The Urban Survivalist

So I decided to press my blueberry wine. The berries have been sitting in a bucket for a week now so it was time. I don't have an actual wine press so I decided to just make a ghetto press out of some buckets. It's pretty easy, actually. You just need two buckets. One has to have a bunch of little holes in the bottom. Put the grapes/berries/fruit/whatever inside of a 5 gallon nylon paint strainer bag in the first bucket. Put the bucket with the holes in it on top of that. SLOWLY push down on the bucket with the holes and let the juice drain into it. If you go to fast it will just spill out over the sides of the bottom bucket. Not pretty. Ask me how I know. Once you've pushed the top bucket down as much as you can just pour the juice into your fermenter. Pictures speak a thousand words. Here's the first bucket with the berries in a bag. And here's the bucket with a bunch of little holes drilled into the bottom. And here's the finished product after ...

A couple of weeks ago I racked my Welch's wine to secondary. It cleared up perfectly so I went ahead and bottled today. I just cracked one of the bottles to try. It smells like wine. It's tart, sweet and fruity. The alcohol flavor is pretty strong. That will mellow out with time. I probably should have degassed it. It's got a little bit of CO2 bite. To be honest I'm a little shocked. It's not at all what I expected. It tastes as good or better than any other wine that I've ever made after one month. The other three bottles will be aged for a few months. I expect good things out of them. This is definitely a recipe that I'll be keeping on hand. It's a quick and easy way to keep the pipeline full.

I just finished the last of my hard cider. It turned out really good. It tasted like sour apple juice. There was very little alcohol smell and little to no alcohol flavor. The second batch was slightly better than the first batch. The only thing that I did differently to the second batch was added a cup of dissolved sugar and champagne yeast rather than white wine yeast. I'll be this again. I really like those 1 gallon jugs, too. They're great for making small batches of wild wine. They're also nice to have around just in case the batch of whatever you're making ends up being too big for your fermenter. I also kegged my beer. This was my first attempt at kegging. I've had a cornelius keg in the garage for the last year or so. I finally decided to clean it out and try using it. When I went to put the fittings on, though, they didn't match up. Apparently there are two types of cornelius kegs. The ball lock keg is much more popular and easier to wo...