View From the Kitchen Today, Nov 17

Two large crocks of home-made vinegars sit on the counter - and the plum is almost finished! We tasted it a bit the other day and it's developing a wonderful flavor - as good as last year's, I think. It should be ready to filter and bottle by the end of this month, or a week or so into December. That means a few of the folks on our Christmas list will be getting a bottle. The apple cider vinegar is about halfway finished, so it will probably take another month before it is ready. The temperatures up here on the top floor of the house are on the lower end of where acetobacter likes, so it takes a while to brew. But I wonder sometimes if the long, slow ferment isn't part of what's helping to keep so much of the original fruit flavor in the vinegar.

Three jugs of wine sit next to the two crocks - all topped off with airlocks and covered with clean white kitchen towels to keep out the extra light. All three are still slowly fermenting, and have been racked at least once - the cherry and plum have been racked twice now. The mead is finally starting to clear a bit, and it looks like it will be a nice golden color when finished. I'm going to be starting a raspberry wine later this weekend - and then I'll move on to my very first batch of homebrew beer! I'm making a light wheat beer for my very first batch. The recipe I'm using only has 6 ingredients, and a simple wort boiling routine, so I should be able to handle it without much confusion. When it has finished its first really hard fermentation, I'm going to rack it into two half-gallon jars and let one proceed without extra ingredients and add some raspberry juice concentrate to the second. The neat thing is, beer brewing is fast when compared with winemaking, so I should be able to haul a bottle out, chill it and taste it by Yule.

Next on the list will be a nut brown ale for my sweetie. He likes his beer strong and dark. No pale ales for him - he says if you can see through it, it's just not worth drinking! So after I see that my first batch is doing okay, I will start a second, larger batch for him as part of his Christmas present from me. I plan to try to keep him in homebrew as much as possible during this next year. I'd love to eventually come up with a handful of tried and true recipes we can make here at home that are just exactly the type he likes. Then maybe next fall, if I'm feeling ambitious, I'll try a batch or two of barley wine - something that he just adores, but we don't often buy because it's fairly expensive. That will have to age for a while, but I think it would be a really cool project.

After these five batches of brew, I have plans to make an apricot wine and an apricot wheat beer, and an apricot melomel (we have a bunch of frozen apricots on hand that need to be used up) some "kosher type" concord grape wine, a blackberry wine and some carrot/raisin sherry. After those are finished, it should be April or May and just about be time to start the gardening year over again. That means I'll have to put away the brewing stuff (except for the occasional bottling weekend as things mature and clear) until next fall. But by this time next year, I expect to have quite the collection of homemade wines maturing, stacked in boxes on their sides in the storage room.

That's one of the nice things about growing older - one finally develops the patience for this sort of thing.