Fermenting is FUN! Wow! It’s so cool … I’ve been wanting to dabble in this for quite some time. I’ve been wanting to do cider for quite a while. That’s why I did it first. I want to do more cider, but also wanted to be a bit more exploratory, especially since we have had local concord grapes in season.
First, the cider. It’s been racked to a 1-gallon glass carboy and has been in its secondary fermentation stage for over a week now. The bubbles slow down and speed up with the change in temperature, it seems. And, over time if I understand it right, the fermentation will slow down as well. It smells delicious when I sniff the airlock as it releases. I’ve got a ways to go, though before I get to try any. It will be in the current carboy for another almost two weeks. Then, I’ll rack it to another carboy where it will continue for another two months – maybe longer depending on how “clear” it is. How long, I guess, will also depend on where I’m at (Ohio? Florida? Elsewhere?) … starting fermentation experiments like this is essentially a semi-permanent move – it takes a while for the process to finish! It’s probably not a good idea to be moving around carboys full of fermenting liquid. I think it would pretty much ruin the investment.
For my second fermentation project, I decided to go pick some concord grapes at Cherry Orchards. At the market I asked Neil Cherry about his concords and he invited me to come pick some at a discount. I gladly accepted because I really wanted to see his place. Alas, I forgot my camera, so I didn’t get any pictures of his orchard. It’s a beautiful place, though. It’s been a family farm for at least two generations now. He’s got 15 acres in production – apples, pears, grapes, berries, pumpkins and some other veggies. They sell at a couple farmers markets and have a great on-farm stand as well. I needed at least 6 pounds of grapes for my wine recipe, and buying them at the market would have been an expensive proposition. So, I picked 11 pounds! And got a good discount.
They are beautiful grapes! And, pretty tasty too.
Making wine was definitely a bit different than cider. Albeit, I didn’t exactly follow the cider recipe … so this time I tried to follow the wine recipe closer. I had bought a hydrometer and other testing equipment to aid in the process. I rinsed the grapes, de-stemmed them and weighed up 6 pounds. I have a two-gallon primary fermenting bucket, so I decided to try and make a gallon and a half of wine … so I weighed out three more pounds of grapes, bringing it to a recipe and a half. After I put the grapes in the nylon sack, I crushed them by hand.
Once I did that, the rest of the recipe was pretty easy. I added a lot of sugar. I wasn’t so sure about this at first, as I wanted to just ferment the grapes and see what happens. But it turns out that concords don’t really have enough sugar to make a strong enough wine. Apparently because of the length of time wine needs to “mature” in the bottle (a year or more!), the alcohol level needs to be high enough to “preserve” the wine until it’s ready. I guess by keeping any nasty germs or bacterial incapacitated? The recipe called for a starting specific gravity of 1.095. I had to add 5 cups of sugar to get it to that level. After I achieved that, I added the yeast and away we went.
I didn’t take any pictures of this process. I probably should have, because it was a lot more exciting than the cider! I didn’t really expect the consequences of fermenting a higher-alcohol product. The fermentation was a lot more vigorous and audible and messy. The decision to make a gallon and half was not a good one. The little 2-gallon bucket, along with the sack of crushed grapes and the added water and sugar was too much volume for the little bucket. When the fermenting really got going, the sack of grape pulp expanded with CO2, decreasing the airspace in the bucket. I was cleaning up mess after mess as the fermentation was also creating foam and the pressure was pushing the foam up through the air-lock, making a mess of the airlock and oozing down all over the bucket and sometimes the counter. It was amazing, really. When the cider was just bloop-blooping air bubbles through the air lock every 20 seconds or so, the wine would bloooooop-blooop-blooop-blop, bloop, blooop, bloop constantly almost. Obvious that there was a lot more activity with all that extra sugar.
I stirred and pressed the grape pulp daily to encourage extraction. I tested the SG and when it got to 1.030, I was supposed to rack it to glass carboys. I did, hoping it would make less of a mess in the carboys because the sack of grape stuff wouldn’t be causing a mess. However, my hope didn’t materialize. The racking process went well. I thought all was great, until I left for the afternoon and came back later to find it had essentially boiled over! There was so much activity and so much foam, that I lost inches of wine through the airlock as it foamed over. Whoops. Lesson learned – I bought a “One Gallon Wine Kit” … do one gallon of wine in a two-gallon bucket. Buy a bigger bucket to do more!!!
Things have calmed down now and I don’t have to swap out clean air locks twice a day when the wine foams over. There are apparently ways around the foaming, with additives and such. But I feel like I’m adding enough chemicals already … this is definitely not organic wine … and I know now why there isn’t much organic wine – because to keep things clean, sterile and wild-yeast and bacteria free, you pretty much have to use some chemicals. Nothing horrible or toxic, but definitely chemicals.
Anyway, I really enjoy the process of wine and cider making. All the testing and racking and air locks is very lab-like and the chemist in me (thanks Mom and Dad!) enjoys that kind of stuff. Recently, my friend Jeff mentioned that if he were me, he’d be learning all about wine-making and planting a vineyard somewhere. It’s a pretty damn good idea, really. People will always love alcohol, especially local, well produced brews. I can see this fermentation thing being a part of my life for years to come. I just need my own space to have my own little operation! That, along with space for the wood shop, welding studio, computer room, etc… I’m gonna need a lot of space.
Not a whole lot else is going on, really … the farm is great. But I’m yearning for my own place. The weather is getting cold, although we had a really gorgeous past week. The one electrical/solar possibility is sounding fairly positive, and I should know more this coming weekend, when I hope to meet with the guy who may hire me. There will be a lot of changes this week, I feel. This time next week I will probably know more about what the rest of the year will be like. I’m gonna hold off on making any further plans for now.
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