenhouse fruiting trees. We repotted the fruiting sapodilla and our newest citrus, a Persian lime and a calamondin. The Barbados Cherry and the other sapodilla will spend the summer on the porch. The bag of Barbados cherries in the freezer is growing. I didn't add them to my freezer wine last January in the hopes of having enough for a 1 gallon batch this year.

Barbados Cherry, loaded with fruit and flowering again

Saturday afternoon Shawn and Suzanne came over for some pool time. We opened the last bottle of Passion fruit wine.  This wine returned some nasty comments in the KC Cellarmasters wine competition, despite my high hopes. Not sure what they were thinking. All agreed that this wine was fantastic. The aroma was just like cutting open a ripe passion fruit, and the wine was well balanced. The bottle was empty in a half hour.

Sunday remained hot. I have been considering removal of the bananas from the greenhouse for some time now. Sunday I finally did it. The blooms are too infrequent and besides, bananas really are only good in wine as a body building additive. I cut them down rather than digging them out in case I get a case of greenhouser's remorse. But the center of the house has opened up nicely and I may make up for the loss of the bananas with lychee production.

No room in the greenhouse for shy producers

 The beds are largely tamed. One little section of the greenhouse bed is out of control, and the berms east of the pool need to be rid of their ash seedlings. I'm actually thinking about tackling the Dawn Redwood bed...something I haven't had time to get to for years.

Dinner Sunday as grilled cabbage with a basil pesto sauce and jerk chicken tenders. I thought about opening one of my wines but we have three bottles already open so I could not justify it.

Haskaps, Part 1

The haskap harvest has begun. We'll top last year, but still will not have enough for Haskap Wine. Likewise, we won't have enough Jostaberries.  So I'm thinking this year we'll do an Estate Quadberry Wine...blackberries, elderberries, haskaps, and jostaberries.

Stained fingers are a good thing.