What's going on in your winery today..

[DaveH]

Quite a busy day!!

Started off with a trip to the Home Brew Shop in Aldershot, returning home with lots of goodies....including a 25KG sack of Malt!

Then, once home, racked and degassed a 5 Gall batch of Blackberry & Elderberry (plus 50g Oak),and have got a 5 Gall batch of No.1 on, a 1 gallon batch of Stawberry, plus a 6 bottle Chablis Blush kit (Beaverdale).

Now relaxing with a bottle of Cascade Ale,and looking at devising a new 'Signature' brew for GF11 (decided on the name 'Grapefest Guzzler!)

All in all a good day!

[lockwood1956]

looking at devising a new 'Signature' brew for GF11 (decided on the name 'Grapefest Guzzler!)

Cant wait to try it dude! if its half as good as your summer ale, twill be a delight

hoping to get my corny kegs set up in the winery this year.....have modified a fridge especially...it holds 2 (three at a push) kegs, and i have CO2 and regulators for 4 keg setup...better make some beer then eh?

regards
bob

[goldseal]

What method had you used for these?

The 'ferment down to 1.000, prime and hope-for-the-best' method.

[goldseal]

Tasting today: Merlot, Elderberry/Blackberry.

I need to get a lot of bottling done tomorrow, but am suffering from a general lack of motivation. Time to get my finger out

[NorthernWiner]

Pressed the Petit Verdot second run, which, surprisingly, doesn't taste all that different from the "first run."

Debating whether or not I should put it through MLF. Normally I would, but PV is naturally higher in malic acid than other grape varieties, so I'm thinking MLF may result in a flabby wine.

[Rich]

Today has been bottling day for me. 5 gallons of basic white #1, and 2.5 gallons of sweet rosé for summer consumption. Also racked the grapefest wines, lots of cold stabilisation gone on there!! loads of crystals in the fermenters.

[koomber]

Racked my D Carnegie and Stark Co Porter to the Secondary today. Clone recipe from the Clone Brewz book. I had a wee taste after measuring the SG (tradition demands I keep 25mL to try).

At the moment, this is probably the best beer I've ever made. EVER. :

I can only imagine what this might do with age behind it. I might have to enter this into a competition!

I'd share the recipe but it is from a book that is currently in circulation so I'm not sure of the moral/forum implications. That being said, this recipe is a CRACKING advertisement for the book.

[lockwood1956]

as long as you reference the book and the author its generally regarded as ok

[AquaCom]

This evening I have been playing with bottle labels.
Made up 10 ish bottles of Wine Expert Choc Raspberry Port for Christmas presents (the rest is ageing) and printed a few christmas'y labels for the gift bottles.
Decided I wanted a less "cheesy" label for my own stock and some non-christmas gift bottles. So this evening I made a new label for the remaining bottles.
Might sound like a boring evening to some, but I enjoyed it

[ms67]

moved the tanglefoot to secondary, and in the few quiet spells have managed to remove labels from a number of bottles, sterilise, order some ingredients for the next brew. Seems like a lot, but that's a testament to busy times 'cos really its very little! oh i did spend some time editing and posting a vid too ... amazing what a time sink that stuff is.

[goldseal]

Filtered and bottled 9 DJs of assorted stuff.

This was a real pain because a) I don't enjoy bottling, and b) the gravity filter was the, err, bottleneck. It's not worth using the Minijet on 1 gal batches because the losses are too great, but it takes an age for the Harris filter to give up the last of the wine.

[Rich]

I found the minijet not too bad for loses once you'd put a 5 gallon batch through, then sneak a couple of dj's through after. It'll start to be a problem when with a tandem filter on the Enol as that holds about half a gallon!

[goldseal]

That was the problem Rich - 9 different wines. Maybe I need to buy a 2nd Harris filter so I can have two DJs filtering in parallel.

[mrdexter]

Harris filters are cheap enough that that's a possibility, although personally I'd solve that problem by making nothing in less than a 5 gallon batch ;-)

Just racked 54 litres cider into one of ten new carbouys (thanks cellar_rat!) and now wondering how quickly I can fill the other nine.

[Former Canuk]

Just had some kit and chemicals delivered today. Put on my first Wine No 1

Used a carton of Apple Juice and a carton Don Simon Grape/Apple/Rasberry