Posted in Merlot, Tasting on April 27, 2008 | No Comments »
As intented, with today’s Sunday lunch, I had a glass of the Merlot that I bottled yesterday.
As you can see, it looks the part. Tastes pretty good too
I am really pleased to report that this is definitely a decent quality Merlot. I’m very pleasantly surprised. It already has a complex, fairly deep flavour [...]
Posted in Bottling, Merlot on April 27, 2008 | No Comments »
After yet more bottle cleaning, I was ready to bottle the Merlot that had been clearing. Having had issues when syphoning the Strawberry, I bought a new syphon from the homebrew shop. I also attached an extra length of tube to the tap, so that this could be fed to the bottom of the bottle, [...]
Posted in Clearing, Merlot on March 19, 2008 | No Comments »
Just a quick post to confirm that last night I did add the second part of the finings - the chitosan - to the Merlot. The sachet for this was slightly larger than for the kieselsol. I shook the contents for 10 seconds again, before replacing the airlock and returning the demijohn to the brewery [...]
Posted in Clearing, Merlot on March 17, 2008 | No Comments »
Following the instructions, I took the gromit out of the demijohn and poured in the small sachet of clear liquid labelled kieselsol. I took the airlock out of the gromit, replaced the gromit in the demijohn and with my thumb over the hole, I shook it for 10 seconds. I then replaced the airlock and [...]
Posted in Clearing, Merlot, Strawberry on March 13, 2008 | No Comments »
24 hours after wracking the Strawberry, and a couple of days after wracking the Merlot, I was continuing to shake the wines as often as I remembered. This involved simply removing the airlocks and covering the hole with a cleaned thumb and shaking until it stopped fizzing when I removed my thumb (or until I [...]
Posted in Merlot, Racking on March 12, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I decided the time had finally come to rack the Merlot - the first home brewed wine I had tried. I decided to take a hydrometer reading, even though I expected to see little or no movement and would wrack it anyway. I took a picture for future reference:
It was hard to get a reading [...]
Posted in Fermenting, Merlot on February 28, 2008 | No Comments »
With the prospect of a free weekend on the horizon, I wanted to take a reading of the Merlot to have something to compare against at the weekend to see if it has finally stopped fermenting. Hopefully it will have done, so that I can transfer it to secondary and begin the final stages before [...]
Posted in Fermenting, Merlot on February 21, 2008 | No Comments »
I took another reading of the Merlot with a hydrometer, having convinced myself it must have stopped fermenting and I wanted to get it into the secondary demijohn. The hydrometer dropped to a level where only the very top of the yellow section was visible, and none of the digits of 1.000 could be seen. [...]
Posted in Fermenting, Merlot on February 18, 2008 | No Comments »
Since taking the hydrometer reading 3 days ago, I have been keeping an eye on the airlock on the Merlot to make sure it got going again. In 3 days I hadn’t seen a single bubble. I put the first day down to it needing to fill up the remaining space with co2 before it [...]
Posted in Fermenting, Merlot on February 15, 2008 | No Comments »
It is 3 weeks to the day since I set the Beaverdale Merlot going. the results of another bubble check are below:
Day
Time per bubble (secs)
Gravity
0
infinite
1.078
3
2
5
9
9
15
12
18
15
30
21
55
1.000
As you can see, the wine is now getting close to the target of less than one bubble a minute. I decided to take a hydrometer reading in order to see [...]
