August 20-26, 2023

Weather | 8/20, 71°, 93° | 8/21, 77°, 91° | 8/22, 73°, 97° | 8/23, 76°, 93° | 8/24, 77°, 99° | 8/25, 73°, 97° | 8/26, 0.56" rain, 71°, 77° | 

• Sunday, 8/20: Bottling Pumpkin Wine
  
  • A quick check of the pumpkin wine found that it still had a strong sulfur smell. I rigged up a plastic pipe stuffed with a copper scratch pad. Then I filtered just under eight gallons of wine through this contraption to successfully eliminate the sulfur smell and taste. I added 1.4 grams of Kmeta. The specific gravity is 0.994, giving the wine an alcohol content of 12.84 percent. The pH is 3.4. A taste test indicated the sulfur was gone, but it has a strong alcohol taste. The pumpkin and cinnamon flavors are there, too. We decided to bottle it. After bottling and corking, I ended up with 39 bottles of new pumpkin wine.
  • We harvested the second batch of pink mushrooms. This batch was even bigger than the first bunch we harvested from this kit. They were delicious.
  • Mary watered the gardens while I bottled wine. Extremely high humidity meant she was dripping wet after finishing that chore.
    
    
• Monday, 8/21: Too Many Photos
  
  • My laptop computer was extremely slow at showing characters I entered from the keyboard. After a bunch of online checks, I suspected large photo files were bogging it down, so I eliminated them by throwing out several and storing some on a zip drive. Now, the laptop works like a champ. There were too many stupid winemaking photos and videos.
    
  • Mary cleaned house.
    
  • Mary and I both watered gardens. My help at filling watering cans and marching them partway to her vastly reduces the time it takes to finish this chore.
  • Mary walked to the chicken coop to start to put the chickens to bed and there were six deer at the edge of the west yard...three does and three fawns. They looked at her for quite some time, stomped their feet, then ran off to the west. We also saw twin fawns in the north yard this morning. That's a total of eight deer seen today.
    
  • We're experiencing hot weather. It's summer. That's what happens in the summer. While local news folks rant about goofy "feel's like" temperatures from high humidity, we noticed an opposite benefit. High humidity and early morning fog created clouds that kept the sun away through large parts of the day and kept temperatures lower than predicted. We hope that continues. Meanwhile, we'll savor air conditioners indoors and head outside only when needed.
    
    
• Tuesday, 8/22: Spiced Apple Wine
  • I discovered in Jack Keller's Home Winemaking book that apples contain more sulfur, so too much Kmeta added to the wine harms apple wine flavor. I used too much as preservative last year, hence the off-flavor of that wine. Apples are also high in malic acid, so tartaric acid, not acid blend that contains additional malic acid, should be used to increase acid content. I worked up a spiced wine recipe from Keller's website, decreasing the clove amount, but increasing cinnamon and ginger amounts, to adhere to our tastes.
    
  • I made a two-gallon batch of spiced apple wine. Leaving frozen gallon bags of applesauce on the sun-drenched porch with outside temperatures in the high 90s made for quick thawing. A total of 25 pounds, 14 ounces of apples went into this batch. I chopped up two pounds of raisins, crushed six cinnamon sticks, and chopped up 8 ounces of ginger root. I included 0.55-ounces of cloves (see photos, below). This all went into two nylon mesh bags in the brew bucket, along with 0.4 grams of Kmeta, two teaspoons of yeast nutrient, a gallon of water, and 1.5 pounds of sugar. The specific gravity was 1.054. It should rise with additional sugar released from apples and raisins and if not, I'll add more sugar, later. I covered the brew bucket with a towel and let it sit overnight in the pantry.
    
  • Mary picked tomatoes and froze several. While in the garden, she found two more small rabbits. She thinks they were born in there. This year, the bunnies are damn Houdini experts.
  • We heard a wood thrush in the north woods while releasing chicks from the coop this morning. We saw two male wood ducks fly by the far garden. Mary had a hummingbird buzz over her head while watering gardens.
  • Mary watered most of the far garden before I finished winemaking and helped her. High humidity and heat means you're soaking wet with any outside work. I notice that temperatures are in the 40s, 50s, and 60s in south central Alaska these days...oh, the joy!
  • A quick check of the wine prior to bedtime revealed a wonderful spiced apple aroma and an reddish-gold liquid. This will be nice wine!
    

Thawed gallon bags of Empire applesauce.

Ingredients (l to r): cinnamon, cloves, ginger, raisins.

• Wednesday, 8/23: Jumpy Chicks, Heat, & Nighttime Cicadas
  
  • We were watching the chicks after letting them out of the coop this morning when a blue jay called and I coughed. The combination made all birds jump and run into the tall weeds at the east side of the chicken run. They have a natural sense to dodge perceived trouble. At over 10 weeks old, these chicks are almost the size of our fully-grown hens. We switched them to an all-flock variety of feed earlier than past years and it seems they grow faster on that food.
    
  • I added two tablespoons of pectic enzyme to the spiced apple wine. The usual amount is one teaspoon, but some of Jack Keller's apple wine recipes call for this huge amount in order to better push liquid out of the apple fruit. The pH is 3.5. It needs to be 3.3. I'll wait until I pitch the yeast and adjust the pH at that point, since the pH might change by then. The brew bucket went back into the pantry to sit for another day.
  • I labeled half of the recently-corked pumpkin wine bottles, with plans to finish them tomorrow.
    
