Making wine

About 10 of us Oakie Wine Club members pooled our resources and bought two wine kits to make as a group. It's been fun getting together at The Brew Shop to go through the entire process together. And instead of 30 bottles of wine, we each should get at least 2.5 bottles. That's easier to store. 

This is a bucket of easy clean. It helps to make sure there is no contamination on anything used. 

We pitched the yeast on our second kit here.

It's a Sangiovese red wine and the grapes were grown in Italy. 

There's yeast, clay and wood chips.

That's a hydrometer and it's used to measure the alcohol content. 

This was our first kit, a big red. It's very big and apparently, needs a year to be properly aged. We moved it into a glass carboy for clarification.

In two weeks, we'll move it again into another carboy with no more wood chips. It will stay in there for at least 28 days before bottling. Next up, I'll be making hard cider. I tried to buy the cider at Whole Foods but they didn't have it yet. I have plans to pour it in November so I must get it started tomorrow. The pressure is on!

St. Patrick's Day shenanigans

I am pleased to announce that the yeast is currently feasting! Soon there will be beer.

St. Patrick's Day fell on a Thursday, which was the perfect excuse to wear tons of green and run 3.5 miles. I managed a 13 minute mile!

Afterwards, I had the beer club meeting to get to. Where I failed to take photos but other people did. I also failed to bring beer but I brought a snack. I left with a hop plant to put in the backyard. It's in a cup of water and soon I will plant it in the backyard.

A good time was had by all! I'm trying to recap all the various events from the last two weeks. It's been busy around here! Interesting fact, it's almost all beer related. Haha!