Jan. 24-30, 2021

Weather | 1/24, 30°, 38° | 1/25, snow, sleet, freezing rain, rain, 0.27" moisture, 28°, 29° | 1/26, 21°, 26° | 1/27, 2" snow, 0.11" moisture, 18°, 26° | 1/28, 2°, 28° | 1/29, 15°, 39° | 1/30, 0.63" rain, 29°, 36° |

• Sunday, 1/24: Katie Leaves
  
  • I took Katie to the Quincy Airport around 11:30 a.m. Her airplane, with a full load of passengers, left about 20 minutes late. She got a room close to the airport in St. Louis. She said Bill showed up with a pizza, toasted ravioli, and some beer, and they watched the AFC championship football game between the Bills and the Chiefs, and then a hockey game. She was going to be getting up too early for breakfast, so she ordered something for breakfast and shared a molten lava cake with her brother. Bill told her that he was never going to eat, again. Her flight to Gulfport leaves St. Louis at 7 a.m., with a stopover in Charlotte, NC.
    
  • I did some shopping in Quincy at 4 stores. It was quiet, probably due to people glued to football games on TVs.
    
  • Mary did some housecleaning and put the bed away in the upstairs north bedroom.
    
  • I brought home hotdogs and rye bread, so we had our January weinie roast by cooking hotdogs in the woodstove with the door open.
    
  • We watched 4 episodes of Downton Abbey's third season.
    
    
• Monday, 1/25: Snow, Ice, Sleet, Rain
  
  • We saw all forms of precipitation throughout the day. No snow piled up, yet it snowed big flakes for a few minutes. It sleeted. It rained. There was freezing rain. By nighttime, the ground was white, but it was only a quarter inch deep. Tree branches are ice covered and clatter in the wind.
  • Katie made it to Gulfport, MS, in the afternoon. She left St. Louis at 7 a.m., and she left Charlotte, NC at 11:55 a.m.
  • Mary crocheted for a bit. I looked up autumn olive wine recipes.
  • We watched 2 episodes and extras of Downton Abbey's third season.
    
    
• Tuesday, 1/26: Slick Roads & We're Staying Home
  
  • WGEM and KHQA in Quincy report of a multiple-vehicle pile up on Highway 61 a mile north of Canton. HERE and HERE are the reports. Roads are slick. We're snug next to the woodstove and staying home.
  • Mary made flour tortillas, then chimichangas for our midday meal. She also read.
  • I updated our checkbook, and wrote down an autumn olive recipe in my wine journal. I plan on making a 4-gallon batch on Thursday.
  • We find that the new radar imagery on the National Weather Service's website usually doesn't work, so I found a better online weather site called Ventusky.
    
    
• Wednesday, 1/27: Significant Snow, for Here
  
  • We had a serious snow for us, which amounted to about 2 inches. Sun started shining about 2 p.m. and it was a clear night. We took the dogs on a walk to the NE of our property. Mary took a photo in our yard of the ice on the weeping willow tree (see below). Ice on tree branches was really amazing at night with a nearly full moon shining through them.
  • Mary made 2 quiche pies and we ate one of them.
  • We turned the heater on in the chicken coop, since the prediction is for a low temperature of 9° tonight.
  • We watched 5 episodes of Downton Abbey's 4th season.

  

  Ice on the weeping willow tree.
  

• Thursday, 1/28: Pumpkin Wine
  
  • I racked the full and partial gallon jugs of pumpkin wine into one gallon jug with an airlock on it. There was an exceptionally large amount of lees in both jugs. The specific gravity was at 0.996 in the full jug and 0.994 in the partial jug, so alcohol content was 12.73% in full jug and 12.99% in the partial jug, which is higher than I like to get it. We tasted some of the wine. The alcohol overpowered the overall taste. Hopefully, that taste settles down with age. I need to start at a lower amount of sugar and specific gravity. These recipes are calling for too much sugar.
    
  • We decided to perform only one winemaking activity per day. It takes too much time sterilizing equipment to hog the kitchen throughout the day and evening when trying to work on more than one wine at a time. 
    
  • Snow that was on the ground revealed deer tracks left all over the yard. We also saw several coyote scratches down the lane. These areas received major sniffing attention from the dogs.
  • One of the amaryllis plants has a bud showing.
    
  • In the evening, we reviewed several choices of countertop laminates that we could order from Home Depot, online.
    
    
• Friday, 1/29: Autumn Olive Wine
  
  • I made waffles for breakfast.
    
  • I made a 4-gallon batch of autumn olive wine, today. The recipe calls for 16-20 pounds of fruit. The night before, Mary hauled out 18 quart bags of autumn olives from the freezer equaling 16.45 pounds. It took me a good part of the day squeezing each bag of thawed autumn olives to squish these tiny fruits. Then I dumped them into a nylon mesh bag in the 6-gallon plastic fermentation bucket. Between each squeezing session, I had to warm my hands under running hot water, sanitize them, then heat my hands over the woodstove. Even though the berries were removed last night from the freezer, they were still very cold. Mary helped me pour 2 gallons of boiling water over the mesh bag of berries and squeezed juice. The smell reminded me of high bush cranberries in Alaska. I added 7, instead of the 8 pounds of sugar called for in the recipe. Seven pounds of sugar brought the specific gravity to 1.085. After adding 4 crushed Campden tablets and 5 teaspoons of yeast nutrient, I tied a flour sack towel on the bucket's top and put it to bed in the pantry.
  • Mary made a pumpkin cake before I started on my winemaking. It had a "more-ish" taste when we tried a piece after supper, so we had another piece later in the evening.
    
  • Mary dusted all shelves and derusted the top shelf of the rolling book cart. It was quite a chore.
    
  • She also washed 2 loads laundry, dried some of the items outside and what didn't dry on the line, dried inside over the woodstove.
    
  • We watched 2 episodes of Downton Abbey's 4th season.
    
    
• Saturday, 1/30: Rainy Day
  
  • It rained almost all day, for the most rain we've seen in 2021. 
  • I added pectic enzyme to the autumn olive wine. What's remarkable is autumn olive berries are dark red, yet the wine must is clear. I developed a yeast culture throughout the day by adding 2 ounces of must heated to 95-97° to the yeast in a glass quart jar about every 1-2 hours. I started around noon and by 10 p.m. the yeast was bubbling nicely (see photo below). I pitched the activated yeast into the brew bucket just after 10. The specific gravity rose slightly to 1.087. My other wine in production, the pumpkin wine, looks good, even though it resembles a dark beer (see photo below).
  • Mary cross stitched, because she couldn't get into the kitchen due to Mr. Yeasty Man.
  • It was Game Night Saturday, so we played pachisi. Mary won handily, three games to one. It was fun. We enjoyed a half a bottle of 2019 pear wine and a piece of pumpkin cake.

Yeast culture for autumn olive wine.

Pumpkin wine after 2nd racking.