urbandryad

Moved, so I can get back to it. In preparation for bottling, which is in turn preparation for refilling carboys with new stuff:

Rose petal mead: very sweet and gorgeous. Rose and honey aroma play so well, just enough clove to balance. Might benefit from that orange peel I skipped. Need to be sure it's stopped. A little bit thin - feeling, I think to counteract that and the sweet I'll bottle it sparkling. I hate the rapey awful term 'panty remover' but yeah. Have two carboys full, might bottle one sparking as is, try adding orange peel infused vodka to the other and tasting to see if it'll be good still.

Apple mead: crazy apple aroma, again sweet like candy but with enough other stuff going on I'm not worried about needing carbonation to complexify it. There's some sort of secondary fermentation going on with this, it's sucking air very slowly in. I will filter this before bottling therefore. Weird taste disappeared.

Barleywine: wouldn't be bad if it hadn't oxidized. I understand what they mean about a flat papery taste at the end. I'm not sure if adding some raisins would help? It's ok but not great.

Kousa: I love the taste of this. Lots of yeast flavor, which plays in a super fun way with the taste of the kousa itself. There's a lot of alcohol in here, which a touch of bitter finish, that could maybe usr another six months. Good to be bottled though.

Quick notes:

Made the coffee cake from my fallen-apart Betty Crocker cookbook. Is still excellent.

Racked and tasted everything.

Apple mead is at ~9% potential alcohol by volume, tastes amazing.

Apple juniper wine is at 1% potential, has some sitting to do but tastes nice. A little retsina-like.

Added straight apple juice to top up the above two.

Kousa wine tastes like hooch. Racked it down to a 5 gallon. It'll take some time.

Graff did not get bottled today because me & brewing partner got distracted. Tastes awesome, better with the not-sour.

Started two ciders today: straight juice with Safale-04 yeast, one with Big Gin-soaked juniper berries, one without. Considering adding some honey to them at some point maybe, but curios where they go on their own. they were right around 5-6% potential alcohol, it was more juice from upvalley straight from the farm. Apparently it's UV-pasteurized there, but not boiled.

Have six full carboys, two empty ones. There will be one more empty one after graff is bottled. Also have half a bucket of honey (one bucket plus the apple juice made 6gal mead), some sweet mead yeast, some narbonnes yeast, and some lambic brett in the fridge.

Hmm, hmm, hmm.

Sorta drunkish from tasting everything, so notes are half-assed but here while I remember them.

Alright, so, brewing time. I am currently making Brandon O's Graff ( http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f81/graff-malty-slightly-hopped-cider-117117/ ) with of course some alterations.

Also: my apartment smells like malt and hops.

Okay, so I basically followed the base recipe with a bunch of alterations and details: I used 1.1 kilos amber liquid malt extract instead of 2 lbs dried malt extract, and 1/2 lb crystal 120L, because I like those dark roasty tastes a lot. Instead of buying apple juice, I used a can of Vinter's Harvest apple wine base, so basically apple juice concentrate, diluted up to 4 gallons. The hops I picked were wakatu, because I loved their smell. Yeast is Safale-05.

For my first official wort-making, it's going well. Things taste good. I'm not sure I like the intensity of hop smell in here. Wish me luck! Will record specific gravity later on.

[Edit: 1.04 specific gravity or about 5% potential alcohol]

[Edit on Nov 04, 2013: I went to bottle this pretty late, end of last week, and I hadn't transferred it to an airlocked carboy. It tasted distinctly sour: I kind of liked the taste, did some research, consulted, and ended up priming and bottling half of it to see where it goes. I am worried that it will form a pellicle in the bottles, in which case I'll throw it out. If not, and it carbonates, and I like it, I will drink the half I kept. But: I think my primaries are scratched enough to harbour bacteria, and I trust cleanliness of glass, so I'm running everything in glass for awhile. Next update will be when it carbonates.]

Sooo... since kousa dogwood was ready and I knew a very large patch of it, and since I found many mentions of a kousa wine online but no actual recipes, I seem to be diving into winemaking feet-first without a detailed roadmap.

Kousa Wine
Because there was no kousa wine recipe I am going off the strong/dessert version of http://www.eckraus.com/wine-making-strawberry because I like sweet things and because most accounts of people making the wine say they wish they had added more fruit etc.

So far I've picked... an amount of kousa that I think is just shy of 25 lbs. Rinsed, mashed with a potato masher, put in the sterilized bucket with 1/4 tsp sodium bisulfite and pectic enzymes as described, covered with a little water to the 15L mark. It's sitting now. I got 100% distracted in the wine supply store (they are getting in sweet mead yeast on Friday! I am getting some!) so forgot to get something to test the acid level, so that will have to wait for tomorrow.

Took just less than 3 hours to pick the kousa, mostly from the BC Hydro complex by Edmonds Station but some from by my home.

My shoulders are totally destroyed. The kousa branches had to be bent down, held with the hand holding the heavy bag full of fruit while I picked with the other hand. There's a bit of a twist/flick I needed to get the stems off, so the picking hand couldn't hold anything else.

Lots of people came by as I was picking once it stopped raining, all universally pleasant and curious about what I was doing. A couple people tasted the fruit, everyone was approving, many were happy to learn, even the security guard was excited rather than disapproving. One dude who was walking by on his cell didn't approach me, but stared awhile then looked at the berries on a tree nearby, but everyone else said hi, and it was awesome. I used the term 'kousa dogwood' whenever anyone asked me what I was picking, since it seemed easiest for someone to look up later.

It seems like either kousa is, like most trees, a little bit of an alternate-bearer (heavy one year, light the next) or else the dry summer took a bit of a toll on the berries. Both might be the case. I remember last year the trees at BC Hydro were just loaded with fruit. The picking was scarcer this year, but luckily the landscape architect had done 3 blocks of the same repeating pattern of dogwoods, so there were lots to visit.

Next time I should bring a ladder.

I remember how much I love picking undomesticated fruit. It's just more fun, with so much less uniformity from tree to tree and even branch to branch or fruit to fruit. You really have to pay attention. The fruit tastes so different from tree to tree too; so neat. So sad that diversity's been bred out; variety really is a pretty awesome spice.