I bought a brew belt today. It was 16°C in the warmest room in the house(!). A few hours later and my quince wine was up to temperature and bubbling nicely (and making a lovely fizz when you held your ear to the tub). I had to find a timer switch to switch it on and off because after a few hours it was creeping up over 26°C. You can also push the belt up and down, but a timer (that I had lying around) looked a better option until I can get the arduino going.
Quince Wine Part 1
I found this very simple recipe for Quince Wine from Wine Making Guides. As with many wine recipes it is rather sparse on the details and ingredients are listed but not mentioned in the instructions!
The main issue was that I only had 17 rather than 24 quince, because some had started to rot in the delay between picking quinces and making wine (my wife had first pick for excellent Quince Cheese). I also didn’t have enough raisins, but my wife pointed out that they were in the same proportion as the missing quince so I stuck with it and added just 50g more sugar to compensate.
The recipe does not say when to add water. After a few minutes of trying to reduce the quince with no liquid, I decided that I needed it in the pan with the gratings. I topped up with a jug until the water was just visible (this was not quite enough and I would be more generous next time, maybe until the water was clearly visible or level with the quince gratings. It took a long time to boil and I put a thermometer in to make sure the middle of the pot was at 100°C.
Otherwise it went pretty well. I have a new LCD thermometer on the side of the bucket, which is genius. I’ll buy more. I’ve added the yeast and nutrient and now we wait for the first ferment! I have to stir every day so I will be careful about sterilisation I guess.
First go at Bottling – Christmas Ale
So, the instructions say that Christmas Ale should site in a cold place a for a couple of weeks and be a SG of 1020 when you bottle. I am pretty pleased that I got it spot on, though I have been very careful about following the instructions to the letter.
Bottling was OK. I did do it a little early though because I needed another demijohn for cider/quince wine. I was very careful to wash and rinse each bottle and lid, then allowed the beer to dribble down the side of the bottle to stop too much oxygen getting in. (That has got to be better than letting it waterfall in.) My tube has a little tap at the end, so it was easy to move the tube between bottles. The main issue was trying to avoid picking up the must at the bottom – I didn’t want too much yeast to make the trip. Since I just use a bare tube I had to be very careful and keep an eye on where it was.
In the end, to get the last bottle to a reasonable height, I gently tipped the demijohn. My bottles are PET ones with screw tops. They should cope with massive pressure should the fizzing up work, but the screw tops have anti-tamper rings and were a right pain to get on straight. I didn’t find a way that worked every time and had to keep checking.
So, the beer looks right, tastes right and has the right SG. I am optimistic that there will be some nice Christmas Ale in a few weeks. The instructions say leave it in a warm place for a week to get the fizz going, then off to the cellar it goes. (No sugar needs to be added for this Christmas beer – I am a bit nervous about that but them’s the instructions.)
Crider Testing
We had a Halloween party last night. I wheeled out some cider after a fair bit of bought alcohol had been tested. The opinion of the crider was that it was a bit yeasty up front but had a good follow through. I do wonder whether it wouldn’t be nicer if made with a demijohn and then racked off a couple of times to reduce the yeastiness – then fizzified with a bit of sugar. Maybe this can be another project.
Rock solid squeezebox? :)
The squeezebox has been perfect all day. Here is the load on it whilst running streamed BBC radio and spotify one on a Squeezebox Radio and one on Squeezelite.
Not bad at only 14% processor utilisation.
pi@hood ~ $ top
I must remember to make a clone of this working sdcard.