Woohooo! 1000 hits

hey hey hey, we hit 1000 on the counter. Thanks all for making it happen. Now it's time to let that counter rip!

Got another brew on the go last night, so look out for a recipe post with a piccy soon.

Counting Hits

I dunno if you guys ever look at the hits counter, but we're nearly at 1000 hits. When that mark is reached i'll be switching the counting method, it's currently set to the slowest count for me to get a feel for how many folks come here each day. When i switch it will then start counting each click on the blog (rather than only counting the first click of a visitor and then waiting for someone else to come along before a new click is registered.

So, many thanks to you all for getting us this far in less than a year.

Got Some Bottling Done

OK, so I hoped to get more done than was reasonable. But I did bottle 4 gallons of wine and I have piccies to prove it. so here we go. First of all I lined up the desired wines.

2 gallons of Blackberry wine, made last autumn using sauternes yeast. 1 gallon of Blueberry & Cranberry quickie. 1 gallon of Elderflower.

and a selection of bottles ready to receive them







And then I got cracking and ended up with this lot

From left to right .... Blueberry & Cranberry, Blackberry, Elderflower.

I love seeing a batch like this, in a day or two these bottles will have shrink fit necks, they'll be lying down and look much more finished - hey I may even post some piccies of that! There's some screw caps in there, those wines won't last long as the seal really isn't up to long term storage ... gonna have to drink them soon then. The Blueberry & Cranberry wine is a table wine, it's not for long term storage so they all have screw caps. The Blackberry has a couple or three screw caps ('cos I really don't mind having to drink them soon). Screw caps will be fine for at least a couple of weeks. Lucky people who share dinner with us!

You may have noticed a small plastic bottle in there, always good to have a few handy, you rarely get exactly 6 bottles from a DJ, more like around 6.5. So why waste that last little bit, I'm sitting here writing my blog with a couple of part filled plastic bottles to enjoy as I do so.

Since there's been few piccies this year, I got all gratuitous about it. Here's a close up of 3 bottles

Left to Right .... Blueberry & Cranberry, Elderflower, Blackberry.

Shame the clarity of the blackberry doesn't come through, but hey clarity isn't hard to achieve. It's usually just patience ... leave it alone for months after racking, degassing and stabilising. Only then consider intervening if it's not clear. Nice colour to the Blueberry & Cranberry.

Haha, you thought that was it? oh no, I took another piccie, just cos a different angle might show something different. I don't think it does, but I may aswell post it. This is the whole batch, bottled (apart from my sneaky plastic bottles which are already in my pockets)

I think all that comes out of this piccie is which bottles have screw caps, and which have corks. Tho you can also see 3 plastic 500ml bottles behind the clear Elderflower bottles ... ooops, they'll have to be drunk soonish then. Nothing like Elderflower wine in spring to give you impetus, momentum, and reason to get out there and do it again. Soon those wonderful sprays will be beckoning me again.

A little Update

Just been clearing out the brewery. It's also the office and spare bedroom. It's recently turned into that room that everything gets dumped into when a general house tidy is happening ... piles of paper, magazines, tools etc etc all over the place. Anyway, now its cleared up a bit so that i do some brewing stuff. In the next couple of days I plan to:

• Bottle a gallon each of the two Blackberry wines, this one too
• Bottle a gallon of Elderflower
• Bottle the last gallon of the quickie Blueberry & Cranberry

Thats only 4 gallons, and I have a glut of empty bottles that are filling up spaces around the house, so I need to find more wine to bottle (and then drink), sometimes life as an obsessed amateur brewer is so hard! But that's not all that needs attention so I'll also

• Rack, degas and stabilise the Tanglefoot
• Rack, degas and stabilise the Green Tea & Ginger.
• Rack, degas and stabilise the Pomegranate

So I very much hope to have a newsy update in the next few days, with pictures, and i'm sure tasting notes too. Then I really must start a couple more big brews, 4-5 gallons each if I'm to stay on target for 50 gallons this year!

Muscat Acidity ... the story con't

So it's been a couple of weeks since the wine was put outside to feel frosts and hopefully drop some crystals of tartaric acid. However the hopes didn't materialise, so next step is to add a little cream of Tartar to try and seed the crystalisation. I'll let you know how it goes. This is still keeping interventions gentle, which is what I prefer.

Frost .. can be a good thing

Some of you will remember me mentioning a very acidic Muscat wine. Well tonight we got home to find a frost sitting on the cars in our street. "A-ha" thinks the brewer, that acidic wine may just drop some tartaric acid crystals in such conditions. So before our coat were off 2 gallons were placed outside and a prayer offered to Bacchus. Hopefully something that looks like broken glass in the bottom of the DJ's will greet me tomorrow.