Thursday, January 22, 2009

GRAPE WINE AND BANANA WINE

i figured what the fuck, i'll make a regular grape wine this time. fairly simple recipe:
  • 9 cans welch's frozen concentrated grape juice
  • 2kg sugar
  • 16g fleischmann's dry active bread yeast
  • topped off with hot tap water
  • shake, airlock, wait
welch's is good because it doesn't have any preservatives or anything, the only ingredients are grape juice and vitamin c. in the picture the carboy doesn't have all the juice in it yet (i added 4 more cans of juice after the initial 5 cans).



the banana wine is a bit more complicated and here is the recipe:

  • 15L bottle of water
  • 4.5 Lbs bananas
  • 2kg sugar
  • 16g fleischmann's dry active bread yeast
  1. thoroughly wash bananas off with hot water
  2. slice up all the bananas, leaving the skin on
  3. simmer half the bananas in water for about 30 minutes
  4. pour some of the water out of the 15L bottle to make room for everything else
  5. add simmered and raw bananas to water
  6. add sugar
  7. add yeast
  8. shake, airlock, stir daily for a week
  9. after a week, strain off liquid into a new carboy
  10. airlock, wait
it hasn't been a week yet, i started the batch on january 18th. uhm...the recipes i've seen tell you to simmer ALL the bananas, and to do it with sugar. i did it differently because i was curious to see the results. hopefully it'll clear to a nice piss-colour by the time it's done, like i've seen in pictures. that's all for now.

EVERYTHING UPDATES!!


okay it's been a while. the holidays were pretty boozy and i'm pretty lazy.

so the kilju. i started drinking it just before xmas and ran out just after the new year. for the most part, i just poured out a bottle when i wanted some. it was pretty fucking boozy, i'd say between 15%-20% alcohol, way more of a kick to it than wine.

it wasn't very tasty. less disgusting than i thought, but still not great. it went down pretty easy with diet ginger ale. i generally drink diet soda because i like the taste and because i have a girlfriend, but it also worked well because the kilju was WAY too fucking sweet. it probably could have fermented another month or so and still not have been very dry. other people said it was fine on its own, though.

it didn't clear very well, even after a few days in the fridge when i finally bottled the remainder.one of my friends ran a bottle i gave him through a brita a few times and said it cleared up quite a bit more after that.


mine was still full of live yeast, but the hangover wasn't all that bad. a couple people have told me that it was an odd drunk, like, a little more clear-headed than usual, which i would agree with. but maybe we're all full of shit.

anyway i started a new batch on january 18 and it has half sugar this time. i also got an airlock from a friend of mine. i didn't have any bungs that fit the water bottle, so my girlfriend used a gluegun to attach the airlock to the cap that came with the bottle, it's worked out pretty well. uhm...not perfectly though, but that's my fault. see, being the smart guy i am, i decided i'd sterilize the airlock in boiling water first. the heat was too much and he got a bit deformed. so while it's still airtight and letting out CO2, it's not bubbling in the normal way. I'M A CHAMP!



new kilju recipe:

  • 15L bottle of water
  • 2kg sugar
  • 18g fleischmann's dry active bread yeast
  • shake, put on your airlock and leave it for a couple months
so now, the blueberry wine. when i was bottling the last of my first batch of kilju, i decided to try the blueberry wine. it was fucking tasty, and very clear. so bottled some of it. initially i thought it was boozy, but after drinking lot of it i realized it was probably only 4%-5% booze. i should have let it sit longer, or maybe the fermentation was stuck...but, it was there so...the whole batch got drank.



okay! i also started a batch of banana wine and a batch of regular grape-based wine but i'll make a new post for those.