Woke up pretty late, got a call from John saying he wanted to check out the races. i took too long to get into the city and it was too late for John to go because he had a play to see at 6pm. i decided i might as well go to the finish line again since i came all this way already. When i got behind the art museum...i saw some Drexel rowers riding back. i then figured i should just call someone that would know if the races were still going on. i called Ryan and sure enough, they were over, lemon.
Ryan told me to come over to play Rock Band. i've played Guitar Hero but Rock Band is just a little bit more ridiculous. The only problem was that this Rock Band was on the PS2. At a glance it looks the same as the XBox 360 and PS3 version, but a few features are missing that just make it inferior such as not being able to download new songs.
Other than that it was still pretty fun. Busting out the solo buttons and banging on the drums. Of course i did a horrible job with the foot pedal, and my foot would get tired from holding it up the whole time...but it was fun.
Later some guys from Ryan's boat came over to slowly start pre-gaming for the big Dad Vail Party. Below is Danielle showing Buck Wheat some love...this has to be one of the laziest cats.
At the big party they had a gin bucket, slices of lemons and limes, ice, a handle of lime twisted Seagram's Gin, and three 2 liters of Sierra Mist...pretty good stuff, of course they doubled the recipe for this party.
One of the residents of the house, Rory, on the left...some crazy kid that drew a mustache for the night...
One of the rowers thought it was be a good idea to spray a bottle of champagne in the kitchen...so that was interesting...made the room reek of fermented grape.
Wasn't long until the cops came to break up the party, even i got kicked out because i'm so crazy when i'm sober and can't talk. It wasn't even that late, only 12:30 am and i had no where to go. Ryan ditched me and no one was answer my phone calls. i chilled with Terry for a bit but he soon bounced and i had to walk the 8 blocks to my car through West Philly by myself. i'm sure one of these days i'll get mugged.
After brent and i bottled the Merlot, i let it set up right for three days so the corks would expand as much as they could before getting wet when turned on their side. After three days had passed i loaded them into the wine rack. i filled up the wine rack! Woot! i even have some bottles left over stuck in some cardboard boxes. My dad sent me some email saying that we should get another wine rack because they're having a sale right now. But the price of the wine rack is the same as the price of our current one. i guess it would be kind of cool to have another wine rack and stack it on top of our current one, then we would have a giant wall of wine...
i went to a party about 2 weeks ago, and decided to break open the German white wine. i was pretty buzzed before drinking it...and it still tasted awful. i'm going to blame the grape because i've never had a German wine that was good. i'm sure part of the awful taste was contributed by me, but the shiraz turned out alright? sorta...i'm sorry to the one person i gave a bottle of Muller-Thurgau to. i'm sure you hate me for it, at least the label was kind of nice?
Well i've taken a break from the wine making for now. Might read up on a few things before getting back in the fermenting business. Might even try crushing my own grapes this summer, we'll see....
i forget what day it was, but one of these past days brent came over to help bottle the Merlot. i could have done it by myself but i was too lazy to drive to the brew store to rent the corker and all i had to work with was that lame hand one that takes at least two people to operate.
Being bored one day i decided to read the directions that came with the siphon. Bottling was frustrating because whenever it was time to remove the siphon from a full bottle and start filling another one....i would always spill a little wine. In the wine kit there is this plastic tube with a stopper on it that i have no idea what its purpose was...After reading the instructions, read that it was to keep spilling between bottles to a minimum. )@#$&)@(*#&$)(#$&)
This plastic tube made the bottling so much easier, i didn't even spill a single drop of wine this time.
Since i always clean the bottles, i decided to make brent do it while i dried them. i really just dried a couple and let the others 'air dry'. We filled up about 28 or 29 bottles...we had a good amount of wine left in the carboy but it wasn't enough to fill a whole bottle, plus we probably would have gotten a bunch of sediment if we did. We then decided to drink it, even though we knew it would taste horrible...which it did. We each got a glass and we couldn't even finish half of it. It was disgusting. We made the most ridiculous faces whenever we took a sip...but maybe it'll taste better in a few months.
Time for the fun chemicals to be added to the Pino Blanc. The specific gravity was 0.993. Probably will only get 11% alcohol with this batch. While mixing the chemicals and junx there was a lot of CO2 coming off, a lot more than the other batches. But i'm not bottling anytime soon so i won't have to worry about making champagne or explosive bottles of wine.
This one kid i know was bottling beer with his dad. They ran out of beer bottles so they decided to use Appletise (best apple soda ever) bottles. When he was putting the bottles in the fridge, the Appletise bottle exploded and a shard of glass went through his lip and chipped his tooth. Now that sounds horrible, but it was also two days before the Dive Trip to the Red Sea so he missed that...lemon.
Anyway, had manthan over to help out with the mixing. We're heading to Stowe, VT today. Should be a fun 8 hour bus ride...at least this time i'll be able to drink on the bus, woot!
i'm sure everyone has collected something at some point in their life. My mom collects those ridiculous spoons, why would you collect those i don't know. All they're good for is tea and maybe an infant could use them eating. This one kid i knew collected scabs...yeah, pieces of coagulated blood. But not just any scab was good enough for his collection. He had to have big pieces and he kept them in ziplock bags...
i wasn't sure what i wanted to collect, scabs are just gross and spoons and snow globes are not manly enough. So i decided to collect toothpick holders.
Okay, i know what you're thinking. You're thinking those are shot glasses, not toothpick holders.Well maybe some of them were intended to hold booze and not toothpicks and i'll probably never put toothpicks in them, but one of them was labeled as a toothpick holder, because it was at a boyscout camp and they didn't want to promote alcohol by any means, pretty ridiculous...
