Home made wine...29º--Foggy

Continued--From that simple recipe for "balloon wine", I soon had more gallon jugs each with a balloon on top and apple or grape juice inside, slowing fermenting away...From gallon jugs to 5 gallon carboys our wine "hobby" grew to major proportions...Now we used fresh fruit, rhubarb, apricots, apples, raspberries, currants, chokecherries, elderberries and rose hips, to name a few...We bought, 5 gallon plastic garbage containers, mashed the fruit, added sugar, water and a little wine yeast, covered these with dishtowels and stirred occasionally...From these crude containers we strained the juice into the carboys, added more sugar and our homemade fermentation locks...(a cork with surgical tubing leading into a small jar of water where it bubbled away)...Herb had built a shelving unit in the back room closet for the carboys...It held 12...Our house took on a strange yeasty smell and it took both of us to make wine...We could have 60 gallons of wine in carboys, 2 or 3 garbage containers started with new fruit and gallon jugs of wine in the cellar aging...Our wine was sweet, syrupy and had a heck-of-a-kick...We drank it, gave it to friends until it overwhelmed me and I said NO MORE!..I refused all offers of fresh fruit from well meaning friends and slowly our "wine hobby" faded away...Occasionally someone will ask us "Do you still make wine?" Or they might say, "I remember the wine you made, that was pretty strong stuff."...I remember lots of wine that was just so-so, but some like our raspberry and rhubarb that was very good and I only remember one that was totally undrinkable that we thew away...Remember the song "Watermelon Wine"...Well our watermelon wine didn't live up to the song, it tasted like rotten watermelons and only got worse with age...We only made one batch.

Now I've had my first lesson in making ale (IPA)...Nick had all the supplies ready when I arrived at his house yesterday...He calls it a "kitchen sink" operation (right up my alley)...He boiled the dried barley, added a syrupy malt, then we added his homegrown hops in three stages...then he strained out the hops, added more water to the 5 gallon mark, poured the reddish brown liquid into a 5 gallon carboy, and last the special yeast packet..added the lid with its fermentation lock and carried it to its place beside the fireplace where it will brew for about a week...This entire process took 3 hours, mostly watching the boiling pot, keeping the temperature just right and stirring...He will call me in about a week when the ale will be racked or siphoned off into another carboy to work for another 2 weeks and then it will be ready to bottle...Is this going to be a new project for my spare time or just more info to add to the data base in my head and a few bottles of ale to enjoy on a hot summers day...Only time will tell....Hugs To All...OWAV:)