Where in the World Are Paul & Jen?: Oh, The Home Brewing You'll Do!

All it took was a taste of our first home brew for us to become hooked. Since we had picked up equipment for wine making in Ohio, we figured that would be our next endeavor. We decided to start with a wine kit, since it would be difficult to get fresh juice in May. Fresh juice comes here from California in September. We decided on a Chilean Malbec. Both Paul and I really enjoyed the Malbec he brought home from Argentina and we hoped this wine would have similar qualities.

Making wine is quite a bit easier than making beer. There is no cooking involved. The short of it is that you add juice, add some bentonite clay (to help settle proteins), add some water, give it a stir, take an original gravity reading with a hydrometer (to help determine fermentation status and alcohol content later), add some oak chips, and throw in the yeast. That's it! Simple, right? Hard to mess up when everything you need comes pre-measured in the kit! Of course everything has to be cleaned and properly sanitized, etc. And then--you wait! After about 7-10 days we racked the wine to a carboy and let it rest there. About a month or so later we followed the kit instructions for stabilization--adding potassium metabisulfite and stirring/aerating the wine. K+ meta not only acts to protect the flavor and color of the wine, it also inhibits the growth of organisms like wild yeast and bacteria. The next step is clarification, but because I'm a vegetarian, I didn't want to use the clarifying agent that came with the kit. It's a product that is made from shells of, well, shellfish. Supposedly the product does not remain in the finished wine, but I just didn't want to use it. We contacted the kit company to ask about an alternative and they said to just let it rest and it would (hopefully) clear on its own. And it did! We even got to taste a little when we stabilized. It was good, but it definitely needed time to mellow!

Bottling day came just about two months after we started. We wound up with 27 bottles of lovely Chilean Malbec! The bottles are aging as we speak down in the basement. We're doing our best to wait until around October before we try it. The longer we wait, the better it will be! I'm sure our patience will be rewarded, but it's difficult to wait!

Since we knew it would be a while before we could enjoy the Malbec, we figured we'd brew up our Cherry Wheat beer kit that we picked up in Ohio. We did this 11 June. It was a relatively easy process, as it was all extract brewing--no grain steeping required. It sat in the primary fermenter for 5-7 days before we racked it to a carboy and then added canned cherries (from the kit) for a secondary fermentation. Another 7-10 days and it was ready to bottle. Granted, it needs to sit in the bottle for a minimum of 2 weeks before it's ready to drink and even it gets better sitting around for a while. Fast forward to July and we first tried the Cherry Wheat with Henry in Long Island. It was good, but it did have quite a bit of sediment in it. It wasn't necessarily as clear as I'd hoped and I hoped for a little more carbonation. Still, it was a nice, refreshing beer. Fast forward to now (August) and since it has settled more, it has improved quite a bit. The beer is very clear now. It has good flavor and decent carbonation though still not as much as the Summer Ale. We do like it, but Paul likes the Summer Ale the best. Oh, there's more to come....but I'll split it up into another post!