Brewing root beer and mead (with wine yeast, I’m not leaving it up to chance this time). The yeast at least is having a feast. It’s feasting on honey. Mead recipe (following this one but without the spicing): boiled 2 gallons of filtered tap water steeped one big of Tazo organic chai in it …
Category Archives: ferment
Other Goings On: Racking the Wine, Painting Earth Day Signs
I see it only now, at the end of the day, how much was accomplished: cleaned out the chicken coop, Â collected four eggs (we’re back to four!), inspected the beehives, painted the last of the signage for our town’s Earth Day, and racked the wine. Â Four. Amie paints her own sign in the new basement …
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Pouring Myself a Soda
Can’t call it ginger soda anymore. “Ginger champagne” is more like it, as it’s definitely alcoholic and tastes a little like champagne. Foams like it too! To your health! {Update 1/17} I immediately put all the bottles out on the porch, where it has hovered around freezing. That immediately squashed the fermentation. When I open …
One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall… Bottling Ginger Soda
DH’s buckets with the wine grapes had company: my ginger soda carboy. The trouble in our house is that there is no place where the temperature remains constantly warm enough. My 1 gallon carboy was being moved from next to the wood stove, to next to the radiator, to next to the gap between fridge …
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Pressing Wine
Yesterday evening we took the next step in making our wine. We picked up the grapes in early December. They’re from Behm Vineyard in California and get shipped here as part of a wine club. We got a Cabernet Franc and a Merlot. Â The grapes come crushed – so with skins and pips – and …
How’s the Mead Doing?
Two posts in a day! The mead’s doing well! I made two batches: one with honey from the first nectar flow (lighter colored), another, smaller batch with later honey (darker color). They’re about the same proportion water and honey – though, to be honest, I’m going the Sandor Katz-way, that is, I’m eyeballing it, adding …
Making Simple Mead
I started my first mead – fermented honey wine – Â today. I used my own honey, of course. This little jar was from our last extraction (09/26). All the air bubbles that were “invited” into the honey when spinning it had risen to the top, taking the wax and propolis that had hitched a ride …
Two Ferments: Sauerkraut and Comfrey Liquor
The first one is sauerkraut. It is my first deliberately fermented food. A huge cabbage head came in our CSA box a couple of weeks ago. What to do with it? As I was reading Sandor Katz’s The Art of Fermentation, I couldn’t resist. My mom and I went looking for a good crock, but all the right …
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