  • We watered all gardens, our daily chore. Mary found little bunny trails under our chicken wire fence. I might have to bury the fencing in the future.
    
  • The heat got to me a little, today. After hauling the garbage can and mail back home, then helping Mary with filling watering cans, I had to take an early break.
    
  • We heard a cicada calling at 11 p.m. They aren't a normal nighttime sound, but Mary looked it up and they can sound off with high nighttime heat or light. It was 81° at that time.
    
    
• Thursday, 8/24: Moon/Star Gazing
  
  • I squeezed the two nylon mesh bags in the spiced apple wine must and more dark brown juice emerged. The pH is 3.5 and the specific gravity is 1.063. The sugar content rose from yesterday. With this sugar content, the alcohol level would be nine percent. I decided to wait until I pitch the yeast for any adjustments, if needed. Mary and I tasted the must...WOW! It is very good...like spiced applesauce.
    
  • I worked up a starter batch of Red Star Côte Des Blancs wine yeast throughout the day. It started quickly, but seemed to slow significantly by nightfall. I pitched the yeast into the brew bucket late at night and it instantly put a nice aroma into the pantry. Prior to adding yeast, a pH check showed 3.3 to 3.4, so I didn't add tartaric acid. The specific gravity was still 1.063, so I also didn't add sugar.
    
  • I labeled the rest of the pumpkin wine, then made an assessment of all wines and updated my numbers on the food chart in the pantry. I have 248 bottles of wine in storage. Yes, my winemaking hobby has taken over!
    
  • We watered all gardens in the heat. West winds made the high heat tolerable.
    
  • This evening, I saw five deer...a buck in the west yard and two sets of two deer eating tender shoots from the lane. Mary saw a half-inch long tree frog and a young prairie king snake, the first snake we've seen this summer.
  • From the website space.com, we learned that when the star, Anteres, which is in the constellation, Scorpius, goes behind the moon, it suddenly blinks out, instead of slowly fading away. This is because of a lack of an atmosphere on earth's moon. We watched through binoculars and used the electric power pole as a way to block the bright side of the moon in order to view this phenomenon. High clouds edged in and over the moon, enabling us to see a moon dog, or a type of rainbow created by the moonlight. Then, sure enough, at 9:15 p.m., Anteres blinked out of sight. That was really cool!!!
  • Katie texted that she participated in her first triathlon and she placed 14th, overall. HERE is a link to an article about it.
    
    
• Friday, 8/25: Harvesting in Buckets
  
  • When we first start harvesting tomatoes, they arrive inside the house in a small bowl. We are now to the bucket stage. Mary picked a four-gallon bucket full of tomatoes and a few tomatillos. She also picked two plastic grocery sacks stuffed with green beans. Garden picking took all afternoon, with several breaks, due to the heat. The fridge is now stuffed.
    
  • I drove to Quincy and picked up meds for me, along with chicken feed. I saw a temperature of 101° on a bank thermometer sign. On the way back home, I heard on the radio that St. Louis set a record high temperature of 104°. I texted Bill, asking if he did okay today in the non-air conditioned warehouse he works in. He responded with an animated file of the Bee Gees singing "Stayin' Alive," and texted "I made it through the day."
  • A wonderful wine yeast aroma emanates from the spicy apple wine in the pantry. A nighttime check of the specific gravity registered 1.053, 10 points down from yesterday's reading of 1.063, so the yeast is moving along, nicely.
    
    
• Saturday, 8/26: Racking Spiced Apple Wine
  
  • A steady rain persisted for most of the day. After several days of high heat, it was very welcome.
    
  • Mary froze several bags of tomatoes, some tomatillos, and a huge batch of green beans. The job took a chunk of the day to finish.
    
  • We have a vegetable-loving dog. Plato just adores green beans picked from the garden. While Mary cuts them up, this crazy dog sits next to her with his ears perked up, watching her every move. Occasionally, she'll throw a piece of bean on the floor and Plato quickly gobbles it up. His other favorites are celery, broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots.
    
  • I checked the spiced apple wine mid-afternoon and the specific gravity was already at 1.022. That's very fast working yeast to be ready in just two days. The pH was still 3.4, within the acceptable range of 3.1 to 3.55, so I didn't alter acid content. I squeezed the two mesh bags to yield just 10 ounces shy of four gallons of wine must. So, fermenting these apples almost doubled the amount of liquid I initially added to the brew bucket. I racked the must into a three-gallon carboy, a half-gallon jug, a 750-ml wine bottle, and a 330-ml beer bottle. It now sits in the pantry until fermentation stops and I see over a half-inch of fines in the bottom of the containers.
    
  • We saw a fawn with fading spots in the east yard. I chased it away before it tried eating apples. We watched a nighthawk fly over the house this evening.
    
  • Mary and I shared a bottle of 2022 dandelion wine. It was bottled a year ago and this wine is very good. It glows with a beautiful golden color. You can taste the dandelion flavor, but there's also a citrus component. Extra ginger root enhanced the flavor of this wine. Unfortunately, picking dandy petals takes forever, so I didn't do it this spring. I need to try to get back to it next year.