Beet Wine Take 2

Brewed up some more beet wine last night. Made up my own recipe, from a blend of other recipes I found.

For one gallon:

2.5 pounds beets
1 gallon water
2 pounds sugar
1 teaspoon nutrient
1/2 pkg. Marcharet wine yeast

Wash and skin beets, and cut into small pieces. Place beets in a
nylon bag and boil in 2 quarts water for ~3 hours. When liquid cools, strain through mesh bag in fermenting bucket. Add sugar, yeast and nutrient. Put bag with pulp in fermenter and stir in remainder of COLD water.

I could add more nutrient (only added 1/4 tsp) and sugar today. Hell I could even add more beets, or raisins, or anything I want.

http://www.grapestomper.com/recbeet.html

5/14/11
I never added more nutrient or sugar, so I'm really not sure how this will turn out... I bottled it today. Tasted like most of my wines seem to taste - very alcoholic, not very delicious. Let it sit a year, then we'll talk.

Christmas ale

I've been wanting to make a spiced holiday beer for a while. I settled on this recipe and closely followed the ingredients in the recipe. Though, I probably added too few hops at the 15 boil, and I didn't add any at 5 minutes. We don't have a digital scale (Christmas gift hint?) so we can't accurately measure the hops, and I'd always rather add too few hops than too much.

Everything took longer than expected. Popped the yeast package a day (or more?) before making the starter. Made the yeast starter two days ahead of pitching. Let the brew sit more than overnight to cool.

The OG was 1.056 - lower than we predicted. Perhaps because we didn't squeeze out all of the liquid from the grains? We need a better system for this.

It's ~5 gallons in a 6 gallon carboy. It is fermenting at ~60 degrees in the first floor closet. Not the ideal temperature - Mark says some of the fruitiness might not come through due to the cold. Three days later and they are still pretty active.

Beet Wine

Harvested some of our white beets yesterday (I think it's the ones Spencer gave us). Cut up ~ 3 pounds into small bits, boiled them for ~20 mins until soft and left overnight. (Too tired to do the full recipe today). Will make small 1 or 2 gallon batches with the beets so we can try different recipes.

Loosely following recipe for Medium Bodied Beet Wine: http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/recipe2.asp

2011: Not sure what ever happened to this one?

Grape Wine

Brewing 2 gallons of green grape mush. No added water. All grapes were dumpstered - one bag had been frozen for a while. Blended them up (food processor works better than juicer), pasteurized at ~140 for a while; added entire packet of champagne yeast (accidentally). Several hours later added yeast nutrient.

First brew at new house

Though we've already done a cider, this is the first beer to be made. Aiming for a watermelon wheat, with an original gravity of 1.050 (wheat LME, some maris otter, and watermelon pulp added at a ratio of roughly 1.3 pounds per gallon.)

7.5 lbs lme
8 lbs watermelon
1 lb MO