A Fine Day for Wine
- May 5, 2017
- 2 min read
Two weeks ago, I pulled off a wonderful heist! Nearly forty pounds of apples from a local dumpster! Aside from divvying the loot to various friends, dehydrating four of them (very thinly sliced) for my mom, and eating a few fresh, what was I to do? I had two large bowls of apples remaining, dwindling freezer space from my last score, and no time to lose. I whipped out my juicer, put on the Beatles diskography and got to juicing. After Part 1 of the White Album, and the majority of Beatles for Sale, I finished with the pulpy extraction. A pro tip, when you use a juicer with the spinning metal bowl, clean it out every time you fill the pulp chamber. I ended up making some fine apple sauce with my last five pounds of apples rather than juice. That same part also gets hot, you know with friction and all, so rinse it with cold water to keep from producing sauce instead of juice and pulp.
With a gallon of fresh apple juice prepared in a white bucket I set to the work of measuring out the proper amounts of pectase, tannins, and yeast activator into the primary fermenting vessel. *cough* A lovely name for a food grade plastic bucket with a lid. I do not aim to provide a recipe guide here, plenty of those exist all over the internet and your local fermentables store. I recommend a fermenting kit that includes a 1 Gallon Carboy, 2 Gallon Primary Fermentor, Airlock, Auto-siphon, and all your biological/chemical agents. They're about $20, and I have had good luck reusing them multiple times. Also at Water Buffalo, where I get my supplies, they provide their kit with way too much of all the enzymes, tannins, and activator, so my next five or six batches of wine will just need their own carboys, airlocks, and yeast.
Bonne Soiree
Zachary Robert
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