Self-taught farmers confidently raising chickens, ducks, geese, and pigs. Our focus is on practices that are environmentally harmonious and respectful to our livestock. We appreciate the beauty around us, clean eating, fermenting, and responsibly utilizing the bounty of the land. If you like thinking for yourself, continuous learning, and connecting with the homesteader lifestyle, check us out.
So your wine has fermented, you’ve racked it to a clean carboy a couple of times to get the wine off the sediment, and now you’re ready to bottle it. You have clean, sanitized bottles, new corks, and a floor corker ready…right?
The Queen Anne’s Lace was so good in jelly – and those lacy flower heads keep springing up along the fencelines – I had to try making wine!
I’ve been reusing my own private stash of wine bottles (alas, I recycled many before I thought to save them for my own wines!), but I finally got down to the last few and realized I had quite a bit more wine to bottle. Checking Craigslist, I found a few listings for cases of wine bottles for sale, but – even better – also found a local winery offering cases of empty (used) bottles for free!
Ah, Tepache…so sultry, so tropical, so refreshing. It’s a wild-fermented beverage made from the “waste” parts of a pineapple – the rind and cores – and astonishingly enjoyable. We’re big Tepache fans, so, naturally, making a Tepache wine seemed the next logical step.
So this was my first foray into the world of wild-fermented mead, and despite using raw honey and adding fruit to try to facilitate the ferment, after four days, there was no detectable activity. Puzzling. Not to worry, though…as a winemaker, I have plenty of yeast on hand, so I added a little slurry from a previously-made berry wine’s lees. I keep the slurry in the refrigerator to extend its life, so it took a while to come up to room temperature in the primary fermentor; when it did, though, it looked the way I expected: bubbly.
Continue reading “Bilbemel Update: Blueberry Mead (Melomel)”
So are you saying to yourself “what, pray tell, is a melomel”? Melomel is mead (a type of wine made from honey) plus fruit – and, more specifically, blueberry mead is a “bilbemel”. We’re big mead fans: Sky River Meadery (https://skyrivermead.com/) in Washington state produces some exceptionally fine mead that tastes like bright, fresh honey – with a delicious fruity note, similar to the fragrance of a juicy concord grape – in a glass. It’s crisp, slightly sweet, and it captures the essence of perfect summer days and industrious bees collecting wild pollen. In short, it’s spectacular. We have yet to find a comparable mead available locally, so we’re taking mead-making into our own hands. Continue reading “Wine Chronicles: Blueberry Mead (Melomel)”