Sauerkraut

The soccer season is coming to an end.  The regular season didn't come out as we had hoped, but Hendrix ended on a positive note with win on Senior Day.  Jake had the equalizer on a blistering free kick.  Lisa had tears.

We will soon be home for the weekend again, and so we'll soon be back to winemaking.  There are bags upon bags of fruit in the freezer.  First however, we're trying our hand at a different type of fermentation: kraut.

I used 1.5T of sea salt for the 1 large head of cabbage. It took longer to get water out of the cabbage than I thought it would, but eventually it was completely submerged in the brine.

We'll give three days then try a taste.

Hibiscus Ginger Wine

This wine has aged really well.  I bottled it 10/20/2013, and the last time we tried a bottle, it was off-color and a little too viscous.  Now it is bright and red, fruity and balanced, with good body and enough ginger to keep it interesting.

Here is the recipe for 3 gallons:

480 dried hibiscus flowers (Hibiscus rosa-sinensis)
3 cans Welch's concentrate
2T ginger paste (not in the bag)
5# 2oz sugar
3t yeast nutrient
3/4t tannin
5.5t acid blend
4t citric acid
28 pints of water
Lalvin K1-V1116

OG was 1.088. pH was 3.39.  Combine sugar and water and bring to boil.  Put flowers in mesh bag, put in primary.  Pour sugar-water over flowers.  Add other ingredients except yeast.  When cool, remove bag, squeeze lightly and discard.  Add yeast, stirring daily.  When down to around 1.010, move to secondary.  Rack per usual.  This wine was stabilized and backsweetened with 50g sugar/gallon along with about 5ml glycerin/gal.  The glycerin is probably not needed.

No cooking tonight, as we are headed to Alabama in the morning.

Oh yeah.  Go Blue.

Starting Over with Vegetables

My original plan for the greenhouse was to grow summer vegetables in the winter. Fresh salsa in February. I did that, barely. One year, with lots of effort, I managed a couple of tomatoes and some cilantro. I can't recall if I grew the lime in the greenhouse; I'm pretty sure I cheated on the onions. But it was salsa and it was February and we ate it.
With that mission accomplished, I gave up on tomatoes in the greenhouse. They don't grow that well in the cold, they require extra light, and they're whitefly magnets. For many years, the greenhouse has been dedicated to tropical plants, mainly tropical fruits. But this year we decided to we decided to clear some space and try some vegetables again.  Saturday we cleared that space.

Jasmine 'Belle of India'

Stephanotis floribunda

The greenhouse has a terrific smell in the mornings these days. It could be the Stephanotis floribunda, which has long outgrown it's little trellis but which I can't quite bear to pull down off of the fan conduit.  More likely the fragrance is Jasmine 'Belle of India'. It is nice enough out there that we can tolerate the noise from the obnoxious cows outside. I am close to taking action on the cattle.

There are a number of things in the greenhouse producing small numbers of blooms and fruit. One orchid is complete confused about bloom times.

'Kari' has rebounded very nicely and it looks like we'll continue to get Carambola wine for the foreseeable future.

We have our best crop of Miracle Fruit (Synsepalum dulcificum) yet. What kind of sick person considers making Miracle Fruit wine?

My goal has for years been one new fruit per year. For the second year in a row, we have met that goal. Last year was a feast of new fruit. This year's entry is the Phalsa Berry, Grewia asiatica. The fruit is also known as Sherbet Berry. It is an odd little fruit, about the size of a blueberry, purple in color, but with a stippled, almost hairy skin and a texture that is a little mealy. It grows a little too well in the greenhouse and will need to be pruned back pretty hard this fall.

Triphasia trifolia is a citrus relative which makes a fuit known as a limeberry. I have a few of these in the freezer, and I intent to use them in my "Varieta tropica" wine along with the Phalsa Berry and other odds and ends. This plant, along with Psidium myrtoides, adamantly refuses to become a tree, preferring instead to drape its prickly branches out and down below the pot and onto the ground. Lisa undertook the challenging job of repotting both plants. She also tackled a couple of the Rollinias, the yellow jabotica (Myrciaria glomerata), and others, and they all came out great.

