Showing You Guys What Exactly Goes On In a Bottling Day

Greetings all! I am back with another bottling day post. This time it is my Cocoa Cherry Mead. I had a bit too much headspace in the carboy and I was worried about oxidation as I was looking some color, so I decided to go ahead and bottle it and let if bottle age. Now instead of the obligatory bottle porn I normally post I decided to let you guys see what goes into bottling meads.

 Here you see my Blackberry[no post on this, too simple and not blog worthy] and Cocoa Cherry meads. The thing inside of the jug in the carboy is a racking cane. You pump it and it creates a vacuum that sucks the fluid down into the tube into a bottle.

 As you see here, the fluid flows into the bottle. The white clamp on the hose is what you press to stop the flow of liquid so you don't spill your precious wine all over the floor. 

And here is the bottle porn. I love the color on these. The left is Blackberry and the right is Cocoa Cherry. Despite the darkness of it, the last two on the left are blackberry too. 

Laters, next post I will show you how I made chicken for thanksgiving. If you have any questions/complaints/suggestions feel free to comment and let me know. 

Inexpensive Peach Vanilla Experiment

Sup yall! I'm back with another brew. This time it is not a mead, but still a wine. The local food dept had peaches on sale. I think it was like 93 cents a pound so I figured eh why not? I picked up three pounds of peaches along with a 4lb bag of sugar (more on that later) and figured I'd give it a go.

After I got home my bro, who was staying with us for a week, helped me de-pit the peaches. I think it was around 15 or 16. We cut them up and threw them into a bowl. Once they were all in there I got out the hand blender and turn them into peach soup.

Meanwhile I put the water on boil to get the sugar in there. Now you may wonder why I am using sugar instead of honey. The answer? I was broke and sugar is cheap. After I dumped almost a gallon into a pot I just poured the entire bag in there. Once it all dissolved I mixed it my bucket along with the peach soup and frappe'ed it again till it was nice and frothy.

I put the usual stuff in there, yeast energizer, nutrient, Lavlin k1v, pectic enzyme. From prior experience  I knew this would go off like a rocket so I setup a blow tube. I was not to be disappointed as when I came home from work the next day I found the blow off bottle which was 16oz had been filled with peach stuff. I dumped it out, cleaned it up and set it up again. I left it like that for three days and thankfully there were no more incidents. It looked like this on day 4. Total price on this is less than 10 bucks so far, so it it is good, it will be a good way to get smashed for cheap make a good wine that people can enjoy.

You can see the evidence of blow off up top. Currently it is in secondary.

"But wait, you didn't mention anything about vanilla"

Quite right my impatient friend. I will get to that............on part 2.

Laters!