Another go at wine making

Youngs cellar7 Malbec 22.5 litres

Made up according to instructions!

I bought a starter kit from The Home Brew Shop

Items	Qty	Price
5 ltr Wine Dispenser / Bag in Box SKU: 101107	1	£4.45
Basic Fermenting Equipment Starter Kit 5 Gallons SKU: Start1	1	£41.00
Cellar 7 Malbec Wine Kit SKU: 1791	1	£28.65
Subtotal		£74.10
Shipping & Handling		£0.00
VAT		£14.82
Grand Total		£88.92

30 bottles for £88.92. Next time for £30-£40, so about £1 per bottle

Pickled Echalion Shallots

Ingredients

1. 1 litre mason jar
2. 500g echalion shallots
3. 1tbs pickling spices
4. 500ml cider vinegar (just eyeballed as half the jar)

Steps

1. Bring cider vinegar to the boil and simmer
2. Put the jar in the microwave with a little water in the bottom for 3-4 minutes to sterilise
3. Peel and slice the shallots crossways into four pieces. Cutting crossways means they stay intact
4. Put the pieces in the jar as you go and stop when there is about 1cm gap at the top
5. Keep back any blemished shallots and use them next time you need some finely chopped shallots!
6. Add the pickling spices
7. Pour over the cider, put on the lid and leave to cool
8. Keep in the fridge and eat!

 Things I've learnt after the first few days.

1. Don't fill the jar; leave a couple of inches: the cabbage rises with the air bubbles and needs pressing down every day for the first few days. I left one inch which was not enough.
2. Put some holes in the cling film! The first morning the cling film had formed a balloon, rising a few inches out of the jar.
3. Keep the weights on the cabbage to keep it down a bit as the gas tries to push it up.
4. The whole house is filled with a lovely fresh cabbage smell.

 Making Sauerkraut

1. Bought two 4.25l jars with 10cm openings, https://smile.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08P9VVSDD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
2. Followed the BBC recipe https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/simple-sauerkraut but with 4tbsps salt per 2kg which seems to be the consensus across the web.
   
3. The recipe says 15g per 500g later so I should probably have done this!
4. Shredded four white cabbages, which ended up filling up one jar nicely. Worked in the salt in a mixing bowl for 7-8 minutes in three batches.
5. Pounded down with a pounder.
6. Used tinned tomatoes wrapped in cling film as a weight.
7. The liquid formed quickly. 
8. House filled with a lovely cabbage aroma

Now I just have to wait 3 to 6 weeks!

Smoked Chicken Drumsticks

I'm smoking a 1kg packet of frozen drumsticks today with my new Cameron smoker. I'm trying to find an easy recipe and am trying smoking the legs for 30 minutes (defrosted but straight from the fridge) and then leaving them to cool in the smoker. The smoker gets very hot, so I'm hoping that this will cook them through.

#4 Batch: Coopers Stout

Brewed the fourth batch today: Coopers Stout + Munton Beer Enhancer.

I'd just finished drinking the #2 Canadian Lager, so the barrel was free. I'm now drinking the #3 Woodforde's Wherry, which seems much better than the first batch, for some reason; perhaps it's the extra two weeks in the barrel before drinking.

I had a couple of problems with the #2 lager: first the syphon tube inside the barrel came off, so I had to depressurise the barrel to open it and then refit the syphon. The site I bought the barrel from were very helpful, telling me what to do. As per instructions, I added 4oz of sugar to the barrel to repressurize it and the following day, the saftey valve (a glorified elastic band) broke, the beer foaming out of the top of the barrel! A did a quick fix with some elastic bands; a quite difficult feat amongst the beer foam and the supplier sent me two replacement bands, so I'm hoping that the next batch behaves itself.

Third Batch

A second go at Woodforde's Wherry started today. The Coopers Canadian Blonde came out of the airing cupboard and into the outside store today to make room for the new batch. I tasted the Canadian Blonde and it's dry and fizzy, so I think the fermentation must be complete. The beer was cloudy but the first pint of the last batch was cloudy too. The float seems to get covered with yeast during brewing, making the first beer out of the barrel a bit cloudy.

The temperature of the new must was 25 degrees C and the O.G. was 1025, which seems a bit low. I was careful to get every drop of concentrate into the barrel, washing the cans out with the boiling water, I put the correct volumne of water in and mixed the ingredients thouroughly, so I'm not sure why the reading was so low.