My collection is pretty lame, i have about fifty shot...toothpick holders but there are only forty six in the picture because i have misplaced a couple of them. i acquired four them on the trip to L.A. Two from the LAX airport and the other two from the Phoenix Airport.
i like the second one from the right just because it has a dead dude in the glass, plus it has a recipe for a shot. Pretty sure i haven't seen that before, some collector i am.
There is my collection, nothing to brag about but at least i can say i have one. Now i just need to get some toothpicks, or booze...
Time to bottle the Cabernet. Well, its actually two days early...but i was impatient and already rented a corker from the store for 24 hours. No more of this silly red plastic wannabe corker that is advertised to only need one person to operate when really it takes 2 to 3 people.
i have to admit i was pretty excited to use this huge thing. It has a spring on the base to hold the bottle against the cork and locks in place when the handle is pressed down. You can also adjust how deep you want to push the cork in. Pretty sweet. i might even buy one. i guess i really shouldn't because you can rent them for free, but you have to return them the next day and that is just more gas money...
Well, i'm no math major...but if the distance to the store is 7.2 miles, and my car gets 24 mpg, and gas prices are 2.80 bones per gallon...it would cost me 84 cents one way...$1.68 there and back...it costs 56 bones to buy a corker...so i'm looking at 33 trips to the store to make the investment worth it...and that's not even taking in a count of how much my times is worth! I'm going to to say my time is worth 33 cents per minute...and the time to the store and back is 32 minutes..that's 10.56 plus the 1.68...$12.24, divide and round up. 5 trips break even. : P
And i have just done a math problem equivalent to problems done by 6th graders...woot.
Here are the bottles, decided to go all green this time. Oh and one blue bottle because the store left a bottle out of a box the last time...
Its kind of boring making 30 bottles of the same flavor. Here is a bottle of crazy blueberry flavoring we added to 3 gallons of the wine. Pretty lame i know, but can't really ruin the wine doing it this way.
Cleaned the bottles...
Here is the wine and the new 3 gallon carboy, kind of looks like a glass grenade...
i got cousin brent to come over again to help bottle. But once we started to bottle he broke out his work laptop and tried starting a VPN to his work...no reason, just because he could...lame.
Racked the wine into the 3 gallon carboy so we could mix the blueberry flavoring without stirring up any sediment.
Filled up the bottles, and corked them in no time. So much better than that other corker. Didn't figure out that you could adjust the cork dept until the second bottle, so the cork is like a half inch in the bottle...
i believe there is another another box of concentrated grape juice waiting to be started around here. At the home brew store i saw that they have stills for sale. But not to be used to make alcohol because that's illegal. Only used to make essential oils and to distill your own water...but its like 450 bones for a still..i didn't even see if it was a reflux one..if it was then maybe it might be a good investment...but i know i could find them or make a better one for less. Some day, i'll make some sweet essential oils...and get crunked.
i forgot to check the gravity yesterday, so it sat in the carboy for an extra day doing nothing. But today i remembered to check it and it was 0.991 again. Time to add the delicious sorbate de potassium, metabisulfite de potassium, and weird goo of shellfish shell...
Once everything is dissolved, you have to make the wine is stirred well and drive off any CO2 that may be lingering. i stirred it for an extra two minutes, mostly because i forgot to watch the time...and it was cool to see the wine swirl around...Now just have to wait another 14 days for it to clear before bottling.
Well its been 10 days since i racked the Cabernet into the carboy. It was time to take another reading. The specific gravity was about 0.991. 10 days ago it was 0.992...looks like the yeast didn't do much in the carboy. i probably could have started the clearing process early but i guess i'll just do it by the books.
i'll check the specific gravity again tomorrow and if its the same its time for all the sulphites and shellfish liquid junx. Then wait 14 days for it to clear before bottling. We're going to try something different with this batch. My dad picked up some blueberry flavoring, and we'll just bottle half of the Cabernet, and then add the flavoring to the second half before bottling it. Hopefully doesn't ruin half our batch of wine. We were going to use real blueberries but apparently you have to also filter your wine...and when you filter you also get a lot of oxygen in your wine and sets it up to just taste nasty after a few months.
Also purchased a wine rack, it holds 110 bottles. Should come in on Thursday. Its made out of Fir wood, we'll probably seal it and stain it with something so it looks nicer and help the wood last longer. Right now we still only have 48 bottles of wine, and with this next batch we'll have 78....of course we'll consume some of the Shiraz so it'll probably take another two batches to fill that rack up.
Brother-in-law Steve got a "Beer Machine" as a going away present. Since alcohol is illegal at his new residence....i go it! Nothing like a free beer machine.
The directions weren't well written. It directed to assemble the beer machine, load a CO2 cartridge, and see if there were any leaks. There were none but when i tired the spout the water wasn't coming out very fast. Maybe with some more CO2 it'll work better. After that, sterilized the beer machine with Clorox. i thought that was a little weird but i made sure to rinse it out well afterwards.
Filled it up with a little water, poured in the bag of dried malt, sprinkled in the brewer's yeast and screwed on the cap. Leave it set for 5 to 7 days, then move it to the refrigerator for another 5 days...and BEER! Supposedly dishes out twenty eight 12 oz beers...hope its good.
Time for the yeast...
Brewing...
Mixing the benonite i used the fancy degasser. Made the job a million times easier. Well, taking pictures while stirring was still kind of a challenge.
i sprinkled the yeast in and put the lid on. Though when i put the air lock on top i pushed the seal through the lid so there was a leak that i was unaware of until a couple hours later...but now everything is good and its bubbling.
How could i forget brent, oh yeah...because he slept the whole time while i was starting the wine process. He snores too. i woke him up with the degasser, so that made up for it. The degasser has so many uses...
