Brewing and winemaking

Things to do in a power cut #15: bottle the grape wine

February 18, 2011
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A well-timed power cut this afternoon stopped my work in its tracks. Not such a good thing when I had so much to get done this afternoon, but in other ways perfect considering the need to bottle the grape wine had been playing at the back of my mind. I’d promised Chris, next door, that [...]

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We bottle the nettle wine

October 29, 2010
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We’ve finally bottled the nettle wine and now have a dozen bottles of very potent-tasting liquid. We’re hoping it will mellow as it matures.

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We’re making progress with the pear cider

September 30, 2010
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We have solved our problem of not being able to press the pears for our cider by first passing them through a food processor.

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Trying our hand at pear cider

September 21, 2010
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We’re making pear cider courtesy of a box of free fruit, but it’s proving more difficult than we had expected to extract the first pressing of juice.

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Our nettle wine has finished fermenting

July 6, 2010
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After almost three weeks of fermenting in the outhouse our nettle wine has gone quiet. Testing it with the hydrometer we found out why: it was ready for racking off.

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Making our first batch of nettle wine

June 24, 2010
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Nettles are plentiful at this time of year and, of course, free, so what better time could there be for us to try our hand at making a few bottles of nettle wine?

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Celebrating summer solstice with the first of our homebrew cider

June 21, 2010
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It’s the summer solstice, so what better way to celebrate than with a good old traditional drink? Time to crack open the homebrew cider.

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We’ve opened our first plum wine

April 26, 2010
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We’ve opened our first bottle of home made plum wine, and it exceeds all of our expectations. It’s light, fruity and very slightly fizzy. So good, in fact, that we couldn’t help but drink the whole bottle.

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Bottling the wine

November 21, 2009
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At last the wine is ready. Not quite ready for drinking, admittedly, but ready to syphon from the fermenter and bottle up, as its specific gravity has passed the magic 1000 point. We’ve decided to dump the corks this year. They served us well last year and the year before, and squeezing them into the [...]

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Moving on with the wine

November 10, 2009
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Our wine is coming on in leaps and bounds. Probably because we’ve kept it beside the oil-filled radiator that keeps the chill off the kitchen. It’s behaving very well this time around. We did test it after twelve days with the hydrometer, but as the picture shows it was still well under the magical measure [...]

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