The lemongrass in the south end of the greenhouse has served as the source for many gallons of tasty lemongrass wine, but it was overgrown and unruly. I pulled out two stands of the lemongrass, cut them back severely, and replanted. This should make room for a small stand of veggies. The yield ended up being around 2 pounds of lemongrass, and I have no open carboys. So I offered it to my friend Rebekah and she accepted.  Hopefully Bek's can do something nice with the stuff, otherwise it was compost.

Future home of spinach and cilantro

We went to the store to be sure we bought some seeds before they put everything away for the season, then came home and had some cocktails. The best was the Sky Pilot, made with Arron's homemade Applejack moonshine.  Tasty!

Lining them up

Friday I went back for what likely will be the last of my elderberry runs this year.  It was brutal. Weeds 6' high, flies, horseflies, and of course I forgot my pruners, making getting through the wild blackberries a challenge.  Final pickin' totals:

• Blueberry 3.5#
• Blackberry 42#
• Elderberry 22.5#

The birds are finally leaving the elderberries in the yard alone long enough for them to truly ripen.  I may get another pound from the yard.  So the plan is as follows:

• Elderberry 16# (3 gal)
• Blackberry/Elderberry blend 10#/6# (3 gal)
• Blackberry 16# (3 gal)
• Blackberry/Elderberry Rosé with skins/seeds from first 3 batches (3 gal)
• Blueberry/Blackberry 3.5#/3# + whatever elderberries I can yet get from the yard (1 gal)
• Blackberry 13# pure juice no water (1 gal)

I need to get some bottling done, as right now I have no open 3 gal carboys.  But the remaining 2014 elderberry wine, when racked this past week, is looking and tasting very nice.

One of the remaining 3 gal elderberry batches I still need to bottle.

This doesn't look like exercise equipment.

But this pressure washer extension has me sore on this Sunday.  We used it Saturday to get the mud daubers off of the ceiling of the lanai.  You don't really control it, you just sort of restrain it.  It reminds me of a slosh pipe.  This is a home maintenance tool I suppose I'll use for 30 minutes every 2-3 years but which has no substitute.  We're not considering a move, but I will be very happy to leave this monster with the lucky buyers of our home whenever that time comes.

Allie is getting settled in her new apartment.  We delivered the green Valium loveseat, so-named because it is so comfortable lying on it is like taking Valium. This required removal of the back door from its hinges.  We took the opportunity to stop by Lucky's and get some rosemary and garlic steak kabobs.  I cooked these perfectly but they were badly overseasoned.  Thanks, Lucky.  The 2013 blackberry mead was therefore a nice surprise.  I admit to have cheated a little bit on this one, but Lisa doesn't care.

Saturday Miscellany

Lisa and I made a trip to the Fulton farmer's market and picked up some of the first sweet corn of the season.  Tomatoes are coming along.  Our market has always been a little heavy on crafts and music and light on actual food.

Then we went back to Danamay Farm for some more u-pick berries.  The blueberries are finished, and the blackberries are not quite as plentiful as two weeks ago, but it didn't take us long to add another 7.5# of blackberries.

It is great to have Allison home, if even for a few days.  We took the opportunity Saturday to collect some Allison Elderberries.  The berries didn't progress as much as I thought they would in the past week, but we got about 8#.  I think we are up to around 13#.  My goal is 20#.  The plan will be 15# in a straight elderberry, 15# of blackberries in a straight blackberry, 5# elderberry + 10# blackberry in a blend, all using a cold soak.  Then, saving off the seeds/skins from these batches, I'll do a second run rosé.  Now I still need to figure out what to do with the blueberries.

The freezer is getting full!

Earlier this week we tried a 375ml bottle of the 2014 hibiscitrus wine.  This wine is over-the-top fruity and floral, a great summer wine.  So again, we are in full hibiscus-flower-collection mode.  Unfortunately one of the pots blew over in a storm a couple of weeks ago and broke.  Saturday I attempted a repair with some 2-part epoxy and a strap clamp.  I do it for the wine.

Lisa hates beets.  I'm not generally a fan...they are like the pineapple of the root vegetables in a way.  Just like pineapple doesn't share space in a fruit salad, beets don't share space in a roasting pan.  They turn everything purple and are just generally obnoxious.  But pickled beets, that might be a different thing entirely.  I made a go at pickled beets yesterday.

Pickled beets, with red onions for garnish

Finally, after about 5 years, it appears that this is really a thing.

Black sapote, chocolate pudding fruit

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.