In AS XXXIII, my in-laws' trees produced a bumper crop. Following a demo at the local college, Aislinn and I invited our shire over for a revel. After some general farbling, I led the gang out to the orchard, passed out a few bags, and we all set to picking. It was a lot of fun. Half a dozen of us, in garb, up on ladders, chatting away, and picking fruit. Shown below is about two-thirds of the 250 pounds we picked from the two trees. Added to the 100 pounds I had gathered earlier, it was pretty obvious that I needed to make some wine--and soon!
The next day, I called an emergency meeting of the Mistig Waetru B&V Guild. Phil showed up first. I handed him a bottle of ale and a sack of malted barley and pointed to the grain mill. One does not live on wine alone; we need beer, too. He acknowleged the nobility of the cause and started grinding the grain.
Then Birk and Indivind arrived (after having stopped off at the homebrew shop to get me some yeast). Indivind grabbed a beer and, after a soak in a Clorox solution, jumped into the plum pressing project with both feet. Birk soon joined him, and with me and Phil cleaning fruit, scooping pulp, and working on some secondary brewing projects on the side, we got all the fruit ready for must.
Those fabulous feet!
Some other folks arrived a little later to shoot archery in the field and help out with the final stages. We did two other wines that day: a blackberry mead and a tomato wine. After the fruit was all crushed, we stripped off our now plum-splattered clothes and headed for the sauna to join the barley mash, already in progress (uh, no photos of that, sorry). We steamed while the mash sparged and then carried the wort out to the fire and went back to steam some more while it boiled.
Thanks for all the help, folks!
I added some water, pectic enzyme, yeast nutrient, a couple bags of sugar, and a few rehydrated packets of Lallemand K1V-1116 wine yeast. In the photo above, it has already been fermenting for a day; I took the lid off the vat to give it a stir to maximize fruit contact with the liquid. The must in the tub is only about a quarter of the pulp we made, the rest went home with Birk who fermented it in two 20-gallon drums.
After a few days, it went into carboys. The carboy in the front is the blackberry mead; the light one in the rear on the right is the tomato wine; the rest is the plum. The "Almo Stout" is not pictured. Birk ran his plum wine a little sweeter, so it went slowly for a while--until BOOM! Here's a shot of the plum stains on the nine-foot ceiling at Heisenberg House.
